San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Star chef goes all in with a favorite Bay Area bar
Gaby Maeda brings a brand-new, Asian-inspired menu to beloved haunt
A James Beard Award-nominated chef from Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant State Bird Provisions is now running the kitchen at an acclaimed Bay Area bar.
It’s an exciting development for Friends and Family at 468 25th St. in Oakland, which was on the verge of ditching its full food menu — until chef Gaby Maeda entered the picture.
As Friends and Family’s former chef was getting ready to leave in December, owner Blake Cole considered scrapping all but the most minimal dishes. The beloved, queer-friendly bar was ranked among the best in North America and a semi-finalist for the James Beard outstanding bar award in 2022. But recently, business has been hard, she said, as customers’ post-pandemic habits continue to change unpredictably. Costs have gone up.
Then, a serendipitous dinner and drinks with Maeda ended with the chef agreeing to run Friends and Family’s food program.
A brand-new dinner menu, packed with Asian-inspired dishes that draw both on Maeda’s Hawaiian upbringing and years in San Francisco restaurants, debuted
Cayce Clifford 2023 at Friends and Family on the first day of February.
“It was either get rid of everything, or let’s go 100% all in and be inspired again,” Cole said.
Maeda was a finalist for the James Beard Awards’ rising star chef of the year in 2020, and the following year was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s best new chefs. She grew up in Honolulu, left to attend culinary school and then cooked at San Francisco fine-dining mecca Gary Danko. At State Bird, she worked her way up from cook to sous-chef to chef de cuisine.
Ingredients like shoyu, aioli spiked with Maggi seasoning and chewy Korean rice cakes now show up throughout the Friends and Family menu. Pickled mushrooms ($9) take on the flavors of hot and sour soup — vinegar, soy and ginger — while a slice of toast is inspired by a bánh mì with sardines and herbs ($14). Underneath luscious, shoyu-cured eggs blanketed in a yuzu kosho aioli ($10) hide Japanese rice crackers for a textural surprise. A wedge salad ($13), inspired by the ubiquitous miso-ginger salad found at sushi restaurants, is accompanied by bacon-esque roasted shiitake mushrooms. (Much of the menu is vegan or can be made vegan.)
Tteokbokki, rice cakes often served in a gochujang sauce, get the Italian arrabbiata treatment instead ($18) with a spicy tomato sauce, pancetta and pecorino. It’s “substantial but elegant,” Maeda said, and the rice cakes evoke the “same unctuousness” of gnocchi.
Friends and Family also started late-night Danish hot dogs (after 9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday and after 10 p.m. ThursdaySaturday)
Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle
and lasagna nights on Mondays. The bar will continue to serve carrot cake for dessert, made from Cole’s mother’s recipe.
Several new cocktails made their debut, many of which are low-ABV and sherry- or vermouth-based. There’s a variation on the Bamboo made from several kinds of vermouth infused with Sumo mandarin peels, rosemary
Cayce Clifford 2023
ight Cayce Clifford 2023 and sage, then blended with manzanilla sherry and bitters. A new sherry cobbler uses apple-fennel kombucha from nearby cafe the Crown.
Maeda remembers well her first visit to Friends and Family in 2020. She sat in the back patio with a “hottie toddy” with amaro and five-spice, and said she was impressed by the bar’s creativity and execution (she later called it out in a list of her favorite local haunts in Food & Wine magazine). Friends and Family became “the place I’d always come to,” she said.