The Best Things Our Food Critic Ate in June

This month, I spent some much-needed time outside: strolling around Rockridge with ice cream, picnicking in Golden Gate Park, dragging my very anti-adventure dog to Lake Temescal. We’re well into the season of letting your food drip down your forearm — be it a trickle of doubles chutney, salsa, or garlic butter — and not caring about any kind of mess. 

Out of all the recent bites I let fall on my shirt, these were my favorite dishes and snacks from around the Bay Area.

Crab sandwich at Spud Point Crab Co. (plus seaweed salad)

At the beginning of the month, Nuala Bishari and I drove up to the Sonoma Coast to try our hands at seaweed gathering. After hours of wading in tidepools in search of nori and wakame, we got a chance to taste some freshly made seaweed salad — a simple combination of greens blanched in sea water and tossed with Asian pantry items like soy sauce and chili oil. 

With our gobs of seaweed secured, we dipped over to Spud Point for a post-gathering treat of Dungeness crab sandwiches, since it’s hard to resist the way eating from the water takes over one’s spirit. Spud’s perfectly rolled joint of a sandwich is tightly packed with crab and bound with just the right amount of mayonnaise. It’s our lobster roll (but don’t tell anybody, because the line is long enough already).

Spud Point Crab Company. 1910 Westshore Rd., Bodega Bay. Open 9am–5pm daily.

Gochujang pork ribs at Sseun Dulce x Cafe Bolita

The latest project from Nico Lounibos, the former culinary director of Sonoma’s Valley Bar + Bottle, is Sseun Dulce, a culinary joining of the sweet and sour flavors shared between Lounibos’ Korean and Mexican heritages. You might be thinking Kogi Tacos, but this goes deeper than kalbi + burrito. 

Recently, Lounibos brought her pop-up to Berkeley’s Café Bolita, where she collaborated with owner and chef Emmanuel Galvan on a menu marrying her flavors with his heirloom masa. I tried everything on the menu, including a corn cheese-slash-elote asado molote, halibut aguachile, and cherry tomato kimchi blessed with a Tajín-adjacent seasoning. The crowning glory was a dish of pork spare ribs, sticky with a gochujang glaze, made to eat on fresh corn tortillas pressed with whole shiso leaves. The meat easily shrugged off the bone on its way to the tortilla, adding up to four truly memorable bites of taco.

Sseun Dulce. Check Instagram for events and locations.

Various snacks at Gazetteer’s Chat Room

Local publication Gazetteer knows how to throw a great party. On June 18, it assembled a bunch of food people to put on panels about restaurant life, food systems work, and other things. Between “sets,” the crowd was unleashed on the open bar and pop-ups, including Ovinloven, Uncle Tito’s, and Provecho. I went straight for the Cali-Oaxacan Provecho; owner Eder Ramirez has been doing food at San Francisco tapas spot El Chato for a bit now, and it’s rare to see him out in the wild like this. His slices of smoked pork belly looked like meat rainbows with ribbons of jelly-like skin attached to the top of the arch. Eating slabs of meat while watching a show brought me back to Medieval Times.

Then, I grabbed a gorgeous little double-corn galette from Ovinlovin, featuring a bed of goat cheese topped with bicolor corn cooked in Shared Cultures corn miso. It’s a great culinary trick to recursively amp something up by cooking it in itself. And crowning the corn was a very generous spoonful of Mama Teav’s hot garlic chili crisp, which is far and away my favorite chili crisp that you can get off the shelf here in the Bay. 

Find Ovinloven and Provecho on Instagram.

The Coney Island at Lovely’s

As someone who was raised Catholic, it’s very weird to me that I have been going to churches a lot lately. But it turns out they make for really great music venues? If you’re going to a show at First Presbyterian Church in Oakland, there are lots of options for dinner — my favorite is Lovely’s, the burger joint nestled in the patio at Two Pitcher Brewing Company. Their version of the Coney Island, which is, despite the name, a Detroit-style chili cheese dog, is the Platonic ideal: featuring a tight, savory chili, raw red onions, and a snappy all-beef hot dog. Sonic the Hedgehog would be such a fan. Lovely’s has a spot in Cole Valley now, and they’re also opening soon in San Anselmo.

Lovely’s. 2344 Webster St., Oakland. Open 4–9:30pm Tuesday through Thursday; 4–10pm Friday and Saturday; noon–6pm Sunday.

Chinese Chicken Salad at Comforts

In 2001, the high school freshman version of me rented I’m the One That I Want, the recording of stand-up comedian Margaret Cho’s 1999 performance at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, and it truly burned new neural pathways into my very elastic kid-brain. I became an instant fan. So of course, every time I encounter an “Asian chicken salad,” I think of her bit: “This… is not… the salad of my people!”

That said, the one at Comforts in San Anselmo can stay. At this 40-year-old café and food market, the salad is the institution. It gets top billing on the menu, plus a dedicated takeout cooler packed with Chinese takeout boxes of the stuff. A shreddy mix of iceberg and romaine lettuce gets tossed with a dressing of sesame oil and rice vinegar with a touch of sugar, then topped with lots of crunchy bits: fried rice noodles, toasted almonds, and sliced scallions. Each salad gets a generous portion of thinly sliced, teriyaki-ish chicken (or tofu). You won’t find any canned mandarin oranges on this guy. While eating on the patio, I watched tons of people — picnickers, firefighters, families — walk out with white boxes in hand.

Comforts. 335 San Anselmo Ave., San Anselmo. Marketplace and café open daily. 

Dreamweaver x Peaches Christ at Bad Walters’ Bootleg Ice Cream

Recently, Rockridge ice creamery Bad Walters got panned by a customer for being blasphemous, thanks to its Pride Month-themed Peaches Christ flavor: a not-too-spicy confection of custard swirled with habanero-peach pie compote and oat streusel. The drag performer and filmmaker, also known for her terrifying Halloween events, would probably be fine with this. I found the flavor sacrilegiously satisfying, especially when paired with the Dreamweaver: marshmallow custard veined with raspberry jam.

Bad Walters’ Bootleg Ice Cream. 5800 College Ave., Oakland. Open noon–9:30pm Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday; noon–10pm Friday and Saturday.