Try as I might, I can never escape restaurant critic life, even if I don’t have that wild budget anymore. The food scene of the Bay Area is too interesting — too magnetic! — for me to stay away. And while I’m not going to restaurants as much as I used to while I was an active newspaper critic, I’m still ducking into plenty of pop-ups, new spots, and old faves as I travel around the region. So I’ve decided to share the standouts of each month. Cheers!
A biscuit with ham and jam from Contimo Provisions in Napa, Calif. (Soleil Ho/COYOTE Media Collective)
Ham and Jam Biscuit at Contimo Provisions
While reporting out my piece on bean culture in the Bay Area, it made perfect sense to zip up to Napa, the seat of power for fancy bean behemoth Rancho Gordo! The company behind the Bean Club recently opened a beautiful new HQ downtown — and after walking around, I was craving something more substantial than their heirloom popcorn to snack on.
Amid all the wine tasting rooms and muumuu shops of Napa’s downtown, Contimo, slinger of crisp and tender buttermilk biscuits, is the people’s munchie savior. You can get the biscuits stuffed with all manner of things: pimento cheese, eggs, bacon. But for me, the ham and jam ($8.75) is perfect: the ham, brined in molasses before smoking; the jam, a seasonal offering that offsets the saltiness of the meat with the right amount of brightness. It comforts like a blue checkered tablecloth — like a grandparent playing with your hair as you sit at the table and eat.
Contimo Provisions. 950 Randolph St., Napa. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 8am–3pm.
Eritrean Cheesesteak at Michoz
I went to see a friend’s punk band play at Thee Stork Club one night (shoutout to Replica Watch!), and during a break in the show, I was thrilled to see that the patio was being commandeered by Michoz, the pop-up by rogue chef Bilal Ali (formerly of Broke Ass Cooks and the Michelin-starred Commis). I’ve been following his trail for a while now, from the phenomenal jerk chicken and rice he and his pals slung from their house during lockdown to the cheerful breakfast sandwiches he served out of the tiny kitchen at Berkeley’s Hidden Cafe.
But that night at Thee Stork Club, I saw something brand new (to me) and exciting: Eritrean cheesesteak ($14.50). Strips of beef, peppers, and onions were stir-fried in a fragrant spiced butter (tesmi), then tucked into a crisp ciabatta roll. Underneath the sandwich was a layer of standard Lay’s potato chips, which soaked up all the juices and melty cheese bits to create a bootleg poutine effect. Ali tells me that he’s going to make it into a torta, which I can’t wait to try.
Michoz. Popping up at Thee Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave, Oakland. Thursday through Saturday, 7pm–11:30pm.
Left: The menu of Michoz, a pop-up in Oakland. Right: Smoked char siu and cold peanut noodles from KaoKao Grill in Berkeley. (Soleil Ho/COYOTE Media Collective)
Peanut noodles and smoked char siu at KaoKao Grill
At KaoKao, a storefront in a funky stretch of College Ave, the main draw is the smoked, Chinese-style meats. There is, of course, a long history of smoking meat in China, but KaoKao’s take brings the char siu closer to Texas than Hunan. I’m a fan — but more importantly, so is Oakland’s own Alysa Liu. Owner Tony Huang, scion of the Huangcheng Noodle House family, produces a Sichuan pepper-brined pork belly char siu that becomes marshmallow-soft and sticky in the smoker, its fat just barely holding together by the time it makes it to your table.
Eat it over rice with pickles ($21.50) or add it to one of the Huangcheng-ish fresh noodle dishes. I like to go for the pile of cold peanut noodles ($13.99), which have a brightly, prickly spice that complements the char siu. That plus the meat make a meal big enough to split with someone, if you’re feeling nice.
KaoKao Grill. 2993 College Ave, Berkeley. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 11:30–3pm and 4–8:30pm.
Nanatsuboshi purple rice cake at Fins & Feathers
Over the past year, Singaporean chef Jin Chua has quickly become a familiar face at wine bars and tasting rooms in the East Bay, including Tessier in Berkeley, the Study in Richmond, and the Punchdown in Oakland. You might also find little red jars of her vegan sambal tumis at specialty food stores around the Bay Area; I highly recommend it, as it truly goes with everything.
I finally got a chance to actually try Chua’s cooking at her pop-up at the Punchdown early this month. And whew, her rice cakes ($11) were loud: rugged but tender; soothing; fragrant. The cakes, a steamed mixture of purple potato and Japanese short-grain rice, looked like bubble gum but yielded readily as I chewed. A dukkah-adjacent topping of fried shallots, jungle peanuts, and puffed white rice turned up the volume, while a dressing incorporating Chua’s coconut-forward sambal was the perfect bridge.
Grilled squid and beans from Maritime Cafe in Elk, Calif. (Soleil Ho/COYOTE Media Collective)
Monterey Squid a la Plancha at Maritime Cafe
Is California cuisine just bean bowls now? Is that what we’ve come to? Honestly, I’m down for that. Bring me an ever-rotating cast of beans with stuff on them! At Maritime Cafe, a cozy restaurant perched on the cliff that makes up “downtown” Elk in Mendocino County, I had the bean bowl ($22) of my dreams. The bottom: creamy butter beans just barely slinking out of their skins as they bathed in a warm broth. On top were chunky pickled carrots and bite-sized pieces of Monterey squid, their savoriness concentrated by a brief kiss on a plancha grill. Rounding it all out was a luscious drizzle of chile vinaigrette. I was so grateful to be digging into food like that while gazing out at the hazy horizon.
Maritime Cafe. 6061 CA Hwy 1, Elk. Open Thursday and Friday, 5-8pm; Saturday, 11am-3pm and 5-8pm; and Sunday, 11am-3pm.
Soleil Ho is a cultural critic, cookbook writer, and food journalist who has a nasty habit of founding media projects instead of going to therapy: from the feminist literary magazine Quaint to food podcast Racist Sandwich to our dear COYOTE.
