November 4, 2007
ESTABLISHED in the wake of the Great Quake a century ago, San Francisco’s Japantown, or Nihonmachi, is the largest of three Japantowns in the United States. The neighborhood still bears the marks of its twin calamities: wartime internment and 1960s redevelopment. But now, with more interest in all things Japanese and still-unbridled investor enthusiasm for San Francisco real estate, Japantown is undergoing a renovation that promises to raise the area’s profile considerably.
Nov 18, 2007
VEGETARIANISM is a simple idea — don’t eat animals — with an ancient pedigree. According to the Vegetarian Resource Group, 4.7 million American adults are vegetarians or vegans (people who avoid all animal products, including cheese and eggs).
Yet even in San Francisco, with its countercultural and fresh food traditions, only about one in a hundred restaurants in the Zagat Survey is vegetarian. And while new vegetarian restaurants have been opening in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco’s scene has been expanding differently as beloved restaurants open new locations.
Nov 15th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCO
A new machine could reshape the speciality-coffee business
NEAR the hard-working espresso machine at Ritual Coffee Roasters, a café in San Francisco, sits a stainless-steel box about the size of a desktop computer. This box, the Clover, produces a cup of coffee with a spectacle of streaming water, whirring motors and an ingenious inverse plunger. Zander Nosler, the industrial designer who invented the Clover nearly three years ago, seems to have done the impossible: attracted a cult following for a new coffee-making machine that is both slower and vastly more expensive than other machines and requires the undivided attention of a trained operator.
