![]() Large tanks of querious catfish, long displays of glistening mussels, oysters, clams, sea urchin laid out on ice. Aside from the insane variety of tofu and fermented products, the part that was remarkable for me at that time was the meat and seafood section. Years later, now living in San Francisco and possessed of at least a faux-cosmopolitan disposition towards weird foreign shit, I wandered into a large Asian market on Irving Street and 26th, in the mid Sunset District. On the other side of town, just east of El Centro, I once followed my father into a Latino market, this one slightly larger than the Iranian one, and was assaulted by undisguised funk of strange meat and blood emanating from the butcher counter, where cuts of quivering, alien hunks of flesh were displayed with a garish barbarity, or so it seemed to me at the time (what a little racist I was).Īccompanying the wafting odor of this tofu one can’t but hear Colonel Kurtz’s final inaudible words to Marlowe The strange stenches reaching my nose were no more sinister than cumin, coriander, clove, paprika, zatar, ras al hanout, i.e., un packaged spices evoking a strangeness that made my head swim. The first thing I did was wrinkle my nose, and then sneeze violently. I remember going to a small Iranian market on Bascom Avenue near The StreetLight Records with my dad one afternoon. Not so with any of the billion “ethnic” markets and supermarkets dotted around the suburban hellscape of the South Bay. If you closed your eyes and felt with your nostrils the air around you, there was nothing to suggest the presence of food stuff. Even as a young sprout I was already primed for S.F.’s general disdain of all things corporate and homogenous. ![]() The dull familiarity of Safeway’s antiseptic smell always caused my heart to plummet when I would accompany my mom or dad on a shopping trip. Lucky’s, Albertsons, Safeway, ad-literally-nauseum, all shitty, unnaturally glowing cubes of drab consumerism. Got any tips? Please send them to as I experienced them growing up in San Jose, California, were dismal places. And the best part is, it comes from those of us that live that life, that work in the trenches. ![]() It’s where we cheer on our favorite chefs, servers, and nightlife superheroes. It’s where we cover restaurant openings and bar closings, industry rumors and inside dirt. Off Menu is our tribute to the service industry. ![]()
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