How the Bay Area Got Hooked on Fish Tacos

Posted on by

By Nancy Friedman

September 20, 2022

Fish have been swimming onto San Francisco Bay Area menus ever since there were people around to catch and cook them. And Mexican cuisine has been represented in the region ever since Alta California was part of Mexico. But until 1992, although dozens of Bay Area restaurants served a steady tide of petrale sole, halibut, salmon, and sand dabs—not to mention McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, invented in 1962—and although there were plenty of places to enjoy burritos, enchiladas, and quesadillas, one Mexican fish dish was still just a wish: the fish taco. Continue reading →

More Loudly Anticipating the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Posted on by

Part Two- What I Will Be Seeing

By Meredith Brody

May 4, 2022

I learned my lesson early with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival: GO TO EVERYTHING.

The first year I attended, I cherry-picked only the movies I hadn’t seen before.  The ones I went to were such a revelation – both in the presentation and the group experience – that my heart hurt as I walked away.  What a MAROON I was. Even a movie I thought I knew well would be a fresh experience, featuring as it did not only live music, but one of the world’s great audiences. There’s a kind of euphoria that sets in when you commit to seeing everything on offer. Continue reading →

Fruits of Labor

Posted on by

By C.J. Hirschfield

On the day of this writing, 13,464 trays of strawberries were harvested in California, the state that produces 83 percent of the strawberries grown in the U.S. Who picks them? Kids as young as 12.

 

Poster by Maribel Martinez and Yen Tan

Continue reading →

Cranky– and Curious–about Cuisine

Posted on by

By C.J. Hirschfield

When a 97 -year-old cookbook writer is called “the Mick Jagger of Mexican cuisine,” and the “Indiana Jones of food,” you know there’s gotta be a story there. There is, and a fascinating one at that. Directed by Elizabeth Carroll and screening at the Legacy Film Festival on Aging, the documentary Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy shares the life and work of an impatient, antisocial, cranky, profane, opinionated woman—whose life has been driven by her enthusiasm and curiosity about authentic Mexican regional cooking. She is an absolutely marvelous force of nature.

onesheet

Continue reading →

DIANA KENNEDY: NOTHING FANCY—INDEED

Posted on by

By Patricia Unterman

To tell you the truth, my dear film buffs, I’m a reader, not a moviegoer, and I only read fiction.  If I watch a movie, it has to be in a movie house on a big screen and it has to promise a good story, ideally involving sex.   Documentaries, for me, are a bore.

tasting tacos

But despite all odds, I was mesmerized by a new documentary on the life of Diana Kennedy, the grouchy, 97-year-old writer of regional Mexican cookbooks, by first-time movie director Elizabeth Carroll.  The film felt novelistic to me—nuanced, revealing, true.  It picked me right up from a desk chair in front of my little computer screen and dropped me in the upland forests of Michoacán. Continue reading →