Each week, critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan shares some of her favorite recent bites, the dishes and snacks and baked goods that didn’t find their way into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for her free newsletter, Bite Curious.
Hokkaido milk is in the air. Inspired by my colleague Elena Kadvany’s reporting on the ultra-rich dairy, I ordered the Hokkaido milk cheesecake at Bon, Nene, a cozy Japanese restaurant in the Mission District. It’s a double-decker delight, with a dense bottom layer and a fluffy topper, and it is, as Elena writes about desserts made with this special dairy, decidedly milky in flavor.
The final savory course in Benu’s current tasting menu doesn’t look like much. It’s a shallow pool of viscous, off-white liquid, and it looks like maybe a growth medium to culture cells in a biology lab. In actuality it’s a rice cake soup made with beef bones, and it’s one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten recently, no contest. Four or five chewy tteok, the same color as the opaque broth, hide just beneath the surface, waiting to be excavated by your spoon. It’s gentle and fortifying all at once.
Some might call me brave, others foolish, but last week I waited in line at Arsicault and did not order a croissant. Instead, I felt called by the bakery’s savory scone, a six-inch baton of buttery pastry packed with bacon, cheese, scallions and red peppers. I’m fond of the unique shape, which maximizes bites of exterior “crust.” I’d encourage you to swap your normal croissant for one next time you need an on-the-go snack and don’t want to arrive at your destination blanketed in flakes of laminated pastry.
“I know I keep pushing the beans, but really, try the beans.” My dining companion, a regular at fast-casual Mexican restaurant Más Masa in Fairfax, was insistent that I dip a spoon into her kids’ side of brothy Rancho Gordo beans ($7.50), and I’m so glad she was pushy. They were the best thing I tried. I spied at least three different kinds of beans in the mix, all topped with crumbles of French feta standing in for queso fresco.
Reach MacKenzie Chung Fegan: MacKenzieChung.Fegan@sfchronicle.com
AloJapan.com