This column originally ran in Wednesday’s Off Menu newsletter, where you’ll find restaurant news, gossip, tips, and hot takes every week. To sign up, visit the Standard’s newsletter page and select Off Menu.
For any cook committed to the Bay Area’s ethos of seasonal eating, summers in SF are emotionally dysregulating. Psychotherapist Esther Perel would probably categorize our push-pull relationship as one of anxious attachment, a whiplash of intimacy (peaches) and distance (pot roast).
Nevertheless, we allow our summer fantasies to persist: The minute there’s a sunny day, we’re at the market, gleefully skipping along with a basket of basil and our favorite dry-farmed Early Girls, only to find that — just as we’re about to serve an al fresco caprese salad — the Big Bad Fog rolls in, the temperature plummets to 62, and we’re huddling inside our drafty old house with the heat on, glumly glugging rosé straight from the bottle instead of making cute, mint-garnished spritzes.
Or maybe this is just me.
But after more than 20 years of taking it in the gut, I have developed abandonment issues. Corn is coy. Tomatoes are a tease.
Elisabeth Prueitt, cofounder of Tartine Bakery, calls it a “seasonal identity crisis”: “The strawberries say June, but the weather says January.” Christine Farren, market royalty and executive director of Foodwise, calls it “cognitive dissonance.” “I’m regularly baking, because it’s a way to heat my North Beach apartment,” she says. “I make things like blistered cherry tomatoes or crumbles or warming grain dishes with pesto and farro.”
(Personally, I’m a pie person and this is the world’s easiest, flakiest pie crust. From her Substack, Have Your Cake, Prueitt recommends this super-simple, house-warming recipe for clafoutis while cherries are still around.)
For chefs, it’s impossible to pivot menus quickly enough to meet the wily weather patterns. Melissa Perello, who owns Frances and Octavia, says, “It’s so fickle — it’s like we’ll have three hot days, and you get your warm-weather menu prepped, and the day you’re ready to go, it’s freezing.” One answer: Octavia’s much-anticipated sweet-corn lasagna, which went on the menu over the weekend. “The dough has masa, the bechamel is steeped with corn cobs, it has fresh corn — it’s, like, corn everything. It crosses the barrier: It’s hearty and heartwarming but also summery.”
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The temptation may be to flee the fog through the rainbow tunnel to have a hot affair with 80-degree Marin. (Feel no shame: Perel approves of ethical non-monogamy.) But there are indeed days in SF when the sun is out. For those moments of frisson, The Standard’s got you. This Friday, we release our Summer 25, a guide to eating and drinking when the temps soar to a sultry … 70.
— Sara Deseran, @saradeseran_food
What are your summer coping mechanisms? Let me know at sdeseran@sfstandard.com.