Hogwash san francisco menu1/17/2024 No, not these we, she claimed with cool confidence, get ours exclusively from a small private plot and you will not have tasted anything like them. Our waitress urged us to try their Kodomos from Hammersley Inlet even though we protested we had, we explained, just eaten some. Dungeness crab from local waters is properly fresh and the oysters pristine. The Hog Island menu is more limited than at Ferry Plaza shellfish raw or roasted, simple salads, soups and a grilled cheese sandwich for the antipescatorian outlier fill the short bill. A drink while you wait? It makes a difference. The line is longer and the greeting more fun they are brusque across the hall but ebullient over here, and the bouncer controls the queues with kindness. Its design is more muscular and less generic, its oysters superior and its fake chowder packs more appeal. Hog Island starts from a certain advantage as one of the more celebrated oyster farms in the United States and has squandered none of it at the Ferry Terminal. The Hog Island Oyster Company across the corridor matches the view and eclipses all else. Our oysters were not cheap at $28 a dozen, but not exorbitant either, and the appointments and view are hard to beat. They pour only beer and wine and not many species of that, but the Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada on tap are worthy if unimaginative mates for the fish. The Kodomos tasted strong, something like the proverbial bottom of a fishing boat, the Miyagis in their deep deep cups sweet. Both the Kodomos from Hammersley Inlet in Washington state and Royal Miyagis from British Columbia displayed an oddly creamy but hardly nasty taste. We had come to Ferry Plaza Seafood for the oysters and were not disappointed. It was loaded with a mince of colorful vegetables and bits of cured meat in no way resembling the essential salt pork a nice hearty soup but hardly chowder. ‘New England clam chowder’ appeared to be based on a roux rather then spiked with milk or cream. Many of these variations on clam soup are good but by none of them are by any means authentic.Īt Berkeley Bowl across the bay, an upscale hypermarket for food and drink of all kinds with an attached cafeteria, they serve soup in portions the size of a lake. Like most places serving seafood in the bay area they have something they call ‘New England clam chowder,’ and like just about everywhere else out west that is not what it is. They do not serve crackers, deep fry food, offer tartar sauce or countenance ranch dressings, and take defiant pride in their strictures. The menu at the idiosyncratic Ferry Plaza Seafood is short and good. The best action is inside at the bars, even if unlike eastern and Gulf iterations you will have trouble trying to banter with the shuckers, who work at a certain remove. Each of them spills onto the esplanade outside, where patrons happily linger even in the darkest days of January and February. Two oyster bars, for example, face off across a narrow track. Perhaps the competition accounts for that. Prices in San Francisco tend to be high, and the tariff at establishments in the Terminal is no exception, but they do not seem to get a premium for their lovely location: Prices at these places are fair. The Ferry Terminal exudes all the magic that Quincy Market, Boston’s ravaged heart, lost long ago. The managers who lease the space have not raced straight to the bottom line of chainstore staples and tourist traps, and so discerning tourists have come anyway to mingle with local devotees. The shops, selling herbs, meats, mushrooms, cheese, honey wine, cookware and all other manner of culinary requirements, are predominantly singular and local the bazaar even nurtures an endangered species, the bookstore. The farmers’ market without is nothing short of spectacular, even during these winter months of relative scarcity the shops and restaurants within boast serious and friendly proprietors eager to talk and to please. Now it is devoted, fittingly enough in this city that feeds itself with fervor, to food. Ships have returned to the slips of the Ferry Terminal and its great central hall has reopened to the city. Among them was the resurrection of the Ferry Terminal at a prime location on the Embarcadero which, like Grand Central Terminal in New York, Union Station in Washington and countless American urban landmarks had been reduced to a squalid shell pocked with plywood by the 1980s. But like New Orleans, another city perched at a geographical precipice, the place is nothing if not resilient and some good arose from the disaster. In 1989 an earthquake, predictable and tragic, struck San Francisco. Ferry Plaza Seafood & the Hog Island Oyster Company: Two oyster bars at the San Francisco Ferry Terminal & a note about clam soup on the west coast.
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