We already expounded the rustic virtues of Michael Chiarello's NapaStyle: a place that helps you get that Napa Valley look, feel, and taste. (Speaking of Chiarello, what happened to his show on KQED? Did he make the move over to the Food Network? While he's no Joanne Weir -- who is, really? -- we enjoyed watching him at times.) What's nice about the place is that it won't overwhelm you in the way that......

By Evan Roberts One of the few remaining knife sharpeners left in SF these days, this is a must-listen. Why? Because it's important to get your knives sharpened. (America's Test Kitchen can't stress it enough!) But Jivano sharpens more than haughty Sur La Table cutlery. Take a listen. If you're reading this via an RSS reader, please click through to access the sound file. And, as always, if you have or know of a......

A short PSA: yesterday we (aka. SFist Sam) investigated the food of Provence. Since no one has done more for the PR of the Provence area than Peter Mayle --except maybe for those guys Cezanne and Van Gogh-- we have to mention he will be signing his new book, Confessions of a French Baker, Saturday at noon at the Ferry Building's Sur La Table. The French baker is the one prominently featured in A Year in Provence, of course. He also will be at a ticketed event tonight at the Clay, tomorrow in Danville, and Saturday at 6pm in Sebastopol (cf. info at the very bottom of this post). As it is about food in France, we will review the book, hopefully next week, as we only received it today. Last week, we started our epic "battle thai," with a lackluster visit to Osha Thai. We usually give at least two visits to a restaurant, but we were not particularly in the mood to go back there. We instead opted to visit Marnee Thai. We had checked out Thai Chef, a block away from the original Marnee, and at the time really felt we should see how the reference in the neighborhood fares against the new young guns....

[A sincere bienvenue to new SFist Cedric of Le Blog de San Francisco, whose culinary opinion we fetishize because he is French and living in California.] Even here at SFist, we like a little French touch in our food. For instance, we don't say 'foodie in the Sunset', we write gourmet de l'ouest. Grumps might complain about the choice of 'ouest' over the much more poetically evocative 'gourmet du soleil couchant'. Of course, the......

SFist enjoys going to literary events for a number of reasons, the least of which being that being at an actual book signing or reading makes us realize that these author are "Just Like Us", thus fueling our dreams of quitting our day job and going on book tour. SFist Chesh alerted us to a particularly good one: Rachael Ray is appearing at Sur La Table in Berkeley from 3-5 today (hurry!). A flyer I......