From Foster’s Freeze on University. Note label: at least it’s Berkeley’s own Berkeley Farms milk!

Thought I’d give a shoutout to some good news for my friend Robert, who I keep running into, as he got his wine mentioned in the SF Chronicle as one of the 100 and 91 points in Wine Spectator. Go Robert! And say hi- he’s the sommelier at Boulevard. Photo to the right is him serving Skylark at a No on Prop 8 fundraiser. The wine mentioned in the article is $35, “This Syrah from the Sonoma Coast is stylish and sizable, pepper-packed all through the palate, with focused blueberry and toast flavors.”

A friend said to me tonight while we were walking past a popular Glen Park restaurant:

There have been all these shootings in Glen Park — maybe now I’ll be able to get a table at this place.

An article about San Francisco’s restaurant scene opens:

There’s nothing wrong with the restaurants in San Francisco except that so many of them serve pretty much the same Northern Cal-Mediterranean menu.

Yeah, that’s what the whole “eating local” thing is supposed to be about, dude. It’s a Northern California menu because this is Northern California. I wonder if he goes to Paris and then writes that the only thing wrong with Parisian restaurants is that they all serve French food.

Meanwhile, this isn’t SF-related, but is on the topic of restaurant criticism. Courtesy Girl Friday: A wine expert hoaxed Wine Spectator magazine into giving an non-existent restaurant its Award of Excellence. Pretty funny.

Oakland police think they have found the gang behind at least some of the rash of restaurant robberies that plagued the East Bay this summer.

Yesterday they arrested three people they say perpetrated three of the takeover-style heists, in which hoodie-wearing men enter restaurants at night, force employees and patrons into a back room, and clean out the cash register.

The Oakland residents were arrested Tuesday evening after they allegedly departed from their successful MO and knocked over a nail salon. Police were given a description of the getaway car, which they spotted, followed and stopped. Inside they found ski masks, guns and the money from the nail salon.

Among the arrestees was the getaway driver, a 20-year-old woman whom police said was the girlfriend of one of the bandits.

Contradicting Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums who said the string of robberies were a result of the poor economy, a police spokesman said “These aren’t guys who lost their jobs and got desperate… These are people who had access to guns and get off on the thrill of robbing people.” And the brother of one of the suspects commented:

He’s got no reason to be doing nothing like this. He’s not a drug addict, not in a bind, there’s no pressure situation. He was cool, man. He missed his calling: He should have been a basketball star. He’s an incredible basketball player. He don’t have no reason to be robbing no restaurants. That kind of (expletive) is serious and petty at the same time, you know?

“Miracle fruit” — Synsepalum dulcificum to the degree-holding class — is a strange berry which has little taste of its own but which works to nullify and transform spicy, sour or bitter tastes, making them sweet. The New York Times had an article about it in May, with users saying it makes Tabasco sauce taste like sugar and lemon sorbet mixed with Guinness like a chocolate shake. Thus “the fruit of the poor lemon” becomes possible to eat.

Mugwumpin, the San Francisco theater company planning a trip to Cairo to a theater festival, will hold a fundraiser for the trip featuring the strange fruit on Saturday, Sep. 6 in Oakland. For more info, email info@mugwumpin.org.

Despite efforts by community and business figures to rally Oakland residents to ignore a recent rash of takeover-style restaurant robberies and come out to eat, bandits last night hit another Oakland restuarant, forcing customers and staff into a back room, robbing them, then cleaning out the register.

Oakland residents, horrified that the crime wave hit upscale neighborhoods, demonstrated last night on yuppified College Ave. with candles and flashlights. The robbery took place several blocks west, on less yuppified Shattuck Ave. See a map on the Chronicle’s website of the summer crime spree.

Either the bandits who are terrorizing East Bay restaurants finally scraped together bridge fare, or the fad has spread to the West Bay: This morning three men in hoodies robbed a Denny’s in Daly City, taking the contents of the cash register while making everybody lie on the floor.

Being robbed at gunpoint — that’s a good story to tell around the water cooler. But being made to lie on the floor at a Denny’s: yuck.

They got “a very small amount of money,” say the cops, but I have the feeling they just don’t want to encourage them. If they said they got $3000* then you’d have even more robberies. View a Google map of all the restaurant takeover-style holdups this summer.

* A figure I just made up, and not intended to be taken as the actual amount of money stolen.

I must admit that Zuni Café is an old stand-by for me. It is my go-to restaurant for late-ish dining, for entertaining out-of-town guests, for enjoying a meal with hard-to-impress friends, and it seems, for constructing sentences with lots of hyphenated phrases.

I’m hardly breaking new ground by reviewing Zuni, but more and more, I’ve run into people who’ve lived in San Francisco for at least a couple of years and have never eaten there. My advice: invite some out-of-town guests to visit and take them to Zuni.

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The second installment of Rapid Restaurant Reviews takes us to the North Country, all the way up in Healdsburg in the Russian River Valley.

Cyrus sits mere steps from Healdsburg Square which itself is mere minutes from dozens of wineries and tasting rooms. And what better way to end a long afternoon of tasting (and spitting, of course) wine than to sit down with an eight-course tasting menu with accompanying wine flight?

To the questions, then…

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