Mission Mission

Well, according to the stats, some of you aren’t just sucking down content from us using Google Reader. For you, we’ve added a two-day forecast widget to the sidebar. Why? Because your window is soo far from your bed.

The inaugural forecast? “73F mostly clear”

HELL YEAH.

(thanks for the suggestion, Scott B.)

Snapped in front of 826 Valencia.

Thinking about seahorses is what gets me through the day, really… even though my spirit animal is technically the honey badger.

Also, it might be time to start a new blog: CutesyAndOhSoPreciousChalkSignsOnValencia.tumblr.com.

Previously:

BIG ASS MIMOSAS
Made By Mexicans!
Save Haiti With Your Stinky Yoga Mat
You Should Come In. Yeah.

The always astute generic_ is not impressed:

What do you say we just call it Food and be done with it? We can open it up right next to where Restaurant used to be.

Read the rest of the smackdown. Grub just popped up on Valencia and 18th.

You all love the French, right? After all, this is San Francisco and I’d like to think we are Paris’ equally smug North American sister city. The best way for you to celebrate Bastille Day is to head over to Amnesia to see the always swingin’ gypsy jazz band Gaucho from 8-10pm.

There will be drinks, Charleston dancing, an accordion, authentic 30′s French jazz, and a REAL beheading. I’m not even joking. I was put in charge of constructing the guillotine.

Update:

Shameless tells us of more Bastille Day awesomeness:

There is also a Mods v Rockers Bastille day celebration at the Make Out Room. Supposed to be French guest DJ’s and dancing. It starts around 10 so fun neighborhood times to be had.

And Heather says this is going on at the Rickshaw Stop:

Don’t forget Bardot A Go Go! http://www.myspace.com/bardotagogo

Are you sick of hearing about how awesome Sunday Streets was? I sure am, after being hungover and stuck in a car for a 2-hour drive to Salinas during the actual event. In any case, Postcards from SF posted a short video showing some highlights.

Mission yo-yo genius Doctor Popular is featured prominently, performing music on his iPhone (hope he’s holding it right) alongside cellist/songwriter Unwoman. There’s also a little girl exploiting her adorableness to shill lemonade. I’m going to guess it was made from concentrate, but can anyone confirm? Please give a full review if so.

Yeah, we’re a little late to the game, but damn… I think this is the best $8 I have spent on food in recent memory. The newly established Mission Chinese Food’s invention, the Peking Duck Chinito (also comes in Vegan!) is really, really great.

It’s duck confit, crispy skin, cucumber, cilantro, and spicy hoisin sauce. All of this is stuffed in a “chinese donut”, wrapped in rice noodle, then chopped sushi-style. What’s a chinese donut, you ask? I wasn’t sure either but once I saw it, I recognized it as the puffed, oily, bread stick that I would dip in rice porridge or warm soy milk as a kiddo, a food item that was previously known to me as (roughly) “Yao-Jok -Gwai“.

The blending of crispy duck, sweet hoisin sauce, donut, and soft rice noodle was something completely new, but still distinctly familiar. The Chinito might really catch on, and I would not be at all surprised if we see some copycats popping up within a year, much like the Korrito. Get in on the ground floor, folks.

The atmosphere at Lung Shan was interesting to say the least. The older, weathered Lung Shan staff seemed to be casually lounging in the dining area while these youngsters shuffled around their kitchen. Looks like I wasn’t the only one curious about this odd dynamic, as Chow asked about it in this recent article:

I just couldn’t get over the strange-bedfellow relationship of the old-school Chinese restaurant and nouveau Chinese restaurant. I asked Myint, who features a Lung Shan dumpling dish as a kind of homage on his own menu, whether Lung Shan chefs would be “trained” to make items off the Mission Chinese menu, too.

“They don’t really need our training,” he said, pausing to let the ridiculousness of the question sink in. “They’ve actually taught us some things.”

Bonus: The kind server threw in the Szechuan pickles free of charge, thus confirming your suspicion that us orientals hook each other up.

Previously:

Mission Chinese Food Is Open!

Woah, didn’t this just happen less than a month ago? Well it looks like Sunday Streets in the Mission back for a second round this weekend. Not that anyone’s complaining.

Lots of cool free events will be scattered along the route including:

Circus Performance: Harrison Street at 20th (O’Connell H.S. lot)
Presented by Circus Bella
• 11:30-12:00 Parade down Harrison
• 12:00-1:00 Live circus performance

I caught Circus Bella last weekend at Yerba Buena and it was awesome. They set up their own circus ring and are accompanied with live music composed by local accordion hero Rob Reich. It’s going to be outdoors so you can bet that the trapeze will be hanging much higher than it was at their last performance at Amnesia.

Other than that, you can probably expect the usuals: purple robed guy on the tricycle with ginormo speakers, meligrosa snapping photos of her shoes, and a bunch of folks saying, “they should do this every week”.

More at Sunday Streets SF.

Ever wonder what SF would look like rendered as an 8-bit video game map? No? Well, clearly some other nerd has. Check it out in it’s 24-color glory at 8-Bit Cities.

I hear that forest patch on the SE corner is a good place to level up.

Has anyone better capitalized on the “so drunk that everything I eat right now is the best thing I’ve ever had” market better than Virginia? She’s definitely saved me from more than one night where it seemed like sucking on old ketchup packets in my empty fridge at 2am would have been “dinner”.

The Tamale Lady celebrated her 57th at Zeitgeist two weeks ago and SFGate brings up this enlightening interview full of such gems as:

Is it still a surprise when you show up in a bar, or can people follow you on Twitter now?

I am all kind of places on the Internet. Face … Face … what’s that Face thing? I don’t know it, but my son put me on there, yeah. He does the Twitter, too.

Read on at SFGate.

Shitty economy or not, the entrepreneurial spirit is still alive. Take these bright Mission youngsters, for example. Gaucho Dave snapped this shot of them and explains:

I remember when I was a kid, trying to make a buck in the summer I’d sometimes mow lawns. SF is different, these boys tried to charge me $1 to take a picture of them with a condom they blew up. I told them I had lots of friends and would do free advertising for them in exchange for a picture.

Done and done. They might still be around at 19th and Florida if you want to take them up on their offer. New decks and bearings are expensive.