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CHEAP EATS I didn’t do justice to Curry Boyzz, my new favorite restaurant, in last week’s review; I realize that. I completely and utterly neglected to mention who I ate there with!
Well, Hedgehog.
Moving right along …
Wait, there was someone else at our table, I feel certain. But Hedgehog, who is the half of our family that remembers things, is at work. She is also the half of our family that works.
With headphones on! So I am going to have to figure this out for myself, think think think … It was somebody skinny, I’m thinking, and so probably a vegetarian. Super skinny. With dreadlocks, and wearing a kind of cardboard hat or scarf, or something. With a price tag on it.
Doh! It wasn’t a vegetarian so much as a mop. Our spanking new, microfiber, swivel-headed dust mop that we’d just picked up at Cliff’s Hardware. I remember now: we wedged the handle through a chair back and its green dreadlocked head kind of watched over our meal, kind of hungrily. In fact, while Hedgehog used the bathroom, it spoke to me.
“That Tikka Masala looked pretty good,” it said.
“Yeah, well,” I said.
And in other news, I did a thing I haven’t done since the ’90s: I ate three Mission burritos in a week, and — funny thing — this was the week we were chicken-sitting in Alameda. When we are stationed in the Mission, Hedgehog and me, and our mop, we don’t eat burritos.
But we were going to watch that movie in Dolores Park with some buds, so we went to Cancun first. And we were going to a baseball game in Oakland, but I was in SF for some reason, and stopped at El Toro on my way to BART.
And Papalote, on a different day, but now I’m mad at them. Hardly any meat on my carne asada burrito: for shame, considering its relative expensiveness! And it was rolled all wrong, so that, cross-sectionally, one side of the burrito was just pretty much rice, and the other side had a few fairly tasteless beans and occasional chunks of meat. Pfft.
Lucky for them, they’re still my favorite taqueria, the orange salsa’s so goddamn good. I’ll just never eat there again, is all.
Hedgehog’s idea is to buy jars of Papalote’s overpriced orange salsa to take home and put on Cancun burritos.
So you see? You see why I love that lesbian? Even though she’s gluten free and dairy free, and made me eat at Radish for lunch today just because they had gluten free po-boys.
But at least she eats meat. Unlike some mops that I know.
So it shouldn’t surprise longtime readers of this column that her new favorite restaurant, like mine (after all these years), is Cancun. Specifically, the one on Mission and 19th, where I gained 20-some pounds in my thirties.
But it’s a 20-year tradition of mine not to review Cancun. To dwell on it, but never to actually review it. Therefore, I give you my other new favorite restaurant, Radish, the thing that finally happened across the street from the Lexington Club. Where I don’t drink, ’cause I’m too old.
But on our way to Cancun, we have to walk past one or the other, and lately it’s been Radish, so’s Hedgehog can look at their menu. We tried to eat there on a weekend but the line was too long.
Today (a weekday), I got the fried oyster po-boy, and it reminded me of Papalote’s carne asada burrito in that there were only about four or five oysters in it. And they weren’t very well battered. They just kind of crumbled.
But the bread was good! It was slathered with what they call “Cajun dirt.” I’d hoped that this would be the same thing Cajuns call “dirty rice,” which is chopped up giblets and liver and stuff, but no. It was reminiscent of muffuletta spread, which is more Italian than Cajun: chopped olives, onions, and lemon.
Good. But the best thing about Radish, as far as we could make out, was the homemade root chips: potato, taro, and yuca — yum!
RADISH
Mon-Tue 5-10pm; Wed-Thu 10am-10pm; Fri 10am-11pm; Sat 9am-11pm; Sun 9am-5pm
3465 19th St., SF.
(415) 834-5441
MC,V
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