by l.e. leone

The switch

THERE'S A SIGN on my chicken house door says "People Eat People's Meat," yellow letters overlaying a big, red, good-looking pig. No idea where the sign came from, but it's been there for months and months. I can see it from my farmer house door. I can see it from my bathtub, and I wonder. Did they commission it from some neighborhood artist? Or are my chickens more talented than even I imagined?

In any case it does the trick. Pork, I'm sure you've noticed if you've been reading this column even half as regularly as I've been writing it, has officially surpassed chickens as my go-to meat. These things happen. Why, just the other day I was eating pigs and pancakes with the great Crawdad de la Cooter and she said, complaintively, "All you ever write about anymore is your transition."

"Hey, it's a big deal," I said, pouring syrup all over my sausage patty. "Someone practically famous for eating chickens starts switching over to pork, I call that newsworthy."

"What are you talking about?" Crawdad said.

"What are you talking about?" I said. "Is there any more butter over there?" (There was!) "Anyway," I said, plastering my pancakes, "what would you rather I write about? Sports?"

More syrup all over everything. Big bite of sausage. Sip of coffee.

"Restaurants?" I said.

She said she was just worried that I was going to lose my readers, or something like that. This is what's called, in Crawdad's line of work, which is talk therapy, projection. Meaning: I'm losing her. As a reader, I mean. I've already lost her as a bedmate, although I still get to sleep on the couch now and again, and we talk on the phone 9 or 10 times a day. Eat.

But to prove that I'm not losing my readers, except maybe Crawdad, here's what we're going to do: a scientific study! I want everyone who used to read Cheap Eats all the time or even sometimes and now never ever even looks at it, not even very very occasionally ... to send me an e-mail and let me know. OK? We'll see who loses who.

Where was I? Oh yeah: butter, syrup, coffee. Sausage. Pancakes with strawberries. College football highlights on the TV behind Crawdad's head, over the bar. Pork Store Café on 16th Street in the Mission. And you want to talk about things changing? To get there we had to go past the site of my old go-to restaurant (the Sincere Café R.I.P.), my old go-to bar (the Albion R.I.P.), and my old go-to coffeehouse (Macondo R.I.P.) – the latter being a slightly foodier coffeehouse now. El Onda, or something. That was where we were going to eat, but it seemed more lunch oriented and we wanted breakfast.

The Pork Store is where Aunt Mary's (R.I.P.) used to be, across the street from the Roxie (still there), next to Ti Couz (still there). Some things never change. For another example, when I looked up my eight-year-old write-up of the Haight Street Pork Store, just to see if there was anything in it I could plagiarize for this column, guess what I had for breakfast, eight years ago, in the Haight: strawberry pancakes and a sausage patty!

What I didn't have, back then and there, was Crawdad de la Cooter to eat with. She just called me for the second time since I started writing this (the first time I read her what I had so far) and said, "Hey, you didn't say that I had pancakes and two eggs with tomatoes and spinach and that the pancakes were so good I can't stop thinking about them and I used up all the butter on my plate and two pats from the table, and I ate the whole thing and the eggs were good too."

Did you get all that, dear reader?

Good, 'cause I have other things I want to talk about. The weather. Sports. Politics. Philosophy. The apple-based barbecue sauce I'm working on in my laboratory. Rats. Weirdo the Cat. Did I tell you I have custody of Weirdo the Cat now? Well, I do!

Hold on. The phone's ringing again.

Guess who? Wonders if we should change her name to Crawdad de ex Cooter, now that our divorce is finally final. I'd put it to a vote, but I can't risk losing any more readers.

Pork Store Café. 3122 16th St. (at Valencia), SF. (415) 626-5523. Sun.-Mon., 8 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Tues., 8 a.m.-4 p.m.; Wed.-Thurs., 8 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 8 a.m.-1:30 a.m. Takeout available. Full bar. American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.

E-mail L.E. Leone at le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com.