Seared Local Something

I’ve eaten my way from one end of the Ferry Building to the other on more than one occasion, but a few Sundays ago I got to do it for a good cause. CUESA, the organization that runs the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, was holding its annual Sunday Supper fundraiser, a cocktails-and-appetizers reception followed by a seated five-course dinner upstairs in the beautifully vaulted expanse of the second floor. My dream was to go to the dinner upstairs but that cost $200, compared to the relative bargain of the $75 reception ticket. Having already sprung this year for a $200 dinner ticket, I opted for the reception (okay, I couldn’t find anyone else willing to spring for the dinner, and I had a taker for the reception. Wiser, thriftier heads prevailed). Then I spent the whole weekend nursing a cold and was happy I hadn’t paid $200 for a dinner I didn’t feel well enough to attend.

But $75 is nothing to sneeze at, either, so I loaded up on the nondrowsy cold medicine and trotted down to the Ferry Building to meet my friend M.

It turns out that a hall full of delicious treats (chicken liver pate, fried salt cod tater-tot-like things, spinach ravioli with a quail egg inside, pasties with homemade HP sauce, Hawaiian-style sushi, the list goes on and on) and liquid refreshments is a lot like nondrowsy cold medicine. You suddenly feel so much better and anything seems possible. Later, when the taste wears off and the mix of animal fat, bread, and alcohol is sitting kind of heavy in your stomach, you might not feel so great, but at the time, it’s amazing.

The highlight of the evening, though, was one of the few things I didn’t try. The reception was as crowded as the Ferry Building on a Saturday morning and it was getting a little tricky to navigate the tables. We stopped at a table so mobbed that we couldn’t read the menu card that said what they were serving.

“What’s this one?” M. asked.

My view was partially blocked by a woman with long brown hair leaning over the table to get up close and personal with the appetizer on offer.

“Seared local something.” That was all I could read.

“That describes everything here,” M. said.

I got a little closer to the table. The seared local something was yellowtail, topped by a tasty, salted pig part. While there’s definitely an abundance of locally salted tasty pig parts, who knew there was local yellowtail?

I was about to pick up one of the morsels when the woman with long brown hair bolted up from her forensic investigation of the appetizer.

“I think I got some of the tasty pig parts in my hair,” she said.

Which just about sums up the dangers of dining in San Francisco.