On the whole, though I find film festivals more festive when I'm attending them in a city not my own (where mundane matters like, oh, cleaning the house and dental appointments and work deadlines don't exist, and therefore don't interfere with total immersion in culture), I was pleased with the way this year's San Francisco International Film Festival was going. There were masterpieces (Patrice Chereau's Gabrielle), part-masterpieces (Hou Hsaio-Hsien's Three Times), and interesting movies by master directors (Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud).
James Sanders
Get a big plate of Hawaiian soul food at this small eatery.
Location Info
Details
Barbecue mix plate $7.50
Roast pork mini $4.50, regular $6.50
Shrimp curry mini $4.75, regular $6.75
Chicken katsu mini $4.25, regular $6.25
Grilled Spam musubi $1.69
Portuguese sausage musubi $1.99
Loco moco mini $4.25, regular $6.25
956-2888
www.hawaiianbarbecue.com
Open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday until 6 p.m. Closed Sunday
No reservations
Wheelchair accessible
Parking: difficult
Muni: 2, 3, 4, 15, 30, 45
Noise level: low to moderate
312 Kearny (at Bush)
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And both the Kabuki and the Castro, the festival's main venues, are located in neighborhoods full of interesting and inexpensive eateries: I love ducking into Suzu, in the Kinokuniya mall right next to the Kabuki, for a bowl of the best handmade Japanese noodles in the city, or stopping at Rossi's Deli, across the street from the Castro, for an Italian sub or a freshly made BLT.
Everything was going swimmingly until the day I found myself walking into the Kabuki 10 minutes before the Raul Ruiz movie I thought I was going to see there started unspooling across town in its actual venue, the Castro, an occurrence that usually happens in my dreams rather than in reality. I don't know how I managed to fly across town and land in an aisle seat several miles away before the beginning credits ended — that was dreamlike, too. A BLT with extra mayo soothed my jangled nerves, after.
But 10 days into the festival, after hearing Tilda Swinton's amusing and trenchant State of Cinema address, I wanted something other than noodles, and I knew what, too (always a gift from the gods, when you know what will satisfy your hungers): Hawaiian barbecue.
Hawaiian cuisine (luaus! Two scoops rice! Spam!) hadn't figured much in my private gastronomy until a trip to Maui a few years ago, when I discovered that a classic Hawaiian plate lunch, with, yes, two scoops rice and a scoop of macaroni salad nestled next to some tender lau lau pork or thin-sliced marinated beef or grilled chicken fragrant with lime juice, could be a divine thing. I wondered if it tasted so good because of the matchless view of sand and sea, but back in the Bay Area, I found delicious Hawaiian fare at Tita's Hale'aina, whose windows showed nothing more than 17th Street, and a number of miles northwest in Vallejo at L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, with an even less inspiring vista of a shopping mall parking lot.
Tita's is now sadly closed; but a branch of L&L, which started small in Hawaii in 1976, recently opened on Kearny Downtown, and that's where I was headed. When I found the storefront covered by locked metal gates, I felt even more despair than when I realized I was at the wrong theater. On Saturday, it seems, the place shuts up promptly at 6. And Sunday it's closed all day. I thought longingly of the lunch my father and I had shared at Wikiwiki Hawaiian BBQ (2417 Shattuck, Berkeley, 510-548-3936): a plate of kalua pork — not flavored with the coffee liqueur that's spelled similarly, just slow-roasted and shredded — had been not only delicious, but also enough for three meals. We'd been headed for Japanese noodles up the block, only to find that place shuttered for renovations. It was raining, and we ducked into the bare-bones Wikiwiki without great expectations, and it proved to be one of our better finds.
Alas, that Saturday night I wasn't going to be digging into pig. Two days later, after viewing the shattering The Bridge, which movingly documents a number of suicides off our seductive Golden Gate Bridge, I needed comfort food, and this time L&L welcomed me with open arms (or open doors, anyway). It's even more bare-bones than Wikiwiki: a tiny room with a counter where you order and receive your food, which comes in Styrofoam containers whether you're taking it out (as most do) or perching at one of the high shelflike counters that line two walls.
But the food makes up for the lack of ambience. Hawaiian cooking is often referred to as the original fusion cuisine: Added to the native Hawaiian ingredients such as coconut, taro root, bananas, sugar cane, seaweed, and seafood, are elements of the cultures that colonized the islands, including Polynesian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean, as well as mainland American, and the ingredients they brought, such as pigs and pineapple. (And Spam.) That day I brought home the barbecue mix plate, which included tasty skin-on boneless barbecue chicken, a thin-sliced short rib that crackled from its sweet marinade, and a heap of barbecue beef (as well as the inevitable rice and mayonnaise-y macaroni salad); a pleasing shrimp curry, whose lumps of potato, which had absorbed the lightly cornstarched curry sauce, were as satisfying to eat as its firm shrimp; and a plate of roast pork, a thick chunk which seemed quintessentially Midwestern under a light gravy. The curry and the pork, like many of the dishes here, are available in "mini" or "regular" sizes; for me, a mini is a meal, and a regular guarantees leftovers.
foam order.com
