There are many reasons to be grateful for living in the San Francisco Bay Area, including one that’s a widespread obsession: Great food. Lots of it, served at restaurants of all sizes and price points, food trucks, farmers’ markets and ethnic grocery stores. Lest we take it for granted, special food events in the Bay Area--food awards, shows and festivals--remind us how well-fed and fortunate we are.
The Good Food Awards, initiated mostly by Bay Area food specialists, honor American food producers who make tasty food while being socially and environmentally responsible. In 2011, the awards’ inaugural year, 780 entries were submitted from around the country and whittled down to 130 finalists in beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, coffee, pickles and preserves categories.
Seventy-one Good Food Award winners for 2011 were recently announced. The Bay Area was the only place in the U.S. with champions in each category, including Drakes’ Brewing of San Leandro, Marin Brewing Company (honored for ESChi, its beer with a Marin-esque name), Nicasio Valley Cheese Company, Charles Chocolates of San Francisco, Blue Bottle Coffee in Oakland, Berkeley’s Cultured and Café Rouge, and Monterey’s Happy Girl Kitchen. Portland, OR, was close, but had no winning beer.
Alice Waters is a major reason the Bay Area is a food capital. The internationally recognized culinary pioneer and Chez Panisse founder hosted the awards ceremony at the Ferry Building (which is best known for its twice-weekly gourmet farmers’ market).
The awards segue into Good Food Month in the Bay Area. How-to workshops on fermenting and pickling, tastings, a “careers in chocolate” panel featuring local women chocolatiers and foodie tours of Hayes Valley, the Mission and Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto are scheduled through Feb. 20.
Other places, such as upstate New York, don’t have it nearly as good. The founder of Gimme! Coffee of Ithaca, a coffee category winner, said she’s trying to orchestrate a version of Good Food Month to educate her neighbors about good food, a combo of taste and what Waters calls “honesty of production and purity of providence.”
Then there’s the Fancy Food Show, three days in mid-January in which producers, creators, buyers, distributors and retailers of ingredients and foods from around the world flock to San Francisco to taste and hob-nob. The extravaganza fills Moscone Center. About 1,300 exhibitors, more than 325 of them from California, were at the just-finished 2011 show.
The range of Fancy Food Bay Area exhibitors is impressive. There are the established names, like the Republic of Tea (which unveiled a chocolate (!) line, including Red Velvet Chocolate), Ghirardelli and Double Rainbow, and global companies that have established American headquarters here (Belgium’s Lotus Bakeries, which makes the crunchy, caramel-y, cinnamon-y Biscoff cookies).
At the 2011 Fancy Food Show, many of the Bay Area food manufacturers were surprises, companies that you (or at least I) have never heard of, in cities I wouldn’t have expected: Bo’s Best Pancakes in Hayward; Cocola of Redwood City; madeleine maker Donsuemor in Alameda; Josuma Coffee in Menlo Park; popchips in San Francisco; Sukhi’s Gourmet Indian Foods in Hayward.
I don’t associate San Jose with baking, but it’s home to Truly Organic Baking, whose banana bread mix was named the year’s best USDA-Approved Organic Product. Sausalito’s Dragonfly Cakes makes petit fours that are (almost) too gorgeous to eat. Little Sky in Boulder Creek (near Santa Cruz) makes lavender baking mixes with home-grown lavender.
The next time you moan, “There’s nothing good to eat,” just think: You could be stuck in upstate New York.
