Eats

(Still no official web-site thing.)


Place: Eats
Location: 50 Clement Street (on the corner of 2nd Avenue); phonicular contact: (415) 751-8000
Hours: open every day of the week at 8:00am
Meal: Divorced Eggs ~ sunny up eggs with half red sauce (salsa roja) and tomatillo sauce (salsa tomatillo), ricotta salata[1], black beans with pepper Jack cheese, grilled tortillas, and roasted potatoes (well, more specifically: Excellent! Roasted Home Potatoes); and a cuppa (with only one refilla this morning ~ they were pretty busy and I didn't want to be "that guy" that lingers around drinking more Coffee while there are many other poor schmucks[2] standing outside in the rain waiting to get inside to eat) House (Blend/Roast) Equator Coffees & Teas™

http://www.equatorcoffees.com/

(There are really no EweToobular juxtaselections [of which I am familiar, at least] between Eats, Annie Lennox, or Casper the Friendly Ghost; I just heard this song on the radio on the way home from the restaurant and decided to share it.

I also went with Annie's version of this song because ever since Procol Harum decided to become an Islamic extremist group based in northeastern Nigeria, and announced their allegiance with them-thar bastages of Da'ish, I have boycotted their music. 

I wonder why Annie borrowed Nastassja Kinski's costume from "The Hotel New Hampshire" for this video.)


Finishing up with the last few restaurants in my Breakfastary Starting Rotation for a 2016 pre-Spring Training workout, I went back to Eats (see previous 'blog-entry from September 13th, 2015) for breakfast.

Since my last visit, they have remodeled a bit inside. Gone are both counter-table areas: the one that was overlooking the kitchen area and the one which was along the window looking onto Clement Street. These have mostly been replaced with regular old table seating. Luckily, they did re-purpose the old large wooden slab that had served as the window-counter into a bench for the tables along the window now. The end-result seems to be that there are fewer (less?) seats now and the wait may be a bit longer for those poor schmucks that hadn't arrived promptly at 8:00am (come rain or shine). Unfortunately, also 86-ed is the cool Coca-Cola® bottles sculpture/hat-hanger thing that was above the kitchen-window.

Along with the structural remodeling, there has been a menu remodeling, too. There are several new items on the menu (meaning several old items have now been omitted or re-named). This might prove to be a good thing because I had pretty much worked my way through the old menu for those items that were suitable for stupid vegetarians. My breakfast choice this morning was one of the new options. Luckily, they do still offer their most Excellent! Roasted Home Potatoes (otherwise, this may be grounds for divorce from my Breakfastary Starting Rotation).

I suppose the best way to describe this would be kinda like a Mexican take on an Eggs Benedict dish (Huevos Benedicto?), where the Hollandaise sauce is replaced by two different salsas (roja y tomatillo), Mr. Thomas' poor excuse for British-style muffins is replaced with corn tortillas, and the poached eggs are now "sunny up eggs" (which I think is mexicano for "sunny-side up eggs"). Okay, on further review, maybe it isn't anything like Eggs Benedict, Arnold. I liked both of the salsas, but I preferred the roja just a bit more than the tomatillo. 

There was just one (large, though) clove of garlic in with the Excellent! Roasted Home Potatoes. This is no reason to panic, though. It was still very good. 

Eats also has updated the choices for their condimentary supplementation. Along with the San Francisco Triumvirate of Hot Sauces (Tabasco® Brand Pepper Sauce [Original Red Sauce], Cholula® Hot Sauce [Original], and Tapatío® Salsa Picante Hot Sauce), they now offer three different types of El Yucateco®: Hot Sauce Salsa Picante de Chile Habanero (una roja y una verde) and XXXtra Hot Sauce Salsa Kutbil-ik® de Chile Habanero (which is one that I also currently have in my hot sauce collection). Not really wanting to mess any with the flavour of the salsas already provided on top of the eggs that had legally dissolved their marriage, I just used some of my own Florida Gold Premium Habanero Hot Sauce (Thanks, Kerry!) liberatedly all over the Excellent! Roasted Home Potatoes. However, I did not notice on any of the tables the really tasty ketchup (the "Sun Dried Tomato Ketchup" from Traina™ Foods) from my last visit.

Alas, it's always the kids' stomachs that suffer the most during an egg divorce...


Glen Bacon Scale Rating: Huevos Divorciados ~ 6.5; Excellent! Roasted Home Potatoes ~ 7.5

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1. I had already explained this cheesy comestible in my previous visit's 'blog-entry to Eats. So, you can look it up yerdamnself if you don't feel like re-reading my description.

Or, better yet, just check it out at:

http://www.cheese.com/ricotta-salata/

(It tickles me to no end that there is an actual "Cheese.com" on the World Wild Webs.)

2. Stupid, useless cunning linguist pointer of the day:

Once again, whenever I need a Yiddish-to-English explanation/translation, I turn to the paradigmatic lexicon in this genre (Are there really any others?): 
The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten.

shmuck* 

Rhymes with "stuck". From German, in some way or other, where Schmuck is "an ornament", "jewelry"; shmuck is "neat", "smart", and schmücken means "to decorate". In Yiddish, shmock means an "ornament".

1. (Obscene) Penis.

Never utter shmuck lightly, or in the presence of women and children. Indeed, it was uneasiness about shmuck that led to the truncated euphemism shmo - and any shmo knows what shmo comes from.
Jews tend to be puritanical about public references to the pubic.
I never heard any elders, certainly not my father or mother, use shmuck, which was regarded as so vulgar as to be taboo. But vulgarity has its raison d'être.

2. (Obscene) A dope, a jerk, a boob; a clumsy, bumbling fellow.

In this sense, shmuck, like its English equivalent, is widely used by males, and with gusto; few impolite words express comparable contempt. "What a shmuck I was to believe him!" "That shmuck fell for the stupidest trick you ever saw."

3. (Obscene) A detestable fellow; a son of a bitch.

I suppose that in every language the word for the male organ has been enlisted in the service of the contumelious.
NOTE: There is a Slovene word, šmok, that also means a fool, an innocent, a gullible dolt - but I have it on the authority of Dr. Shlomo Noble of the YIVO Institute that šmok came from shmuck, and not the other way around.

*(Of course, I prefer die deutsche spelling of "Schmuck". The first time I ever saw a large sign hanging over a jewelry store window along the Kurfürstendamm in [what was then still West] Berlin, I automatically assumed it must be a brothel†.)

†(And there is absolutely no truth to the old adage: "Too many hookers spoil the brothel.")