When NOON All Day, the newest Dogpatch cafe and eatery, opened its doors last December, trendy dishes like brussels sprouts with pancetta or roasted cauliflower didn’t make the menu. Instead, a legume with a traditionally bad rap got its chance to shine — beans.
“Something about beans is the embodiment of what we’re trying to do,” NOON All Day’s head chef Carlo Espinas told me. “We want people to feel like they’re part of the community and come back on a regular basis.”
Their dish, called Beans and Greens, contains braised butter beans, a poached egg, sautéed greens, fermented chile and toast, and has had local clientele coming back for more. “It’s one of our top sellers, which is surprising and not surprising,” said Espinas. “People are making beans a part of their daily ritual.”
In San Francisco there seems to be a growing fascination with beans, especially with heirloom beans (yes, beans can be heirloom too). Just look at the May edition of Eater SF’s hottest restaurants, and you’ll see that three (Sorrel, Barvale and Che Fico) are showing off their love for legumes.
Sorrel, on Sacramento Street in Laurel Heights, is featuring their scorza di fagioli, a pasta in the shape of a split fava bean filled with cranberry beans and other seasonal legumes, like sugar snaps.
Barvale, on Divisadero Street, is offering a bean stew called fabada that includes local runner cannellini beans, pork belly, house-made morcilla (blood sausage) and house-made chorizo.
And Che Fico, down the street from Barvale on Divis (just look for the large sign), is currently serving mafaldini (ribbon-shaped pasta) with a fava-leaf pesto and fresh green fava beans on top.
So if trending restaurants aren’t shying away from putting beans on their menus, can we say that beans themselves are trendy?
“Absolutely,” said NOON All Day’s Espinas. “They’re this thing that you can take for granted for all this time, and then all of a sudden, you see all this magic that’s happening behind it…I think people are going to start to identify with certain beans as part of a region they’re from or a culture they’re from.”
“They’re definitely making a comeback,” says Sorrel’s executive chef Alex Hong. “If you’re going out to dinner and spending money, [customers] aren’t gonna be too psyched about the old black bean or refried beans or pinto beans…But then there’s all these new heirloom beans coming out that have amazing flavors.”
Calling beans trendy, however, is being rejected by some chefs around town, including Che Fico’s chef David Nayfeld. He’s not using beans because they are en vogue (Zuni Cafe and Nopa have been serving beans for years, he points out), but because they’re grown locally (mostly in Half Moon Bay) and in season.
“In spring you have fava beans, English peas and green chickpeas. And then you’ll work your way into summer, where you’ll have the fresh shelling and fresh runner beans. And into the fall and the winter, you’ll get dry beans.” Nayfeld plans to serve a bean dish at Che Fico for each season.
Nayfeld also points to the fact that a majority of restaurants in the city are ethnic (Mexican, Indian and Peruvian, to name a few), where beans have been a part of their culture and a staple of their diets for very a long time.
“It’s great when we showcase fresh, vibrant beans from the farmers’ market… but there are cultures that have been doing [beans] right for a long time,” said Nayfeld. “When we do adopt these brilliant techniques and flavors, there’s this appropriation about it where we’re running around tooting our horns, saying, ‘Look, we discovered the bean!’ What? You did what? No, you didn’t. You just figured it out!”
Barvale’s executive chef Patricio Duffoo thinks a short attention span may be the reason why beans won’t become the next big thing, at least not in San Francisco home kitchens. “In today’s world, time is really valuable, which makes it an uphill battle for legumes. With beans, you have to soak and then braise. Brussels sprouts and cauliflower take way less time to prepare.”
Don’t have time to soak your beans but you’re craving something starchy? Here are a couple of more beany favorites to check out around the city:
Gigante beans from Fiorella — Classic white shelling beans in a red sauce. Don’t let the simplicity of the dish downplay your expectations — it’s all part of chef Dante Cecchini’s plan. “A dish that literally has two to three components. If you fuck something up there, there’s sort of nowhere to hide,” Cecchini told us.
Strawberry vada from Dosa — A standard Indian dish made with chickpea flour that’s given a sweet twist. “I kept thinking, what if we made vada sweeter?” chef Arun Gupta explained. “Essentially, what you have is a gluten-free chickpea donut with strawberry and coconut.” For now the strawberry vada can be ordered only at brunch.
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