This will not be a fair fight. Hipster is about listing ingredients on a menu and tricking people into buying their food. We ran into an ideal hipster sample in our recent trip to San Francisco. We also encountered a dish with a few ingredients with true sincerity.
Let's start with the hipster sample: Duck fat fries. Regular places that serve duck fat fries, especially Hot Doug's RIP, have French fries cooked in duck fat. That makes them duck fat fries.
Horsefeather in San Francisco serves what they call "duck fat fries." The fries contain umami seasoning, duck fat "snow," and curried ketchup. The umami seasoning is real, not that exciting but verifiable. The duck fat "snow" looked pretty but didn't have any taste. The curried ketchup was curried in that there was a slight curry taste but not enough to bring any significant flavor, like curry for people who can't handle actual curry taste. Curried implies not full curry.
The problem with these fries is that they weren't cooked in duck fat. The trick is that the snow, which was tasteless, qualified them as "duck fat." Duck fat should have been in quotes in the description. The law may not be able to touch them but they are deliberately deceptive.
The fries were $8 and there wasn't a lot of ketchup. (If there is a lawsuit, I will contend the fries did not taste like they were cooked in duck fat. I will win.)
The porchetta sandwich at Roli Roti is a classic. Very few ingredients yet thoughtful and ones that marry well together. The slow-cooked pork with the cracklings, a beautiful onion jam, arugula, and rosemary sea salt.
Every ingredient is sincere: the onion jam would be great by itself. The ingredients make this $13 sandwich more than the individual ingredients by themselves. If you think you dislike arugula, you will enjoy it on this sandwich.
I got to enjoy this twice on the trip, the second with a Mexican Coca-Cola. Talk about the perfect complimentary choice (purchased separately inside the Ferry Building).
Unlike the fries, I ate the whole porchetta sandwich. In fact, the sandwich was so good that I ate it slowly to appreciate what my taste buds were experiencing. The "duck fat fries" were so dry that you had to eat them with the curried ketchup. A good fry, especially ones actually cooked in duck fat, should be able to stand up on its own.
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I fell for the hipster place because I was running around that afternoon and felt like having a treat of duck fat fries. If I knew for a second that the deception would run that deep, I never would have gone in there, not even for a story. I could have argued about the deception, but the hipster logic is that they were "upfront" and you should have known better.
We likely have been tricked more than once by the hipster food approach. We are still good people even if we are labeled as "suckers." Just eat more classic food than hipster food in your travels.
photo credits: Horsefeather; me (x2)
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