The Pork Store: No Better Cure for a Sunday Morning Hangover
Jun 20 '03
The Bottom Line You're a tourist. You drank too much last night, but you wanna see some hippies down at Haight/Ashbury. You're gettin' the inside scoop here. Thank me and enjoy.
If I were to pick a fake fight with megugrrrl, it would probably be along these lines: You’re either an All You Knead person or you’re a Pork Store person! Plain and simple. Pick. Which side of Haight Street do you come down on?
But it wouldn’t be a too long-lasting fight. Not any more, at least. Because, while I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool eggs bennie with taters at All You Knead guy, I’ve finally seen the error of my ways. The Pork Store may have longer lines, less comfortable seating and stinkier patrons, but I now bow down to its superiority. The Pork Store is the Sunday Brunch shiznit. As repulsemonkey might say, “It has the crack.”
the room, the crowd, the freaks
Many of the little breakfast spots in the upper Haight make you wait a while to get your food, and there’s almost no time in life when you want your food right fucking now more than Sunday brunch, when you’re inevitably hungry as a school of Louie Andersons, and need some damn water, and are already thinking about where you’re gonna go to the bathroom before you’ve even eaten anything, because last nights burrito-pizzaslice-sushi just, ya know, isn’t sitting so well. Squat and Gobble has the shortest lines, but man do you not want to stare at another one of those multicolored chalk boards. All You Knead looks like a 10, 15 minute wait, but man, how long are they gonna make me wait once I’m seated?
When the hangover’s really, seriously kickin’, you know what you really need is something greasy, combined with something bready and salty and meaty and filling, and please, please, please just be nice to me because I’m really just not having a good morning, seriously.
And if you can just survive the wait outside, it will all be better at the Pork Store, I promise.
And the wait outside can frequently seem interminable. Hippies galore line the sidewalk, and talk about whateverthehellitis hippies talk about while they’re stinkin’ up the place and chanting “kind bud” under their breath to passers-by. The restaurant is small. Maybe 8 tables, most of ‘em two-tops, and about a dozen seats at the counter. And it’s nothing fancy either. Just a plain utilitarian room. Overly crowded. Overly Loud. Overly Hot. But seriously, I already told you, it’s worth it.
the cooks; the service
I just have so much respect for people who work in restaurants and can handle being slammed that I want to give every last one of ‘em a reacharound. Waiting tables can be a hard job. Being a short order cook ... can also be a really hard job. Both demand true professionals, and you know what? There aren’t a lot of true professionals working in restaurants.
Not the case with the Pork Store. This group is a no-excuses, yeah-you-can-see-I’‘m-slammed-by-the-look-on-my-face, but-you’re-gonna-get-everything-you-want-with-a-smile-before-you-know-you-want-it bunch of professionals. The waiters have got you with the coffee and the water and the iced tea before the padded vinyl bar-stools have finished making their little farting sound. Set your menu down, and the waitresses is in your face in a second, “How ya doin’? Know what you want?” Substitutions? No problems. Need that poached egg runny? C’mon dude, my boys at the grill never mess that up. Extra potatoes? We got nothin’ but brutha. Chill out. Have some fluid. We gotcha covered.”
The cooks, they’re something else. The Pork Store must have the smallest little work-space on the planet, but sitting at the counter watching them is something special. About a year ago, I finally got around to reading Kitchen Confidential, in which Anthony Bordain describes cooks variously as compadres in a foxhole, ballerinas, artists, and a bunch of other cool things I can’t remember. Well, the entire staff at the Pork Store fits this description. The space within which they work is so small that it’s hard to believe that they’re turning out about a plate a minute. There are times when the cooks have plates full of food balanced on top of stacks of towels, stacks of other plates, the edges of counters and ovens. But nothing ever breaks, and everything comes out at the right time, perfectly done. And if you want to minimize that because it is, after all, just short order cooking, you can bite my short stack. It’s hard to do.
the food
The Pork Store has all the standard breakfast items on its menu, and I’ll get to them eventually. But two words explain why it is that I’m now a Pork Store man, irrevocably: Shredded Tubers.
The Pork Store’s hash browns are just the very essence of what a hash brown ought to be. In fact, they’re more than that, because I didn’t even know that hash browns could be this good before I had theirs, and I’m a man who once ate hash browns at three different restaurants in a two hour period. The hash browns at The Pork Store are the Platonic ideal. They embody each characteristic of perfect hash browniness to perfection. Each serving is crispy on both top and bottom, but the entire stack is loosely packed, and all the soft little shreds on the inside are coated in nice, warm, salty butter. They’re served piping hot, and they soak up every last little bit of runny egg yoke and tobasco you can feed ‘em. And if hash browns were the only thing The Pork Store had to offer me, I have to tell you, that might be enough.
Fortunately, they’ve got plenty of other grub. Me? I usually get the eggs Florentine with bacon. Nice, toasted english muffin, and a perfect glob of spinach, 4 thick slices of Applewood smoked bacon and two large, runny, poached eggs. Maybe, 7, 8 bucks. Same’s you’d pay at any cheap place in the city. The only down side to the Pork Store is that the open kitchen forces you to notice that the Hollandaise sauce they dump on their Eggs Benedict type dishes – including the Florentine – comes cold out of a giant bucket next to the sink, where it’s been sitting for god knows how many hours. But then, I don’t have any illusions that restaurants with closed kitchens store their Hollandaise in any more sanitary conditions.
Pork Store also serves, at around the same price, your usual array of omelettes and other egg dishes. You got your Denver Omelette, your Huevos Rancheros (which I haven’t had, but they look great), your California-type Omelette with Avocado and Jack cheese. All that kind of stuff.
They also serve up a nice looking stack o’ pancakes. Nothing special or anything, as far as I can tell. And I suppose they call themselves The Pork Store because they’ve got plenty of pig-type offerings, aside from just the great bacon. They’ve got the ham. They’ve got the pork chops, which come in pairs, with pairs of eggs and biscuits if you want to get their Pork Store Special. They’ve got all manner of snausages, including little bits of sausage in their truly nasty and delicious looking biscuits and gravy breakfast.
The one thing they don’t have that most San Francisco brunch places do is crepes. Frou-frou little crepes that every little corner breakfast joint in the city lists in 37 varieties on the exact same multi-colored chalk board in some kind of script you can barely read. They don’t have that. And good riddance to it.
Another thing they don’t have is the world’s nicest bathroom, which, really, they ought to be focusing on. It’s a hangover joint, and one thing you really need in a hangover joint is a clean, comfortable bathroom. And it’s not like you’re gonna find another one anywhere else in the Haight ... certainly not one you’ll be allowed to use. Pork Store needs to get on that.
In conclusion, the Pork Store is a great place to start off you Sunday morning ... at around 2:00 in he afternoon. It’s only about 4 blocks from Amoeba records, and smack dab in the middle of about a thousand used clothing stores and head shops and tourist traps. Try it.
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Mr.Eyore
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I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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