Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
Loveski, the “Jew-ish” deli from fine-dining chef Christopher Kostow and his wife Martina Kostow, is opening its third location in San Francisco’s Jackson Square, according to the S.F. Chronicle.
Loveski first opened in Napa’s Oxbow Market in 2022, followed the next year by a second location at Larkspur Landing in Marin County. When the Chronicle did a taste test of the Bay Area’s best bagels last year, Loveski’s claimed the top spot.
As I wrote in 2022, Kostow has earned many of the culinary world’s highest honors, but he had long thought about opening a Jewish deli. In fact, one of my favorite quotes ever for this column came from him, when he told me “I’m not a real fine-dining guy…. My car is dirty. I like walking around and giving people a pickle.”
The Napa location of Loveski, which will soon open a San Francisco site. (Alix Wall)
Kostow was the youngest chef to earn a Michelin star, and he was the executive chef at The Restaurant at Meadowood in St. Helena, which burned down in the 2020 Glass Fire. Besides the two Loveski locations, he owns Napa’s Charter Oak and Ciccio with his wife, who is also his business partner.
She is Thai, so Asian influences can be seen in the menu, such as the matzah ball soup with fish sauce. (Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!)
Loveski will replace the current Postscript Cafe at 499 Jackson St. and will have a large market section and items unique to that location, including poke bowls, a pickle hot sauce and everything-bagel chili crisp. The Kostows plan to open in about a month.
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Saul’s Deli is starting a one-day-a-week delivery service for what it’s calling “Cozy Monday Dinners.” Every Sunday, it will share its special menu of the week, and a limited number of orders will be taken on Sunday until they sell out (or through Monday if they don’t) for Monday delivery. The first menu was brisket and sides, though certain items can also be ordered from the cold section of the menu, like packaged pastrami and egg salad or chopped liver and quarts of soup.
Saul’s Delicatessen in Berkeley is starting a new Monday-only delivery menu. (Aaron Levy-Wolins/J. Staff)
Delivery helped keep Saul’s open during Covid, but it stopped delivery once the worst of the pandemic had ended, and it has refrained from signing up with apps like DoorDash.
“The in-person experience is essential to Saul’s, and the truth is that a lot of our food is not designed to travel (think hot pastrami and schnitzel),” owner Sam Tobis told J. “By doing delivery in-house in this limited way, we can bring guests something special to their homes while not putting the dine-in experience at risk. I’m not saying we’ll never do something broader, but we want to be thoughtful about it and keep the personal touch.”
For now, delivery service is limited to Berkeley, Albany and El Cerrito, but depending on how it goes, it may expand into Oakland and Richmond. A minimum order of $65 is required with a $10 delivery fee, and orders over $100 get free delivery.
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Adam Swig of Value Culture is collaborating once again with chef Kathy Fang and JCCSF for an upcoming Shabbat dinner called “Soy Vey,” celebrating Chinese New Year and the ties between the Asian and Jewish communities. The multicourse dinner, on Feb. 13 at Fang Restaurant in S.F., is kosher style, meaning no pork or shellfish, and it always sells out. While this year’s event is already sold out, sponsorship tickets are still available at $1,000 each.
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Betty Newman was a longtime recipe columnist for this newspaper, with a column called “The Joy of Jewish Cooking” that ran from 1986 to 1998 in what was then called the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California.
Betty Newman, who wrote a column in the Jewish Bulletin for 12 years, put her recipes together in a book in 2014.
I interviewed her in 2014 when she self-published nearly all of her columns in a book of the same name, and again not long ago.
Newman, now 94, still lives in San Francisco. She reached out to me recently to reminisce about her column. When she first stopped writing it, readers would often ask her about it at shul and in other Jewish spaces. She asked me to share a message with readers who still remember her.
“I’m still here, I’m still cooking, and I hope you are, too,” she said. “I still have fond memories and was just reminiscing about how much I enjoyed writing the column and connecting with the readers and sharing my feelings about cooking.”
Newman said she still tries to host Shabbat dinner once or twice a month for her family, as it brings them together, and her grandkids look forward to it. She favors her mother’s recipes, including Ashkenazi classics like stuffed cabbage.
“I like to cook with old recipes, as they bring back a lot of memories, and that’s what cooking is about for me,” she said.
Though, of course, cooking and hosting are about so much more than that, she added. “I like to have people around my table enjoying my food,” she said. “That’s the most important thing. You don’t just cook for the food, you cook for a lot of other reasons.”
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The Bagel Blurb: Thanks to J. photographer Aaron Levy-Wolins for directing me to an SF Standard feature about Bagel Daddy, a new bagel business owned by Benjamin Simon in the SoMa district of the city. (As I’ve written before, it has become impossible to track all the new bagel businesses in the Bay Area now!)
Originally from the Chicago area, Simon has a story similar to those of many of the Bay Area’s bagel entrepreneurs. Frustrated by the lack of good bagels here, he set out to create his own. But in a twist that couldn’t be any more San Francisco if he tried, Simon is a software guy who first made the bagels to give away at Burning Man. (And, yes, there was a sexual connotation to the name that is not appropriate for a family newspaper.)
Bagel Daddy also offers sandwiches. It’s open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily except for Sunday, at 685 Townsend St., S.F.
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