Welcome to p.m. Intel, your midday roundup of Bay Area food and restaurant news from publications near and far. Tips are always welcome, drop them here.
- A 7-Eleven store near the UC Berkeley campus was robbed at knifepoint this week, but the target wasn’t money, the Daily Californian reports. According to a spokesperson with the Berkeley Police Department, at 7:04 p.m. Tuesday, a suspect “pulled out a knife” and “threatened to kill the clerk” before fleeing with “seven to eight sandwiches.” As of publication time, no arrests have been announced in the case.
- Concerns that legacy LGBTQ business the Eagle Tavern might never reopen intensified this week, when the Bay Area Reporter followed up on news that its building had been sold. Eagle owner Lex Montiel “told a reporter that he did not appreciate the call” about his bar’s future, and refused to comment on the building sale. Compass Real Estate, which is handling the transaction, also declined comment.
- It was just last summer that Castro arcade bar Brewcade rebranded as the Detour, an homage to a Market Street gay bar that closed in 2005. Now, like its namesake, the new Detour is going dark, at least “until a vaccine is released,” co-owner Shawn Vergara said in a Facebook post reported by Hoodline. “If we were to stay open now and stay the course we would shut down permanently,” Vergara says. “That’s not what we wanted to do.”
- The owners of pan-Asian fast casual chain Bamboo Asia have launched a food delivery company that “allows customers to order meal kits, prepared foods, wine and other grocery staples from restaurants that get delivered via refrigerated truck within two days, at zero upfront cost to restaurant partners,” the SF Business Times reports. Users of the app, which is called Feastin, pay a 20 percent fee per order to cover “service, tax and tip for full-time drivers.”
- San Francisco tech worker Jessica Hershfield has toiled at Google, Uber and Lime, but quit the business to start a company called Just Enough Wines that seeks to “elevate” canned wine, KQED reports. She doesn’t have a background in booze, and said she was attracted to wine because of its “ubiquitous nature.”
- “The number of primary Spanish-speaking Latinx families in the San Francisco Bay Area who cannot afford to eat balanced meals and go to bed hungry has more than doubled since the pandemic,” UCSF says of a new study published Wednesday.
- I can only assume that SF Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho’s inbox is a living nightmare (people sure are, uh, passionate about food), but dropping a new best burgers list probably didn’t help matters.
- Popular-in-the-90s Emeryville restaurant Townhouse Bar Grill is seeking 2020s relevance, Berkeleyside reports, with a new owner and chef Jake Kwan Rosenbush (Gary Danko, 15 Romolo) in the kitchen, and patio dining in a nearby parking lot.
- Forward has a nice overview of the Bay Area’s new deli options, including pop-ups like Mark and Mike’s in SF, and JW Catering’s pivot to deli in Sunnyvale.
- Zuni chef Nathan Norris is calling out what he sees as inequity in the local indoor dining reopening plan, saying that “most restaurants do not have access to the money needed to create the safest indoor space, such as modern HVAC systems, and serve a broader range of society, including the non-white populations disproportionately infected with COVID.” [SF Chronicle]
- The Electric Smoothie Lab Apothecary is delivering smoothies to food banks across the Bay Area. [KQED]
Article source: https://sf.eater.com/2020/10/15/21517982/zuni-7-eleven-eagle-tavern-brewcade-detour