KQED, Dirty Spoons and Thirsty Girls

      Harvest season is fast approaching and that gives me license to talk about food and drink for the next several posts. Gastronomy is our go-to conversational topic in the Bay Area just like baseball is in Boston. In terms of personal diets, the San Franciscans I've met generally fall into two camps. The first smaller camp is the one where members dare not touch certain foods or edible constituents, i.e. maintaining diets that are sugar-free, vegan, meat-and-eggs-free or free from packaging. The second camp is much larger and more celebratory. These happy campers declare at every opportunity how foods at certain restaurants are "So Good!" and need to be lauded, or, at the very least, deliberated.

      No show captures the "So Good!" foodie zeitgeist than Check, Please! Bay Area. We watch it on domestic Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. on Channel 9, KQED, the Bay Area's PBS station. The premise: three guests who are local diners (not professional food critics) meet at a round table each week. Each guest chooses her favorite restaurant and the other two guests visit that restaurant under total anonymity. After trying each other's favorite dirty spoons, the guests come on the show to discuss, dispute and celebrate their dining experiences. The show's fun and punchy host, Leslie Sbrocco, an award-winning author, food critic and sommelier, oversees the discussion and peppers it with zingers and inquiries about desserts. She claimed, in one on-line interview, that she doesn't drink during the show but we swear that the producers prefer her to be tipsy, especially in more recent episodes.

      This show is one product that we can't say originated in the Bay Area. The franchise started in Chicago in 2001 and San Francisco didn't hop on board until 2005. I actually found a clip of then Illinois-State-Senator Barack Obama throwing in his two cents about a soul food joint in the Windy City.

      Here is a CPBA highlight on one of our favorite Inner Sunset places, Marnee Thai. 

      For all of San Francisco's sundry expenses, dining is low on the prohibitive scale, especially if you eschew the booze. When you take your sweetie out to dinner and spend $45, you know that it's going to be a respectable and delectable meal.

      My dream is to go on CPBA but I have yet to find the appropriate eatery or one that hasn't already been publicized. As for Leslie, she remains our culinary goddess on Friday nights when we're too chewed up from a week of work to hit the hilly pavement. Here's a clip of Leslie trying to get Hoda and Kathie Lee sloshed on the Today Show.

      Back in Boston, I used to watch PBS on Friday nights to catch up with world and local affairs. On WGBH, in the same 8:30 p.m. time slot, airs the bellicose political show called The McLaughlin Group ("The American Original") with its 1970s laser graphics and blustery red/blue talking heads screaming at each other. I miss the fire and brimstone and sharp political rhetoric but also get that the McLaughlin Group could never work for West Coast primetime. All we're looking for out here is a good meal and some decent conversation as the power corridors of the East Coast pulsate. As Joni Mitchell sang, "Well, something's lost but something's gained in living everyday."