This Week In Food: Post Thanksgiving Edition

A new Palestinian restaurant is coming soon to Noe Valley, Thomas Keller is closing his Yountville Mexican spot after this weekend, and downtown Oakland has a new cocktail bar — with pickles! — all in This Week In Food.

Tablehopper brings word of a new Palestinian restaurant debuting in the new year in Noe Valley. It’s called Falasteen — which is the Arabic word for Palestine — and it’s a collaboration between owner Samir Salameh and chef-owner Lamees Dahbour, aka Mama Lamees, who you may know from her La Cocina-backed pop-ups. The menu features various mezze, a labne flight, grilled meats, and Mama Lamees’s slow-cooked makloubeh, a stew of lamb, eggplant, potato, and tomato. Look for Falasteen to open in early January.

I just walked by this other day and Tablehopper also reports on the opening of Hamburger Project on Disivisadero, in the former Hina Yakitori space (808 Divis). It’s the project of Ju-Ni/Handroll Project chef Geoffrey Lee and co-owner Tan Truong, and it features bargain-priced smashburgers that start at $6.89 for a classic single cheeseburger. They’re also doing an Oklahoma-style smashburger with griddled onions and Peppadew peppers ($9.49, or $11.49 for a double), and there are fries, cheese fries, and loaded fries, which you can optionally gussy up with some caviar for a $30 upcharge.

Thomas Keller’s Mexican spot La Calenda is closing after this weekend, after six year in business in Yountville. An Instagram post announcing the closure cited “the lack of local traffic and the economic downturn the Napa Valley experienced this last year” as the main reason for the closure. Keller says of the team at the restaurant “It has been my honor to collaborate with you on this journey, and we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for everyone’s efforts, which have inspired us.”

Over in Oakland, the longtime former dive Radio Bar has been transformed and reopened as Little Bird (435 13th Street). It’s a bird-themed cocktail bar with a colorful design that includes handmade birdcages and “primary colors that recall the plumage of macaws,” as well as a cocktail menu featuring bird-themed drinks, and a selection of pickles from Golden State Pickle Works. There are also a bunch of hidden birds painted in odd spots around the bar as a kind of “visual scavenger hunt,” owner Jennifer Seidman, who also owns Berkeley’s Acme Bar & Company, tells the East Bay Times. Little Bird is now open daily from 4 pm to 2 am, and there’s a free pickle bar at happy hour (4 to 6 pm).

And Berkeleyside has a quick followup about Daytrip, which is closing December 15 for a quick pivot into an unnamed new quick-service restaurant. Co-owner Stella Dennig tells the publication that she and husband/chef Finn Stern want to still keep it as “a space that’s really vibey, really fun to be in that people are excited to go to with groups, with friends, family or on a date night,” with a counter-service model that is “kind of elevated.” You can expect to still see some of Daytrip’s fermented foods, she says, and a menu focused on “crave-able flavor maximalism that you feel the urge to order every day.”

We haven’t had a regular restaurant review for a few weeks from the Chronicle’s MacKenzie Chung Fegan, but she did pen a column this week following up on her piece last week about the prevalence of tasting menus around SF. She discusses the psychology of tasting menus, and how they allow a restaurant to obfuscate a bit about how much they need to charge for certain dishes to make a profit — something that Chef Brandon Jew of Mister Jiu’s said was a particular problem for a restaurant like his in Chinatown, where diners balked at the beef chow fun being priced at $32 on the former a la carte menu.

Photo via La Calenda/Instagram

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