Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

The Ford model T was available in any color, so long it’s black. Surprisingly for a land that is passionate about automobiles and requires 31 flavors of ice cream, Americans are very conservative about car colors, the most popular being white, silver and black.

My own is a dark metallic green, a color apparently favored by only 2% according to the DuPont color survey. Car makers like Audi or BMW offer a fraction of the color choices in the US that they do in Europe. I just don’t get it.

Well, for me actually.

I went to the San Francisco Apple Store on Stockton Street a month or two ago, and even in the heart of downtown San Francisco, the phones would keep switching to EDGE. This confirmed rumors that AT&T’s 3G network is abysmal.

There’s no point in paying $200 for a new phone that’s plastic instead of metal, extending my contract by another year, paying an extra $10 per month for 3G service that doesn’t work and $5 per month for SMS that are included in my current plan.

I used to carry a small moleskine notebook with me (I still use one of the larger A5 versions for taking notes at work) until I switched to 3″x5″ jotter cards, as featured in the hipster PDA. I went as far as having Crane make personalized jotter cards in a square grid pattern (Levenger’s are quite nice as well).

Interestingly, 3″x5″ index cards are actually 75mm x 125mm cards, as Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal classification and of the library card catalog system, was an advocate for the metric system.

I have just eaten what is hands-down my best meal of the year at r n m restaurant (their capitalization, not mine), on Haight & Steiner in the Duboce Park/Lower Haight district of San Francisco (not to be confused with the formerly raffish and now utterly commercialized Haight-Ashbury).

The restaurant is named after the chef-owner Justine Miner’s father, Robert Miner, a co-founder of Oracle. The food was so good I am almost ready to forgive Oracle for their sleazy extortion tactics…

I started with the Parisian style tuna tartare with waffle chips, microgreens and a quail egg, a very classic dish (and one too often botched by careless chefs), given a little pep with a slight acidity. It was followed by an absolutely outstanding pan-roasted local halibut on ricotta gnocchi with asparagus and morel mushroom ragout, meyer lemon vinaigrette and mâche. The halibut was crisp outside, flaky inside. The ragoût was simply wonderful, a deep, rich and tangy broth, also slightly acidulated, with a generous helping of precious black morels. To top it off, the dessert, a Peach and cherry crisp with home-made blueberry gelato combined two of my favorite summer fruit in an unbeatable combination.

Be advised the parking situation in that neighborhood is particularly nightmarish, even by SF standards. If I had realized they offer valet parking, I wouldn’t have had to park halt a mile away (after seeking a place in vain for nearly half an hour).

Update (2012-09-05)

Unfortunately, it closed at least a year ago.