Welcome back to Good Taste, your weekly look at the Bay Area food world. Today, I’d like to give flowers to San Francisco’s star transgender food critic.
I first started following the transgender podcaster and self-styled social media food critic Lilly Contino back in March, when I heard that she she was verbally accosted in the Union Square Cheesecake Factory by a woman who called herself a TERF, though the woman didn’t even know all of the words in the acronym (of course).
Contino, who was dining with her puppy, handled herself with the utmost grace, and she recently revealed on her Instagram account that she still hasn’t heard anything back from the Cheesecake Factory to this day.
Since then, Contino has shared videos of herself reviewing food and trying items that are new to her at various restaurants in San Francisco. It’s fun to watch her expand her mind and palate with each visit, like when she recently tried the fermented green tea salad at Burma Love or Ethiopian kitfo (raw beef) at Tadu.
Contino is also using food as a way to educate people about her transition. She recently underwent surgery to remove what she refers to as her “cake pops,” and has been using her platforms to explain how that works, and why some people decide not to do it. She’s now considering whether to change her “stick” to a “self-glazing donut,” and used an actual delicious-looking donut to demystify that procedure for her viewers.
It’s terribly unclassy of the Cheesecake Factory corporate office to not formally apologize to Contino, though the manager of the San Francisco restaurant does appear to apologize to her in the video. In fact, she should get unlimited cheesecake for life.
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