You’re eyeballing Good Taste, a tipsheet for eating well and supporting upstanding people in the Bay Area food world. This week, some recommendations for those who are in the gifting spirit right now.
BAY AREA COOKBOOKS
A cookbook with Bay Area ties may be a thoughtful gift for a home cook/aspiring chef in your life. If you want to focus on titles that came out in 2023, there are some solid choices from this region, including Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California by Sylvan Mishima Brackett from the San Francisco restaurant of the same name; Budmo! Recipes from a Ukrainian Kitchen by SF chef and culinary instructor Anna Voloshyna; High Times: Let’s Get Baked!, co-authored by Bay Area cannabis consultant and pop-up queen Haejin Chun of Big Bad Wolf and The Herb Somm, Jamie Evans; Snoop Dogg Presents Goon with the Spoon by the Bay Area rap ambassador, E-40; and Simply West African: Easy, Joyful Recipes for Every Kitchen by Pierre Thiam, a Senegalese celebrity chef who now lives in the Bay Area.
You could also let the gift recipient pick out their own cookbooks with a gift card to Omnivore Books on Food, where they can pre-order 2024 releases such as Vegan Mob: Vegan BBQ and Soul Food by local Vegan Mob restaurateur and rapper Toriano Gordon; and Koreaworld: A Cookbook by chef Deuki Hong of The Sunday Family Hospitality Group, which has restaurants in SF and Oakland.
GROCERY GIFT CARDS
A gift card to pick out groceries is always a welcomed and thoughtful present. The worker-owned Rainbow Grocery offers physical gift cards in denominations between $20-1000 that can be purchased online or inside the San Francisco store. Similarly, you can buy physical Berkeley Bowl Marketplace gift cards in $25, $50, and $100 increments online or in-store.
TABLEHOPPER GIFT BOX
Marcia Gagliardi from the veteran Bay Area newsletter Tablehopper continues her annual gift box tradition with a collection of 12 local products called Tablehopper’s Taste of San Francisco Holiday Gift Box, “the majority of them from people of color, queer, and women makers, as well as small businesses that have been hustling extra-hard to stay afloat,” she writes. This year’s edition includes holiday truffles from Kokak Chocolates in the Castro, spicy Thai cilantro sauce from the La Cocina-incubated business Kitiya, and granola from b. patisserie, to name a few.
In the past, Gagliardi and friends have knocked on doors personally to deliver these items. This year, she’s partnered with FEED to greatly expand the delivery area; the app will deliver the gift box throughout California and the West Coast, and even into cities such as Phoenix, Denver, and Salt Lake City. The purchase includes a donation to the SF-Marin Food Bank, and is available for the month of December.
Gagliardi always puts a lot of heart into assembling these gift boxes, which are smart to buy and split the contents into several presents. No one will blame you for maybe keeping a treat for yourself in the process. (This year, I’m definitely yoinking the furikake Chex Mix from The Sunday Bakeshop.)
FANCY FOOD SUBSCRIPTIONS
For the gift that keeps on giving, Dario Barbone wonderfully nerdy Italian deli Alimentari Aurora in SF’s Potrero Hill offers three monthly subscription boxes: Aurora Fish Tin XOXO, Aurora Cheese XOXO, and Aurora Choco XOXO. Subscriptions can be sent to your recipient (or picked up by them) monthly until you cancel or for three or six month stretches.
COOKING CLASSES
Napa’s CIA at Copia is hosting holiday cooking classes as well as a year-round schedule of boot camps and other hands-on cooking classes. In San Francisco, Aedan’s Fermented Foods offers miso and koji making courses, while Bernal Cutlery will teach you how to make natto, sharpen your knife skills, sharpen your knife, or chicken butchery. Another idea is to let your intended pick out their own culinary or knife skills classes with a gift card from 18 Reasons, sold in increments of $36, $95, $165, and $175.
Tamara is the publisher of California Eating, which will offer several small-batch zines and guides in 2024.
