Good Taste offers a menu for eating well in the Bay Area. This week, we celebrate the art of saving on surprises.
I’ve loved mystery bags ever since I bought those pink, sticker-and-trinket-filled ones from Sanrio as a kid, so I was excited to see that Dario Barbone sells blind bags with fish tins, a food category he is known for at his Studio Aurora (302 Valencia), a cafe that shares space with Internet radio station Fault Radio.
“I grew up with these surprise Sunday bags,” Barbone, who’s originally from Italy, wrote for the label that goes on the bags. “I wanted to bring you the same excitement and curious approach to eating.”
He also brings a decent discount with this kind of offering; $35 for a standard and $55 for deluxe. I recently purchased a standard bag, which came with two different kinds of Italian anchovies and a big portion of Portuguese horse mackerel. Barbone does indicate if a particular bag has shellfish, in case that influences the decision.
One discount food app that works well throughout the Bay Area is Flashfood, “the app for grocery’s best kept deals.” You’re likely to be buying items that are discounted because they’re marked best by that day or soon after. A recent look around found deals on meat, produce, and other staples at Lucky, Dash Mart, and Green Left Market stores throughout the region. Some are SNAP and EBT eligible as well.
The popular international app Too Good to Go was created to curb food waste at restaurants by facilitating the sale of mystery bags of foods at a large discount of their individual values. In San Francisco, I often see options like produce bags, bread, pizza, donuts, dumplings, burritos, hummus, coffee, and tea. Orders are prepaid through the app and must be picked up during a specified time window, which vary from morning, afternoon, and nighttime. Incidentally, there’s a Too Good to Go Subreddit for the world that can be enjoyable to scroll through, if only to see how different merchants respond to the app and to get the joy from cheering along with people who luck into particularly amazing deals.
Tamara publishes the California Eating website, newsletter, and zine, and has just launched the Food Book Club.
