Optimism boost: Tom Kelley visited Yahoo! on Monday and I’m still stoked!

If you’ve never heard of IDEO, you’re about to. IDEO is a company which makes other companies perform better. They analyze and restructure strategies and product designs for big name johns like Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, Apple to design more effective products and/or concepts. For example, their fat squishy toothbrush handle for [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . La Victoria Taqueria

Thank God this place has their infamous orange sauce because their burritos taste like garbage. And I don’t mean a euphemism for bad food, I actually mean garbage like someone dumpster-dove for the tomatoes and lettuce and left ‘em in mayonnaise out in the sun (I saw that taqueria caveat piece on the news; [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . Yuki Sushi

It may seem a bit misleading when you see the queue outside and the crowded dining area inside, but Yuki Sushi is not good eats. Their tempura batter is too thick, noodles starchy and limp, sushi rice too vinegary, rolled tamago way too sweet, nori stale, maguro stringy, tako a bit sour, overall tough [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . Yakko

Yakko joins Masa’s and Sushitomi for noteworthy Mountain View sushi. That already might sound a little odd, “Mountain View sushi”, but I’ve found much more authentic sushi down here in the Peninsula than in the City. Out of the three restaurants I mentioned, Yakko is the most romantic.. and if you’ve been there, [...]

Happy 6th of July!

Happy belated Independence Day! How’d you spend it? If you were competitive chowhound Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi, you spent it suffering through a Nathan’s hot dog gorge fest with a recent wisdom tooth extraction and a paralyzing jaw injury. Kobayashi also spent the last few moments of the neck-and-neck race violently vomiting into [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . Sushitomi

Sushi, sushi, sushi. Sometimes I think my life revolves around the stuff. I was often told to check out Mountain View’s Sushitomi, mostly by white people, so I was skeptical. Call me a food racist, but I find it a smart practice to scout out restaurants approved by those that would call it [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . Hanamaru

So where have we been eating sushi if it ain’t at Masa’s? We’ve been hanging at Hanamaru (which I tricked myself into believing was a short distance from Yahoo!), with the cramped floor tables and uncomfortable chairs (and no booths) and everything’s sort of dark and blah, but wait.. go up to the counter and [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . Masa’s Sushi

If you’re going to put your name on something, especially an eatery, you’d better make damn sure it’s good. Masastugi Uehara proudly parks not only his name on Masa’s Sushi in Mountain View but his smiling face on his website. Masa is not a behind-the-scenes kind of entrepreneur. He’s always behind the [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . Real Ice Cream aka: Olety’s Chaat Corner

Do you remember the free webhost Angelfire? I guess I started internet browsing around the death of Angelfire so I remember designing a webpage for a CS class and going nuts with colorful repeated backgrounds (were those orange serrated semicircles supposed to be fans or carrots?), animated .gifs, 42pt banner marquees, and framesets (thanks [...]

MOVIE REVIEW . We Are the Strange

This review is so long overdue that a serendipitous run-in with the writer/director prompted a strict reminder. M Dot Strange (aka: Michael Belmont) is so completely casual and San Jose-centric that he frequents a local boba tea place, even today as he types out an article for Wired Magazine (August issue — be [...]

D’oh! Missed Hostel 2, but free screenings of Go-Bots and Starblazers!

So we had planned on attending the Hostel 2 advanced screening in the city, with Eli Roth in attendance, but as luck would have it I had my dates mixed up. In fact, the screening actually started about an hour ago. Oh well.  We’ll try to get a review up sometime around it’s release in a week or so.
Some other cool items though. If you haven’t already checked out SFIndie’s Another Hole in the Head lineup, you really should. The festival starts Friday, and there are a lot of great films playing this year. Check out the schedule here, as well as our reviews of Murder Party, [...]

MOVIE REVIEW [SCREENER] . The Man from Earth

If a friend you’ve known for 10 years suddenly made plans to leave town without saying goodbye, wouldn’t you be a little alarmed? If he was leaving a new promotion, a budding relationship, a slew of colleagues and comrades, wouldn’t you be a teensy bit suspicious? What if he told you he was [...]

Murder Party movie review he-said-she-said screener!

Murder Party
SHE SAID:
Somewhere there is a man who looks like Chris Elliot, but you will actually care if he dies. Chris Sharp plays Christopher S. Hawley, a totally blah, totally random alprazolam-popping traffic cop whose sorry socialization solely involves interactions with his cat. One Halloween, when the battle for the armchair is again lost to [...]

Another Hole in the Head Festival Lineup ‘07

The Festival Lineup for SF Indie’s annual Horror Fest, Another Hole in the Head, has been published. This year the festival will run from June 1st through the 14th, and will feature the following films:
FEATURES

Aachi & Ssipak http://youtube.com/watch?v=w14kQlT8hjg
Automaton Transfusion http://youtube.com/watch?v=sk6N69lXWBs
Blood Car http://youtube.com/watch?v=YiQTOL6XTkE
Driller http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZgJInsBdGeQ
El Muerto http://youtube.com/watch?v=mkCz3mLGdIg
The Forbidden Zone http://youtube.com/watch?v=GY1XmUKPjFc
Hazard http://youtube.com/watch?v=x0-zMw2OojI
ID  http://youtube.com/watch?v=XVLED-nWYrA
Last House In The Woods http://youtube.com/watch?v=4y21FZ-xo5c
Living [...]

MUNCHIES [CA] . Dot’s Café at Yahoo!

Okay, so we don’t have free gourmet roasted quail like Google does, but we do have a cute little cafeteria with lots of curves and multi-color polka dots. So there, ha! The chefs are cool and the food is okay; when I do eat in I usually opt for the Indian/Thai stuff or [...]

Beard Papa’s 1-year anniversary in SF

My goosh, has it been a year already?? My my how the time flies. A year ago the Bay Area was Beard Papa-less. Today we have three locations, two in San Francisco and one in Redwood City! And if you doubted their popularity or Bay Area-ites ability to overindulge, let me [...]

San Francisco’s Frjtz is moving.. just not very far

When Santiago Rodriguez was informed that his restaurant lease was denied renewal, he didn’t panic at all. Rodriguez, the owner of Frjtz — the cute shop o’ the best paper cone o’ Belgian Fries (not quite French Fries) and authentic (soupy, buttery, floppy) crepes of Boho trendy SF Hayes Valley — simply moved right [...]

Palo Alto’s Spago to close

Shoo shoo Spago! Wolfgang Puck just isn’t welcome in Palo Alto anymore. Ten years of the King of California cuisine was enough. June 1st is the closing date for the iconic ritzy restaurant on the fringe of downtown Paly. In a press release, senior managing partner Tom Kaplan announced that the [...]