Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

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.