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Nopa Fish opened last month in the Ferry Building, as first reported by The Chronicle. The fish and seafood market and restaurant is the latest venture of chef Laurence Jossel, his partner Holly Rhodes and fishmonger Joe Conte.
We’ve written numerous times about Jossel, a South African-born Jewish chef; the long-running Nopa, on Divisadero at Hayes, continues to be one of San Francisco’s most popular restaurants.
As one would expect of a Ferry Building vendor, Nopa Fish features only products caught sustainably. The restaurant is casual, meant primarily for the lunch crowd. On the menu: a fried fish and tuna melt sandwich, fish and chips and Rainbow Trout Latkes, which feature house-smoked trout, beet hummus and creme fraiche.
Carmel’s Congregation Beth Israel is holding its annual Jewish Food Festival on Sunday, July 27 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. An array of classic Ashkenazi food like whitefish salad, noodle kugel and blintzes can be preordered and picked up on Saturday, July 26. There will be plenty else to enjoy at the festival, too, like Israeli folk dancing, a mock wedding and children’s activities. It’s worth noting that at the very first Jewish Food Festival, our own Sue Fishkoff won a prize for her kugel (she wasn’t our own then, this was in 1988).
New York-based Israeli chef Einat Admony has partnered with Local Kitchens, a “multibrand restaurant,” or ghost kitchen, to offer Yalla Falafel. There are Northern California locations as far south as Los Gatos and as far north as Sacramento. Because each Local Kitchen contains five or six restaurant concepts, the menus are rather compact. In Yalla Falafel’s case, that means falafel, pita sandwiches, chicken, rice plates, hummus and sauces.
We stopped by the kitchen in Lafayette and had the hummus and falafel plate and a side of fried cauliflower with black garlic sauce. The cauliflower was excellent, with a smattering of pickled peppers on top and a drizzle of the black garlic sauce, and the side of z’hug really took it over the top. We were less impressed with the hummus and falafel; they both were a bit on the bland side, as was the baby carrot salad compared with other Israeli/Moroccan carrot salads we’ve tried. But there were other things on the cardboard “plate” that made up for it: a flavorful red cabbage salad, a handful of fresh baby arugula and pickled onions, and more z’hug. Since the z’hug was so flavorful and spicy, we put it on everything, which remedied the bland problem. The pita bread was interesting in that it was square-shaped. Appropriately fluffy, but square; we’ve never seen that before.
We reached out to Admony to ask if she is testing the concept for a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the Bay Area, and she responded, “While I currently have no plans for a Bay Area restaurant, I would never say never.”