Umami Mart

Gochi opened quietly in 2005, in a little non-descript strip mall on the back roads of Cupertino. It was actually a bit traumatizing for me — they bought out a nasty dive bar called the Peacock Lounge where my friends and I used to go when visiting our hometown for the holidays. The “Cock”, as […]

The Forest Feast heads to the city for an evening! San Francisco is just 45 minutes from our little cabin in the woods. Last weekend my husband and I attended a benefit for the San Francisco chapter of Meals on Wheels which was a delicious showcase of the Bay Area’s best chefs. The mission of Meals on Wheels […]

Here is Part Deux in our Tokyo-SF Bartender Salon Series. Meet Monsieur Tomokazu Kai, bartender at Heuga Bar in Gifu, Japan. Mr. Kai won the 2011 Suntory Cocktail Award, and his prize was a trip to SF and NYC. Gifu is a way’s away from Tokyo, a city just north of Nagoya, but clearly it is […]

The Umamimart Shop has been invited to be a part of Magasin Général, where Bay Area independent designers, hand-crafters, shop-keepers, jewelers, and artisans will come together for a two-day shopping event popping up at Fort Mason in San Francisco. It was so kind of Anaise (shop-keeper) and Lotfi (textile designer) to invite us to join […]

It’s been a while since Umamimart has put on a big event. Honestly, our Gift of Food benefit last April for Japan set the bar so high that I haven’t had the chutzpah to do anything since. So Umamimart took a long hiatus from events. Too long. But that all changed a week ago, when […]

Exactly one week ago on March 26, about 150 people descended onto the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin (just north of SF) for an OPENharvest food and art collective event. The Headlands hosted OPENharvest in a former gymnasium nestled within two hills. The space was filled with stories, artifacts and projections collected during […]

I should confess that I have never really been a fan of tsukemen (ramen with dipping sauce). Shouldn’t ramen be in a piping hot broth, brimming with scallions and chashu (pork) and menma (bamboo shoots)? Tsukemen just always seemed so WRONG to me, despite the fact that I love zaru soba (cold soba with dipping […]

Remember when Yoko and I went to Japan last year with the OPEN crew? God, it seems like forever ago. We had so many rad, eye-opening opportunities, like rice harvesting in Niigata, visiting farms in Nagano and organizing a line of pop-ups on a busy street in Shibuya. Wow! Yoko and I will be reuniting […]

On Sunday 3/11, the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Northern Japan, Yoko and I helped organize a cross-cultural exchange between bartenders from Japan and San Francisco. Held at Prizefighter Bar in Emeryville, it was an intimate gathering of old friends, and new. Tomokazu Kai (Heuga Bar) and Masako Ikegami (Bar Shake) had won […]

I woke up to an email this morning with the subject line: “You’re so ahead of your time!” Bryan’s good friend Rob was informing me that March is National Noodle Month, and forwarded me this article about the celebrations in LA. So what the hell, let’s extend noodle month through March! April! FOREVER! Today, I […]