Finally, a S.F. restaurant for soup sycophants like me
These memories trickled back recently when I visited Rusty Ladle, a tranquil soup counter in San Francisco's Outer Sunset, mere minutes away from Ocean Beach. These soups are a remedy for the neighborhood's sharp wind chill and a soothing balm for hard times.
As food prices spike and the possibility of a recession looms, affordable dining options like Rusty Ladle are more vital than ever. You leave the restaurant with a happy belly for under 15 bucks.
Housed in a narrow 700-square-foot building, the counter-service restaurant offers four options (cup for $7.50, bowl for $10.50). Two are standbys, tomato soup and clam chowder, and the rest change weekly. You might find Mexican meatball stew, miso vegetable soup or gumbo.
Of the classic offerings, I liked the chowder best. With plenty of Bodega Bay clams and a side of bacon bits, it was surprisingly thick for a gluten-free stew; chef-owner John Lindsey thickens it with potato starch — a trick he borrowed from celebrity chef Jacques Pépin.
I was into the subtle tang and sweetness of the tomato soup, especially with a drizzle of basil cream. (If you skip it, however, it's vegan.) The tomato soup is strongest, however, as a dip for the obscenely cheesy Schmelty ($9), a grilled cheese sandwich with a shiny, crisp skirt. What makes it shine is schiacciata bread, made by next door neighbor Andytown Coffee Roasters. A specialty of Tuscany, it has a focaccia-like fluffiness and ciabatta-like texture. The soup nicely offset the sandwich's salty richness and made me feel like a kid again.
I'm not the only one. Rusty is a big hit with kids, which surprised Lindsey. 'There's a lot of soup sycophants… (but) I forgot how much kids love soup.' It's an easy way for parents to get their children to eat vegetables without forcing the issue.
Lindsey opened Rusty late last year. In the '90s, Lindsey worked at Zuni Café, Hayes Street Grill and the café at the now-closed San Francisco Art Institute. He stopped cooking after a back injury and took up graphic design before opening an art studio and gallery next to the building where Rusty currently resides. He saw the space transform from a bodega to a deli to a brewery, which closed in 2022. When the building was available, Lindsey seized the opportunity and returned to the kitchen.
His penchant for art lives on at the restaurant. The bar is effectively an art installation. Beneath glass are rows of thousands of pennies, each of which Lindsey and his daughter cleaned, patinaed and glued to the counter. It's a memorable piece of decor that works to add age to the 6-month-old restaurant.
I got the sense that many of Rusty's patrons are regulars — Lindsey confirmed that a third of his clientele are repeat customers. The bar is stocked with dozens of ways to customize your bowl including oyster crackers, seasonings and about a dozen different bottled hot sauces — I loved the vinegary burn of the Binko's Fresno pepper flavor. The restaurant has a way of making you feel like you share history with it, even with only one visit. Perhaps that's owed to the universal nature of soup. Lindsey likes to joke that he sells water.
So I asked him: Why soup? 'Everybody loves soup,' he said. But his age also had something to do with it. 'I'm 59 years old, I don't want to make composed things.' He finds making soup to be a meditative art, one that can't be rushed.
The humble counter nudged me back into the warm embrace of soup, my old friend.
Rusty Ladle. Noon-8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. 3645 Lawton St., San Francisco. rustyladle.com or 415-205-0860
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Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
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Separated by a border for decades, parents and children are reunited at last
José Antonio Rodríguez held a bouquet of flowers in his trembling hands. It had been nearly a quarter of a century since he had left his family behind in Mexico to seek work in California. In all those years, he hadn't seen his parents once. They kept in touch as best they could, but letters took months to cross the border, and his father never was one for phone calls. Visits were impossible: José was undocumented, and his parents lacked visas to come to the U.S. Now, after years of separation, they were about to be reunited. And José's stomach was in knots. He had been a young man of 20 when he left home, skinny and full of ambition. Now he was 44, thicker around the middle, his hair thinning at the temples. Would his parents recognize him? Would he recognize them? What would they think of his life? José had spent weeks preparing for this moment, cleaning his trailer in the Inland Empire from top to bottom and clearing the weeds from his yard. He bought new pillows to set on his bed, which he would give to his parents, taking the couch. Finally, the moment was almost here. Officials in Mexico's Zacatecas state had helped his mother and father apply for documents that allow Mexican citizens to enter the U.S. for temporary visits as part of a novel program that brings elderly parents of undocumented workers to the United States. Many others had their visa applications rejected, but theirs were approved. They had packed their suitcases to the brim with local sweets and traveled 24 hours by bus along with four other parents of U.S. immigrants. Any minute now, they would be pulling up at the East Los Angeles event hall where José waited along with other immigrants who hadn't seen their families in decades. José, who wore a gray polo shirt and new jeans, thought about all the time that had passed. The lonely nights during Christmas season, when he longed for the taste of his mother's cooking. 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José gathered his mother in an embrace. He handed her the flowers. And then he gripped his father tightly. This is a miracle, his father whispered. He'd asked the Virgin for this. His father, whose heart condition persists, was fatigued from the long journey. They all took seats. His father put his head down on the table and sobbed. José stared at the ground, sniffling, pulling up his shirt to wipe away tears. A mariachi singer performed a few songs, too loudly. Plates of food appeared. José and his parents picked at it, mostly in silence. At the next table, José Manuel Arellano Cardona, 70, addressed his middle-aged son as muchachito — little boy. In the coming days, José and his parents would relax into one another's company, go shopping, attend church. Most evenings, they would stay up past midnight talking. Eventually, the parents would head back to Zacatecas because of the limit on their visas. But for now, they were together, and eager to see José's home. 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Buzz Feed
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20 Kitchen Products For Bad Cooks
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An Instant Pot, your holy grail if you can't keep up with recipes that require more than one pan *and* the oven — something will definitely end up burning. Your dinner possibilities are endless with the seven preset functions! You can make warm chicken soup, try out your grandma's beef stew, or if those are too hard, chicken and rice have never been simpler. A pair of salad cutting scissors if you aren't trusted with a knife in the kitchen but still want to help out. Just toss all your ingredients into a bowl and cut away (there's no way you can mess it up). A pair of herb scissors so even if your final dish isn't the most appealing, you can quickly cut up a little green onion razzle dazzle right on top. These scissors have five sharp blades to give you finely chopped herbs in seconds — say goodbye to struggling with the old cutting board and knife. A vampire garlic crusher if you love garlic but haven't quite figured out how to properly chop it without just smearing it all over your cutting board. His pointy little fangs turn a messy job into a quick and easy one. Just twist for garlic heaven without having smelly garlic hands for days. A corn stripper that lets you forget the terrifying strategy of standing a slippery ear of corn upright and attacking it with your questionable knife skills — it ends in disaster every time. This gets every last kernel without the mess of corn juice or the waste of leaving half the cob behind. The stainless steel blade just glides through, so you can have a fresh bowl of Mexican street corn in no time for your next BBQ! A trio pack of Dan-O's seasoning because salt and pepper alone is not enough!! You can choose from original, spicy, or chipotle, all made with low sodium, so there is no such thing as overseasoning. 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Indianapolis Star
2 days ago
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INdulge: It's corn time. This summery Mexican dish was the best thing I ate this week
I spent a chunk of the past week in a hospital, which, for the sake of not violating HIPAA, we'll pretend was due to a tragic State Fair funnel cake overdose (everyone's fine and no cake was involved). One consequence is that I spent far less time than expected at the Fair, where I had planned to consume a great deal of corn, both in cob and dog form. Fortunately, I did have time for: This time of year I think of the fairgrounds as the corn epicenter of the universe; however that designation might be equally appropriate for Tlaolli, the Near Eastside Mexican restaurant whose name literally means 'corn' in the Aztec Nahuatl language. There I enjoyed a cup of Tlaolli's street corn calabacita ($8), an especially summery take on Mexican esquites. More: Indiana State Fair announces 2025 Taste of the Fair winners Esquites — not to be confused with its cousin on the cob, elote —features cooked corn kernels tossed with a variety of ingredients, in Tloalli's case Cotija cheese, poblano pepper-infused mayonnaise and the popular chili-lime seasoning Tajín. At Tloalli the dish also receives an unconventional scattering of roasted calabacita, a small Mexican varietal of zucchini. As is the case with nearly every dish at Tlaolli, you can order your street corn vegan, with dairy-less mayo and nutritional yeast instead of Cotija. Even with its nontraditional departures, Tlaolli's esquites hits all the crucial notes. The corn is bright and fresh, the semi-melted mayo is tangy but not gratuitously creamy, the Cotija brings a little funk and Tajín remains the one seasoning that might genuinely improve everything it touches. Meanwhile, the roasted bits of zucchini add a subtle earthy flavor without the somewhat slimy texture that can undermine squash. Still, where summer produce is concerned in this dish, the corn is the star. Corn is, obviously, a pretty big deal around here. It's the Hoosier State's second-biggest cash crop behind soybeans, and Indiana regularly ranks among the nation's top five corn producers. At my alma mater Indiana University's home basketball games against Iowa or Nebraska, you can rely on a sizable contingent of students in the stands hoisting signs that read 'our corn is better than yours.' Previously in INdulge: Chinese dish with surprising Hoosier ties is best thing I ate in Indy this week I suppose Indiana has no excuse not to make good corn considering its earliest settlers practically obliterated the state so they could grow the stuff. In his 2003 book 'Corn Country: Celebrating Indiana's Favorite Crop,' author Sam Stall writes that travelers passing through Indiana occasionally remarked on the smell of smoke in the air due to settlers burning vast swaths of forest to make room for cornfields. Those early Hoosiers desperately needed a resilient, calorie-dense foodstuff to sustain both themselves and their livestock year-round. Fortunately for them, the state's original inhabitants had been growing it for thousands of years. Most scholarly research suggests corn was first domesticated nearly 10,000 years ago in southern Mexico's Atoyac River basin by Aztecs who began planting the seeds of a wild grain called teosinte. Teosinte migrated throughout the Americas with multiple tribes who selectively bred the plant to yield a higher nutritional value and, if you'll allow me to venture a guess, so it wouldn't taste like dirt. At some point that proto-corn became known among Native Mesoamericans as tlaolli, which some Aztecs used in the early versions of now-ubiquitous Mexican foods like tamales and tortillas. Millennia later, sweet corn likely originated as a spontaneous mutation in dent corn — the kind you typically see growing en masse alongside the highway — that inhibited the corn's sugars from turning to starch. The first recorded sweet corn harvest was in 1779 by the Iroquois tribe in New York, a bounty that was promptly pillaged by colonial soldiers and replanted on the same land from which the natives were forcibly removed. The history of corn is laden with similar examples of Europeans exploiting the same indigenous peoples who taught them how to survive by growing corn in the first place. The current result of that exploitation is, in a cruel twist of irony, a delicious bit of seasonal produce. Regardless of how much you choose to confront corn's uncomfortable history, you can find excellent preparations of its kernels at Tlaollli, whose street corn calabacita combines a Mexican culinary staple with Indiana's cherished crop to yield a refreshing, concentrated dose of summer. And, as I can attest, it is way better than hospital food. What: Street corn calabacita, $8 for 8 ounces Where: Tlaolli, 2830 E. Washington St., (317) 410-9507, In case that's not your thing: Tamales are the name of the game at Tlaolli, but you'll also find tacos and a handful of other Mexican staples reimagined to suit Hoosier preferences. Owner Carlos Hutchinson last year told IndyStar that while his food isn't quite like what you would find in his home state of Monterrey, Mexico, 'that doesn't mean that it's not Mexican.' Nearly every dish at Tlaolli has a vegan version, from jackfruit and mushroom 'birria' tacos to the NoNoNo tamales filled with soy chorizo, roasted poblanos, potatoes and black beans.
