Markets are moving past 'peak fear in tariffs': CIO
Sean Taylor, CIO of Matthews Asia, discusses the market reaction to the U.S.-China trade deal, saying tariffs are priced in in the short term. He also weighs in on the recent rally in the Korean and Hong Kong markets.
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San Francisco Chronicle
11 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
A seldom-seen Korean wine stars at a new S.F. bar
Funky, milky and ancient, an often overlooked Korean rice wine is getting the spotlight at a new San Francisco bar. Jilli opens Saturday, June 14 in the Mission District, at 1503 15th St., with a special focus on makgeolli: a traditional style of rice wine which fell out of favor but has gained a recent surge of popularity in South Korea. Branding itself as a sool jib — Korean for drinking house — Jilli, which already has a location in Los Angeles, will focus on craft makgeolli pours and cocktails with Korean bar food. 'It's a little grainy and thick. You can think of it as (unfiltered) sake or a bit like yogurt and sometimes it has bubbles,' Jilli owner Dong Hyuk Lee said of makgeolli. He likens its appeal to that of natural wines, kombucha or sour beers. Soju, a distillate made from grains, has been hot for some time on both sides of the Pacific. It's made its way into trendy Bay Area bars and low-alcohol cocktail lists. Korean pop idols regularly grace soju labels and even launch their own brands. When Lee opened his first Los Angeles restaurant in 2020, Korean fusion spot Hanchic, diners wanted more traditional dishes with soju or Korean beers to drink. Makgeolli, meanwhile, was long considered an unhip drink for farmers and grandpas, Lee explained. But a boom happening in recent years has created a moment for this rice wine, with a new generation of brewers in South Korea innovating with new variables, such as changing temperatures or filtering methods, and adding ingredients like botanicals and fruit to the drink. The fervor eventually reached the U.S., with Korean-American craft makgeolli brewers launching on both coasts. Seeing the growing profile of makgeolli among younger brewers and young crowds in South Korea, Lee opened the first Jilli in Los Angeles at the start of 2024. The low-lit den dedicated to makgeolli was well received, with groups huddling over tables crowded with glasses and Korean bar bites. 'The vibe is more like a hip bar than a Korean restaurant,' Lee said. Capacity in San Francisco is for 25 seated diners indoors, plus another 25 in a patio space. Jilli's bottle list will include selections from leading U.S. craft makgeolli brewers like Brooklyn's Hana Makgeolli and Southern California producers like Sang Makgeolli and Nomi Doga. Pours will be available as well as cocktails that incorporate ingredients like blended strawberries and roasted chestnuts. Lee developed dishes to pair with the rice wines based on his mother's home cooking, with some modern interventions. He said the San Francisco menu will be close to the Los Angeles location, where diners bite into shrimp toast with chile vinaigrette and tteokbokki, chewy rice cakes, that swim in an uni butter sauce with smoked trout roe. A rigatoni in a kimchi vodka sauce, a fan favorite, will also be available at the incoming bar. Expect to see Korean-style fried chicken as well. As the bar approached its opening, Lee used the kitchen as a base for a popup of Chimmelier, his Los Angeles chicken restaurant. The positive response convinced him to make it a permanent fixture during lunch hours. Lee's company, In Hospitality, launched the first fixed Chimmelier location in Berkeley, quickly followed by another in Oakland's Temescal neighborhood. Lee thinks San Francisco will embrace the focus on makgeolli, and hopes the rice wine style continues to grow in popularity. 'It's become very different compared to old times,' Lee said. Jilli. Opening Saturday, June 14. 1503 15th St. San Francisco. Tuesday-Saturday 5-10 p.m.
Eater
13 hours ago
- Eater
Austin's Food Truck Scene Is Getting Hotter
Austin's intrepid food trucks punch far above their weight class, and they've long found a receptive audience in the city's uniquely offbeat food landscape. Since food trucks took off in popularity in the city in the mid-2000s, and even decades before the 'chaos cooking' trend became part of the cultural lexicon, the most successful mobile restaurants in Austin offered new, often funky, takes on diasporic cuisines. Think: Asian Southern fusion at the Peached Tortilla, Korean fusion truck-turned-chain Chi'Lantro, and of course, Torchy's Tacos. Today, Austin's most popular food trucks continue to sling tantalizing twists on cuisines and dishes that keep Austinites coming back again and again to line up in 100-degree weather. This should come as no surprise in a state that essentially invented the food truck with the chuck wagon, horse-drawn carriages from the late 1800s that fed Texan cowboys salted meat, baked beans, and biscuits as they worked. Austin's food truck scene, which entered its modern form in the 1990s, isn't quite as large as in some other cities — even after the number of food trucks surged from 648 in 2006 to more than 1,500 in 2024, that still pales in comparison to, say, Los Angeles, which is home to over 4,000). Nonetheless, Austin's inventive, nonconformist food trucks have firmly cemented themselves in the city's culture. Today, many stand alongside many of the city's best brick-and-mortar restaurants. (Michelin seems to think so, too.) Even with all that success, the food truck scene is only heating up and continuing to evolve, pushing further beyond straightforward tacos and barbecue. For some food truck owners, many of whom are immigrants or transplants, trucks have been a successful way to introduce takes on their respective cuisines to the Capitol City, often without the higher labor costs and razor-thin profit margins that come with opening a standalone restaurant. The result: Diverse menus, bold experiments, and profoundly personal food stories told in food trucks across Austin. KG BBQ pitmaster Kareem El-Ghayesh, a native of Cairo, Egypt, first came to Austin in 2012 and fell in love with the flavors and techniques of Texan barbecue. When he returned to Egypt, El-Ghayesh tried his hand at replicating what he ate in Texas, even though it was difficult — if not impossible — to source the cuts of meat, wood, and smokers. El-Ghayesh became so entranced that he left his career in finance to move to Austin in 2016, where he enrolled in Austin Community College's culinary school. There, he worked under the tutelage of several different chefs and pitmasters of local barbecue joints, including Miguel and Modesty Vidal of the now-closed Valentina's, which initially opened as a food truck. In 2017, he used his experience to host a series of pop-ups serving classic takes on Central Texas barbecue. Finally, in 2022, he launched KG BBQ as a full-fledged food truck in East Austin — a decision he says was a logistical nightmare, but a much more manageable financial risk than a brick-and-mortar. 'A food truck is a lot cheaper, a lot more profitable, and more approachable. I've had a lot of experience working in barbecue food trucks, so it just made sense,' El-Ghayesh says. Though his pop-ups focused on traditional barbecue, El-Ghayesh says he quickly realized he wanted to infuse it with Egyptian flavors, inspired partly by Valentina's approach to incorporating Tex-Mex ingredients and dishes into its barbecue. Today, KG BBQ serves a variety of Egyptian-Texan barbecue dishes, including its diner-favorite pork ribs that are first dry-rubbed with Egyptian spices and later slathered with pomegranate barbecue sauce. Egyptian flavors show up in the sides, too, like El-Ghayesh's pink buttermilk potato salad, which uses roasted beet puree, and KG's Mediterranean rice, which is spiced with turmeric, bay leaf, and cinnamon. El-Ghayesh's fusion-forward approach has earned him a devoted following and awards, including Eater's Best New Food Truck Award in 2023 and a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2024. 'No one really anticipated that, including myself,' El-Ghayesh says of the truck's success, but he attributes it to KG's novel combinations of Egyptian cuisine and barbecue — an entirely new flavor for Austin. 'How well the flavors go together, and also how much effort and love went into this, I think those are the two main ingredients to my success.' While trucks like KG BBQ captivate diners with Texas-born fusions that pay homage to the chefs' culture, others earn loyalty by preserving food traditions. Run by the Bigi family, Italian natives who split their time between Austin and their home city of Mantua, in the Lombardy region of Northern Italy, Artipasta serves the types of exact, traditional Italian dishes that you don't often see coming out of a truck. The operation, parked at South Austin's Thicket Food Park, eschews Alfredo or meatballs for specialties like bechamel-laden lasagna, spaghetti with clams, and gnocchi with tomato sauce. Ugo Bigi, the family patriarch, originally got his start in the automotive industry. However, he tapped into his passion for cooking after his honeymoon in the U.S. revealed what he saw as a dearth of traditional Italian restaurants. Years later, the family decided to fill that gap. 'What we wanted to bring here was traditional, typical Italian food from our area … and to make those flavors as best we could and make people from here in Austin taste it,' says Matteo Bigi, Ugo's son. 'The dream is to eventually spread out this type of cuisine to more people.' Chef Marlon Rison, co-owner of Community Vegan, was living in Dallas when he decided to open his vegan comfort food truck, but the city's 'meat and potato' food culture didn't feel like a great fit. Austin's, however, where his partner was living at the time, did. 'I knew if we had food that tasted good, [Austinites] would show up, regardless if it was vegan or not, and that's exactly what happened for us,' he says. Locals quickly fell in love with Rison's heavy use of cauliflower, mushrooms, and onions to mimic the umami, savory taste of meat, and his takes on comfort food that yield fried oyster mushroom lemon pepper 'wings,' beer-battered cauliflower 'chicken' sandwiches, and macaroni and 'cheese.' Rison doesn't have a formal culinary education — he learned how to cook as a child from hanging out in the kitchen with his mother. After transitioning to a vegan lifestyle as an adult, he gained a following online by posting photos of his home-cooked meals on Instagram, incorporating the teachings of his mother and celebrity vegan chefs Babette Davis and Chad and Derek Sarno. 'All the concepts that my mom taught me are exactly what I'm incorporating into the kitchen,' Rison says. 'For instance, I cook my fried oyster mushrooms exactly the way my mom fried chicken growing up. The way we do mac and cheese is exactly the way [my partner] Erica's mother and grandmother did mac and cheese. It just all happens to be plant-based.' While Austin's vibrant food truck culture makes it ideal for newer business owners to open up shop here, Texas's often unpredictable weather — from severe snowstorms to crushing heat waves — proves to be a significant, even dangerous, obstacle. Food truck teams and solo operators work in what are essentially lightly upgraded metal boxes with fryers and stoves running full blast: Temperatures inside a food truck can reach 10 to 20 degrees hotter than outside and, during triple-digit days, many trucks lose business or even shut down, according to Community Impact. 'No matter how hard the AC fans or everything's blowing, it's pretty intense conditions,' says Rison, who works out of a vintage 1973 Winnebago Chieftain. 'It's not as comfortable as it could be in a brick-and-mortar.' David Florez, owner of Ceviche7, a pint-sized Peruvian food truck just north of the University of Texas campus, says the climate is especially difficult when trying to prepare dishes — like the cevicheria's popular, lip-puckering ceviche de pescado — that require fresh, raw ingredients. Florez won't remove his fish from the freezer until a customer has ordered, which means preparation takes longer. 'In a regular kitchen, you've got a walk-in storage that you can do preparation … and that is very comfortable,' Florez says. 'But right here, I've got demand like a very, very busy restaurant, but I don't have [that accessibility or space].' Those conditions have pushed some food truck owners toward the dream of opening a permanent restaurant. After three years as a mobile business, Artipasta opened its first standalone restaurant in 2022. Rison is saying goodbye to his truck entirely. This summer, he'll replace Community Vegan with three new businesses: a brick-and-mortar version of Community Vegan; Rison and Lott's, a 100 percent vegan smokehouse upstairs; and a lemonade stand in the same property's old smokehouse. Though rewarding, the transition from truck to a standalone restaurant hasn't been easy, Rison says. Expenses have been twice as high as he expected, and the building he's operating out of needed a lot of work — he's had to redo the floors, walls, seating, air conditioning, and even the parking lot. But others are sticking with their trucks for now. El-Ghayesh plans to expand to a second truck in Houston, then, ideally, to a permanent barbecue smokehouse by 2027. 'I've had many, many moments that I remember working 12-hour shifts and going back home after midnight, going to shower and putting my head on the pillow and just thinking, 'What the hell did I do to myself?'' El-Ghayesh says, but adds that he has few regrets. 'I'm so glad I kept pushing through those darker times when I really had nothing else other than the belief in myself. There's going to be a payoff later.' See More: Austin Food Trucks Dining Out in Austin
14 hours ago
AI chatbots need more books to learn from. These libraries are opening their stacks
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artists and others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes "all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated $50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'" Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language," said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.'
