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San Francisco Chronicle​

This S.F. toast cost $13.50, and I'd buy it again

Each week, critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan shares some of her favorite recent bites, the dishes and snacks and baked goods that didn't find their way into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for her free newsletter, Bite Curious. Remember when The Discourse revolved around the price of toast at the Mill? A simpler, sepia-toned time… The current seasonal toast special costs $13.50 (more than three times the $4 that sparked outrage 12 years ago), but it's 'toast' in the same way that 'The Metamorphosis' is a book about a bug. A chonky, inch-thick slice of Josey Baker's whole grain Wonder Bread is slathered with chive cream cheese, then dolloped with a punchy, vegan pesto made with both basil and arugula. The element that takes the toast from serviceable breakfast to composed dish, however, is the crunchy, garlicky clusters of chili crisp pepitas that are sprinkled over the top. Yow. Go eat this while it's still on the menu. Scribe Winery takes its food seriously. Their chef-in-residence program reads like a who's who of bestselling cookbook authors and James Beard honorees, and the quartet behind Top 100 restaurant Valley all met while working at Scribe. The team grows much of their own produce, collects eggs from the spunky vineyard chickens and serves incredible beans. Spiritually, beans are the opposite of caviar on a restaurant menu; they're humble, a hard sell, and a chef isn't going to serve them unless they're absolute knockouts. Scribe's pink beans are brothy and creamy, seasoned with a good amount of acid and showered with fresh herbs. Last weekend, my family celebrated the Dragon Boat Festival with a proper feast, anchored by homemade zongzi and a cured duck that's a specialty of Yiyang in Hunan, our home province. The ducks are marinated in a variety of Chinese spices and herbs, many of them selected for their medicinal properties, before being air dried. The resulting delicacy is a dark reddish brown in color, mildly spicy and very savory in addition to being good for your spleen and blood circulation, my cousin tells me! Cousin Winnie's house, or the internet