Marglin on Taste

When “ordering in” tasteful food, the most important ingredient to a successful experience is determining how far that food has to travel to get from its place of preparation TO ITS PLACE OF CONSUMPTION. And, of course, how it gets there. The effect of the journey upon the taste of the food should be your primary consideration before ordering.

Need one mention that the closer the place of preparation is, the better the food is likely to taste..? And delivery is generally somewhat inefficient; usually the food is not going directly from the kitchen to a vehicle straight to your designated eating place.

Which is why certain ethnic foods: Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, even Italian (and including pizza) deliver better than most other foods. But better still if you can pick the stuff up yourself (and time your arrival to the restaurant to be just before or at the moment the food emerges, properly packed). Good packaging is key as well.

Care in packaging shows respect for what is being packaged. So, here in San Francisco, where I live, Indian food generally “travels” less well than Chinese. Thai and Vietnamese (and variants thereof like Mongolian and Indonesian) would fall somewhere in the middle. But you don’t want to be going too far with your food. Of course, most places are no more than 20 minutes away, which is not as good as 2, but is better than 30.

So, an ideal take-out experience, for me, on a Sunday, is picking up Tommaso’s in North Beach. It’s 5 minutes max from my house. It’s packaged well, and while all pizza suffers from being “boxed in”, this seems to suffer less, being a fluffy crust.

I like their pasta dishes, too, including the sleeper spaghetti with broccoli, olive oil, and garlic. Salads are less desirable. All the pizzas are worth trying, though seafood pizza still freaks me out. Try the spinach. And the Calamari pasta. A must. If your pleasure tends towards veal, they have several options undoubtedly worth the slightly less than $20 (and served up with a side of rigatoni marinara). And the vegetarian antipasto will light up your taste buds to start the meal off on the proper gait.

http://tommasosnorthbeach.com/ourmenu.asp
1042 Kearny (@ Broadway) 415 398-9696