San Francisco Chronicle Food & Home - Spoken Edition

If it’s good enough for quinoa bowls, surely it’s good enough for mac and cheese. That seems to be the thinking for Mac’d, San Francisco’s burgeoning mac and cheese chain, which has announced that its shops will soon begin rolling out fully automated restaurant technology created by fellow S.F. compan, Eatsa.

San Francisco’s Albona Ristorante Istriano will close at the end of 2018, following 30 years in North Beach. Owner Samuel Hernandez announced the news on Facebook, calling his time operating the business a “wonderful dream.” The final service will be Dec. 31. While the post thanked its customer base for the support over the years, it didn’t actually provide a reason for the closure. Inside Scoop has reached out to Hernandez for more details.

Whether you’re looking for the latest Ottolenghi title or a vintage copy of Madame De Lyon’s “The Art of Cooking Omelettes,” Bay Area culinary professionals and home cooking fanatics know there’s one person to call: Celia Sack of Omnivore Books. Earlier this month, Sack’s beloved Noe Valley bookstore (3885 Cesar Chavez St.) celebrated its 10th anniversary.

You may not notice much of Namu Gaji’s menu is now vegan unless you’re counting up the tiny signs that follow each item description: a plus for dishes that are or can be made vegan; a milk carton for vegetarian dishes with dairy; an egg for, well, eggs. It’s easy to ignore the creeping veganism when ordering, too, unless you’re the kind of diner who examines a menu with meat blinders on.

In the subterranean hallway of a San Jose apartment building, pastor Gerardo Vazquez knocks on a door decorated with a Feliz Navidad sign from a Christmas long ago. Eva Martinez, a small, grandmotherly woman with red dye covering the tips of her white hair, welcomes him into a space no larger than a college dorm room that she shares with her daughter and several grandchildren.

The smell of autumn is a smell that seems to appear overnight when you least expect it. You wake up one morning to a chill and the smell of loamy earth, and you pull your oversize blanket from the closet’s clutches and put it in its rightful place upon your bed. The air’s cryogenic tinge starts to seep through your windows when you let the soft pink light in.

Dungeness crab season has arrived. The commercial season for most of the state began on Thursday, and as of Friday, the crabs are landing in Bay Area stores. According to industry-wide predictions, this is expected to be a good year for the beloved crustaceans. You can check out more details on how the 2018 season is shaping up, check out Tara Duggan’s coverage here. As such, expect grocers to pack their seafood displays and tanks starting this weekend.

How to get food Food banks. Each Bay Area county (or in some cases, a pair of counties) has a central food bank that works with community agencies — churches, schools, nonprofits — to supply food to smaller pantries. Contact your local food bank to find out how and where to get food. You may have to supply your name and ZIP code. Alameda County Community Food Bank. https://www.accfb.org/get-food. 510-635-3663. Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano. www.foodbankccs.org. 855-309-3663.

After Oscar Michel and Jake Weiss passed the final health inspection for their new Oakland restaurant on 40th Street in Temescal, they walked up the block and bought some beer. It was their way of celebrating a monumental moment. Getting the green light to was the final hurdle in opening Tacos Oscar, the permanent version of their taco pop-up. The roaming East Bay outfit is most known for its handmade tortillas.

As the holidays approach, one way to add a touch of beauty to the household is by bringing in plants or flowers. A wonderful way to add both color and fragrance is by “forcing” paperwhite narcissus to bloom in a bowl of stones. The idea is both simple and foolproof: Fill a bowl with small stones, fill with water to the top, then place the paperwhite bulbs packed closely together on top of the stones, just so their budding roots alone touch the liquid.

At this point of his decorated career, David Kinch doesn’t plan on opening any more fine dining restaurants. His Michelin 3-star Manresa, which Kinch opened nearly two decades ago in Los Gatos and where he still spends a majority of his time, is an institution in the fine dining world. And while the chef enjoys being in the kitchen, crafting critically-acclaimed tasting menus priced at $275 per person, he has no intention of expanding his fine dining footprint.

Janice Dulce’s wife, Brandi, had to convince her they needed to set a grand opening date for FOB Kitchen, the duo’s new restaurant in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. The recent friends and family nights had gone off without a hitch. A brunch menu was in place. The cocktails were ready to go. It was time to make a decision for when everyone could start showing up, Brandi said. “I was nervous,” Janice said Wednesday night while sitting outside of the restaurant.

I caught up yesterday with Qupe founder Bob Lindquist, who recently announced that his 36-year-old Santa Barbara County winery had been sold to Vintage Wine Estates. “It’s all real new, but obviously the situation with Terroir was pretty well documented,” he said. “It was not going anywhere positive.” Lindquist was referring, of course, to Qupe’s previous sale. In 2014 he sold a stake to winery investment firm Terroir Life.

Rose Levy Beranbaum’s 11th book, “Rose’s Baking Basics” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $35), shares 100 recipes that every home baker should know. With pie season upon us, Levy Beranbaum, dropped by The Chronicle to share more crucial tips for foolproof holiday pies. 1. Weigh your ingredients for baking. Not only is it faster, easier and more accurate, you also don’t have to dirty as many dishes after measuring out your ingredients.

San Francisco’s 90-year-old Alfred’s Steakhouse is back in familiar hands. After being sold to Michelin-starred chef Daniel Patterson three years ago, the Financial District restaurant is again being operated by the Petri family, the same folks who ran the business from 1973 to 2015. “We’re going to return some normalcy there,” said Al Petri, the 75-year-old patriarch who retired from the restaurant business eight years ago.