An SF Hotspot Heads North; J. Gold Remembers Rose Gray

PORTLAND—Eater SF learns that the team behind popular New Orleans-style eatery Town Hall are moving up the coast for their next project: "Town Hall boys are opening a 'Town Hall' concept restaurant in Portland in the recently shuttered Bay 13 space. May 1st opening date scheduled. They’ve brought in the same NY architect/designer that did the Town Hall interior." [Eater SF]

PREHISTORIC TIMES —Today the BBC wonders if cooking is what made us human in the first place. Says a Harvard professor: "I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life... .Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidentally. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction." [BBC]

RIP ROSE GRAY— Today, Jonathan Gold pens a tribute to the recently departed Rose Gray, in the best way he knows how—by recounting in loving detail his first meal at the River Cafe: "I was expecting as little of the restaurant as it seemed to be expecting of me. And then the appetizer appeared: a single blob of mozzarella naked on a white saucer; possibly the plainest plate of food I had ever seen, so blank that the three drops of greeny olive oil dripping down one side shone brightly as the sun. When you cut into it, the cheese oozed thick milk, and the flavor was all barns and grass and dusty roads, sensations I had never before experienced from a cheese, not even in Italy." [LA Weekly]