Vengeance Come Quickly

The home of the 59-cent hot dog

One of the more bizarre San Francisco news stories these days is about the misleadingly-monikered freshman supervisor, Ed Jew.  You can head over to the San Francisco Chronicle's website, search for "Ed Jew" and see an evening's worth of reading on his current problems, but there is one tie with the subject of this blog which I find deliciously unexpected and amusing:  Jew is accused of taking $40,000 in kickbacks to smooth permit problems for a Taiwanese chain which has a store on Castro Street -- that bright orange plastic purveyor of tapioca ball drinks, Quickly. 

I always thought Quickly was going to kill someone, but I didn't think the victim would be a politician's career.

When Quickly opened a year or so ago, I was horrified.  First of all, tapioca ball drinks are without hyperbole the worst thing ever to happen in the history of mankind.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, tapioca drinks are usually a cold, flavored milk tea to which has been added a few inches of tapioca balls which sink to the bottom of the cup.  These balls are about a quarter-inch or so in diameter and have a consistency somewhere between ricotta cheese and Play-Doh.  As you drink the tea through a straw a gushy ball periodically comes shooting up the straw right into your gullet.

An oyster for under $3? How can you go wrong?

Now, the tapioca balls alone are damning enough, but Quickly also ups the ante by serving a hot food selection which is truly beyond description.  The biggest sign in the window advertises 59-cent hot dogs, and as CastroNative noted in another post's comments, it's traumatizing to imagine what eating one of these would do to your system.  But the alternatives to the hot dog are equally unfortunate:  squid ball, fried oyster, pork tripe, fried squid, fish ball... 

(Actually come to think of it, there are a lot of balls on the menu, so maybe they aren't so out of place in the neighborhood after all.)