Found Treasure: Bacon-Wrapped Hot Dog

April 29, 2022 – Sometimes breakfast must be a bacon-wrapped hot dog.

The street-bought BWHD became required eating as a result of a sequence that came the night before. 

Let’s start there. About last night…  

Before I rolled to San Francisco’s Chase Center to see the Golden State Warriors play the Denver Nuggets in the fifth game of their first round series, I bulked up on some leftovers from Seaside Seafood Market. 

The final pieces of a smoky and spicy Andouille sausage po’ boy and a blackened chicken po’ boy—which will become more relevant in a minute—got me right for the moment.

Then I took a green chili and beef Turf Burrito by Goon with a Spoon from the toaster oven, wrapped it in foil and tucked it into a hidden pocket in my jacket. 

The plan would be to smuggle that into the game, for several important reasons. 

Here are my starting five:

Reason #1: Goon with a Spoon is one of the ever-expanding food-and-drink products captained by hip hop legend Earl Tywone Stevens Sr., aka E-40.

#2: E-40 is an avid Warriors fan, overall #YayArea sports enthusiast and my favorite rapper.

#3: I thought I might message Stevens Sr. during the game and tell him the official timeout snack was a Goon with Spoon burrito—and get a seat upgrade to hang with him closer to the court. 

#4: For Valentine’s Day, the #bestvalentineever took me on a culinary tour that included: a stop at an E40 mural on the side of an Indian restaurant, a bottle of E. Cuarenta tequila reposado, a cup of instant E-40 Rap Icons ramen, Turf Burritos under E-40’s Goon With a Spoon label, an Earl Stevens Function Red Blend bottle of wine and bacon-cheeseburger lumpia from The Lumpia Company in Oakland that he co-owns. (I decided to save the Turf Burritos for the big moment they demanded. The Earl Stevens Function Red Blend bottle of wine will be for when the Warriors win the next round.)

#5: My valentine Googled whether aluminum foil, which was wrapped around my smuggled burrito, would set off the metal detectors. It would not.

On the way to the game, traffic was thick. Normally it flows out of the city around 5pm rather than in. The main reason for the Thursday evening vehicles wasn’t purely the Warriors either. 

It so happens the Oakland A’s were playing the San Francisco Giants at Oracle Park, no more than a few hundred meters from Chase Center. 

Which brought me back to Seaside Seafood Market. The same chef who co-founded the market this time last year was recently hired to do all of the food for the Oakland A’s and the place they play back across the bay, RIngCentral Coliseum (or as most call it, The Coliseum).

The additional job Danny Abbruzzese has taken on seems immense and proves to be precisely that.

His duties run deep. He’s dishing high-end cold and hot food and fancy drinks (bottle service, please) for 180 suites. 

He’s in charge of eats for players, home and visiting, which means balancing young international player appetites with team dietician demands—all the nutrition they need before the game and all the recovery protein after. 

“It’s pretty intense,” he says.

“I try to keep it nice and enticing and give them as much live food as possible” Abbruzzese says. “Good healthy food that’s going to give them energy and not sit in their stomachs. 

“Win or lose we want to satisfy them and make them happy. What’s better than a good meal?” 

He’s also reinventing what premium seat-holders get and upper deckers like me enjoy too—including brisket tacos and Oakland-inspired Hustler Chicken Sandwiches with chicken breast brined in Frank’s Red Hot with provolone, bacon and ranch dressing on a soft French roll.

So on any given gameday he’s creating, navigating and reinvigorating food for professional athletes, suite VIP types, premium fans and the sun-burnt bleacher creatures, as well as the interests of his employer, Aramark. 

“We’re in four different dimensions here. It’s a lot,” he admits.

To hear him tell it, the gig is equal parts planning as wisely as possible and then dealing with chaos. Which echoes what Warriors coaches experience.

“It’s all about timing and coordination. It goes to the fact of what a kitchen is. The people who understand and manage in and around it succeed in our business. Every decision has a ripple effect—staffing, execution, coordination, getting everything to open at the right time,” he says.

Then, come game day: “My phone is blowing up, the radio is blowing up and my entourage of support people are following me around asking questions while I figure out where to go and put out the fire. With good planning and coordination, the fires are less and less.”

Sometimes I play basketball with Abbruzzese, which makes me biased, but objectively he’s a great guy for such an insane job.

He ran Asilomar Conference Grounds’ food service for around a decade, overseeing a program that dished as many as a million meals a year without compromising sustainability requirements. When he moved over to Portola Hotel and its covey of restaurants he did similar quality at scale.

Back in Seaside, where he lives and commutes to Oakland from, Seaside Seafood Market, which he co-created, is doing tasty stuff, including items he often stylizes for The Coliseum service points.  

He trained his team well enough that he can be off campus without sacrificing quality around things like the po’ boys—well-sauced with the right amount of toppings, southern seasoning and squooshy French rolls.

There was a moment in the Warriors-Nuggets game on Wednesday when Draymond Green threw rookie Jonathan Kuminga a lob that seemed way too high to grab, and Kuminga promptly seized and slammed it. 

It makes me think of Abbruzzese: Sometimes we can rise to daunting heights in the right situation.

Later the Warriors were down 10, which might’ve led to a trip back to Denver and mileage that undermines any hope of a championship. 

Only Steph Curry did Steph Curry 3s from oblique angles, Gary “Young Glove” Payton hit big shots and made big stops, and the undersized big-heart Dubs took the win.

The Chase Center rode a sustained shock wave of crowd noise. 

So I was full of E-40 burrito and fanboy joy as I left Chase, but I still couldn’t pass on a bacon-wrapped hot dog.