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Guy Fieri Crashed the Sonoma County Fair and Dropped $10K on a Prize Pig

Plus, Yelp is rolling out a feature to sort restaurants by vaccination policy and more intel

Guy Fieri’s Restaurant Reboot
The mayor of Flavortown surprised Sonoma country fairgoers over the weekend
Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images
Lauren Saria is the editor of Eater SF and has been writing about food, drinks, and restaurants for more than a decade.

Welcome to p.m. Intel, your bite-sized roundup of Bay Area food and restaurant news. Tips are always welcome, drop them here.


  • Everyone’s favorite spiky-haired celebrity chef Guy Fieri showed up unexpectedly at the Sonoma County Fair over the weekend and, along with his friends, purchased more than a dozen pigs at the livestock auction. ABC-7 interviewed Frances Marshall, a member of the Sebastopol Future Farmers of America, who says she wrote Fieri a letter encouraging him to show up and place some bids on pigs. The chef ended up paying $10,000 for Marshall’s pig named Chevy. (The group ended up spending $30,000 on 16 pigs total.) Per Fieri’s Instagram post, they’ll all be donated to charity. [ABC-7]
  • Yelp says it’s rolling out a new feature that allows users to check both a restaurant’s vaccination policy and the vaccination status of its staff, KRON-4 reports. The change comes as an increasing number of bars and restaurants have started instituting requirements that patrons show proof of vaccination in order to dine or drink indoors. [KRON-4]
  • There’s a new daytime dining option now open at the Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel near Union Square. Called Fredericks and helmed by chef Daniel Corey (formerly of Michelin-starred Luce at the InterContinental), the white-washed breakfast and lunch spot sports stylish black-and-white flooring and a menu of coffee, pastries, sandwiches, and salads served seven days a week.
The Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel’s new breakfast and lunch restaurant Fredericks opens Aug. 4.
The Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel’s new breakfast and lunch restaurant Fredericks opens Aug. 4.
The Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel
  • The “freewheeling” food at Clement Street Vietnamese restaurant Lily is worth going out of your way for, the SF Chronicle’s restaurant critic Soleil Ho reports in a piece centered around the runaway success of the restaurant’s $72 fried rice. Chef Rob Lam says he dreamed up the wagyu beef, caviar, and crab-topped dish as a joke during the pandemic — but serving it became a nightmare with customers ordering dozens of the dish every night. [SF Chronicle]
  • Finally, SFGate dove deep into a bloody urban legend based at Pinecrest Diner near Union Square. “Was a San Francisco waitress really killed over poached eggs?” the website posits. [SFGate]