The Richmond. Utter that small collection of phonemes three times in a row a la Beetlejuice and you might suddenly find yourself clad in a thick, grey knit sweater, gazing thoughtfully over the thick foaming head of a pint of stout from a plush barstool at flocks of angry asian women fighting over dragon fruit and flip-flops on the sidewalk outside. Frequently grey and cold, Clement Street between 2nd and 13th Streets is also a fantastic promenade whose edible entertainments

For those interested in the consumption of fine entrails, we present to you here within a weekly collection of macabre signposts pointing towards zones of high offal-saturation scattered throughout our little slice of peninsular heaven. They lay there, our guts, steaming with primordial, magmic heat, waiting for the slightest chance to jump out of our elastic casing like a troupe of eager, mucus-covered chorus girls from behind a scarlet curtain, brazenly kicking out their he

As the latter part of the above title flat-footedly implies, this weeks article has me journeying into savage, humid environs redolent of the morally queasy atmosphere of Joseph Conrad's most famous novel. Instead of the Belgian Congo, however, I find myself in Peru's Amazon Basin. I have to come clean, though. My point of penetration is quite tame by Amazon standards: the town of La Merced, which is only eight hours ENE of Lima, Peru's noxious, hideously sprawling capital.

The Argentinian food scene, which I had found fairly monotonous heretofore, is improved markedly the closer your proximity to Bolivia and Peru. The most remarkable city of that region is Salta, a frenetic, dirty pearl dropped into the psychedelic northwestern desert. The eyes are more native brown than European hazel and blue, the buildings more graceful (owing to the influence of the Spanish), and the food more interesting and flavorful. Offal (otherwise known as guts) c

Flaming kidney. Explosive intestine. Numbing uterus. Shrieking thymus gland! Are these ideas scrawled on the white board of a Spanish Inquisition spitballing session? A catalogue made by a doctor of gastric illnesses suffered during the Black Plague? Neither. They are, in fact, some of the more weird and depraved vittles offered for brave palates venturing into San Francisco's Chinatown (actually, only the first two are real; I really hope the others exist). The savage and o