Mark Malicki, sitting at a small table in his soon-to-be-evacuated restaurant space, says he’ll scrape off the gold lettering in the window when he moves out, leaving only the letters “a-i-n-t.”Café Saint Rose, after two years on its very cute and very awkward downtown Santa Rosa backstreet, will be moving out of its small Sebastopol Avenue location at the end of March and heading to greener pastures in west Sonoma County. It’ll reopen at the property now occupied by Two Crows Roadhouse, five minutes west of Sebastopol on Bodega Highway, in late April.

Two Crows is locally recognized as one of those unfortunate “doomed locations,” having hosted a handful of short-lived tenants in the last five years. But it’s a divine spot, right on the creek, and Malicki’s got the clout and reputation to give it the traffic it deserves. Just this week, in fact, sources tell us he fielded a reservation from Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, and the Kitchen Sisters, NPR hosts and authors of Hidden Kitchens.

Café Saint Rose, which was essentially the Amy Winehouse of the Bohemian‘s Best Of awards this year (Best Place to Rekindle Love; Honorable Mention for Best Chef and Best Romantic Dinner), has always been invitingly down-home, sometimes showing movies on the wall during dinner. Malicki goes to Farmers’ Markets in the morning to buy fresh ingredients and builds his daily menu around what he finds. He says he’ll keep as much of the trademark artistic atmosphere at Café Saint Rose as possible, including the large paintings, colorful fixtures, rotary phone and vintage chandelier; he’s also looking to reinstate the cue-it-up-yourself record player that was a fixture of the restaurant’s early days in the new location. (The current windowsill, cutely carved by customers with cupcakes, hearts and lovers’ initials, will have to stay behind.)

Malicki seemed wistful when I talked to him about leaving the neighborhood, and was especially saddened about the prejudiced fear some customers openly brandished towards the perceived unsavory elements in the area. I myself live in this neighborhood, and was heartened that he’s not jumping ship in a move to placate his customers by getting away from the Greyhound station. Rather, it’s fairly cut-and-dry: Malicki says his monthly rent’s gone up from $1000 to $4000. Goddamn.

In the interim, be sure to hit up some of Malicki’s own favorite places, like K&L Bistro in Sebastopol, Della Fattoria in Petaluma, and the Willow Wood in Graton.

I’ll never forget the first time I came to Café Saint Rose, weeks after it first opened. After waiting for a couple minutes in an empty dining room, we watched as Mark and his wife burst through the kitchen door, out of breath, flush-faced and glowing with an unmistakable beam. They played it off legit, handed us some menus. Classic. Here’s wishing you the best, buddy.

 So I think I’d rather hear Xoshi Lubin’s expertly assembled Bad 13 Challenge entry again than spend another second on fucking WordPress (why is it so crummy when other blogging platforms are so easy to use? Why am I punished for using a PC?) But maybe not. I don’t think I could ever listen to that Yin Yang Twins song again. THE WORST by Xoshi Lubin

1. Stomach Cramps-King Missile
2. Prince of Arabia-The Toy Box
3. Tell Me About the Forest (You Once Called Home)-Dead Can Dance
4. You Oughta Know-Alanis Morissette
5. I’ll Make a Man Out of You-Donny Osmond & Chorus (from Mulan)
6. What Went Wrong-The Moldy Peaches
7. I Believe-Stephen Gately
8. Disney’s The Devil-Sexually Transmitted People
9. Blitzkreig Bop-Rob Zombie
10. Seconds-Le Tigre
11. La La-Ashlee Simpson
12. Wait (The Whisper Song)-Ying Yang Twins
13. Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now-The Smiths

Xoshi’s brilliant plan of attack (or at least as I see it) was to zero in on pop songs by artists who take themselves way, way too seriously. So these are musicians who, generally, know what they are doing. But either an overinflated sense of self-importance or a purely shitty raw material (e.g. dumb lyrics) result in painful listening experiences. Xoshi was THIS CLOSE to winning.            Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughta Know” is terrible simply for the way she sings “Will she go down on you in…a thea-ter?!!!” If I dumped a girl and then she sang this song as a way to get back at me, I’d feel very satisfied and justified in the dumping. Hey, I just read that Flea played bass on this song. Like that made a difference.            Jerry Goldsmith, Matthew Wilder, and David Zippel are responsible for writing “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” and I think its insipid bones are largely responsible for its awfulness. Contemporary Disney animated musicals probably spread more anger than love. Donny Osmond sounds like a high school drama kid singing “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”. That’s a compliment, in a way, but after having to sit through this song, I intend never to see Mulan.               Gabe Meline noted that the The Moldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson now had the #1 soundtrack in the country with Juno. Anyway, the terrible noise of “What Went Wrong” might have qualified as experimental music if it had been recorded, like, sixty years ago. I have an old home recording of me and my best friend playing Barbies in her basement that’s edgier than this slop.            “The Sexually Transmitted People were from Santa Rosa!,” Gabe Meline writes. “I saw their last show at the Phoenix in 2001. They were good and this song always made me laugh. They also had another tune called ‘Ishmael’s Last Ride,’ I believe. Peter Bonos, the trumpet player, now lives in Boston or Germany and makes avant-garde jazz music.”               Rob Zombie makes movies now. I hope he continues to do so, and never again sets foot in a recording studio to inflict the high douchebaggery he inflicted upon the Ramones’ “Blitzkreig Bop” upon any other song or person.               I hate Ashlee Simpson for getting a nose job, which I initially saw as a slap in the face of all big-nosed women, myself included. However, I have since come around, and I am glad this empty-headed bitch now shares no facial similarities with me. She’s not good enough to have a big nose! The lyrics of “La La” really push it to new levels of terrible.               Yin Yang Twins’ “Wait (The Whisper Song”) is explicit without being in any way sexy, and therefore it is offensive. I’m trying to think of an offensive song that’s good…like Body Count’s “KKK Bitch”, because it’s at least clever and funny. But this is just uninspired bad pornography.               We decided that The Smiths, though self-important via Morrissey, are-even for Smiths-haters-not terrible enough to be one of the 13 baddest songs ever. In fact, after the physical and psychological torture of Xoshi’s CD, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” was refreshing and healing.

The last time I stopped by Gayle’s Superburger, on its final day in business, the atmosphere really wasn’t as jovial and congratulatory as it should have been. As a matter of fact, it was decidedly depressing—despite the milestone, the former owners could only muster one other grungy customer in the joint, and he didn’t even know, or seem to care, that it was the last day they’d be serving up their famous King Burgers.

I related this scenario to a few different people later on that night, and I quickly learned that the former owners weren’t what you’d call necessarily well-liked. I remember going to parties at the house next door in the mid-‘90s and listening to the house’s tenants complain about how mean the owners were, which is pretty funny considering that we routinely sneaked over onto Superburger’s roof to drunkenly light off fireworks in the middle of the night, but apparently the sentiment spread throughout the land. Though I never had any truck against the old owners—why would I?—I was surprised to hear some of my best friends vilifying them as if they were the human incarnate of Mr. and Mrs. Satan.

I stopped by the vacated Superburger the next day and ran into Bill Cordell, the new owner, as he prepped the small space for its reopening (that’s the transitional phase, pictured above). Things looked promising—Bill was friendly as could be, and Modest Mouse’s “Perfect Disguise” played on the stereo inside, which I know doesn’t have anything to do with food, but still. I asked about the overhaul, and Bill assured me he wouldn’t change the place much, short of scraping off the gum on the counter, slapping on some fresh paint, and making a few non-intrusive additions to the menu.

It took me a while, but I finally got down there today, and even at a late lunch hour the place was filled—only one seat remained at the horseshoe counter. And friends, I didn’t think I’d say this, but the place has changed for the better. You know how, like, you’ve got an old car that you love but it’s kinda fucked up, and you think the reason you love it is because it’s fucked up, but then you take it in and give it a tune-up and wash it and wax it and you’re like, if I loved this fucked up car so much, why didn’t I do this earlier? That’s what Superburger is like now.

Don’t worry—there’s still a pile of newspapers at the door, some old regulars, and the serve-yourself condiment tray on the counter. There’s still the old Schaefer ice cream freezer and the Hamilton Beach milkshake blender. There’s still the fixed stools. But all of these things are simply put to a much better purpose these days. I got a cheeseburger with fries and it was like nothing had changed, except the cheeseburger tasted a lot better and the people around me were a lot happier.

As for the menu, I could tell you about the nifty ingredients, like apple-smoked bacon and gorgonzola cheese. I could tell you about the burgers with cute local names like the St. Helena and the Montecito, about the chicken sandwiches and the sausages. But you know what? All you really need to know is that there’s now a huge jar of jalapeños sitting on the counter, free to be smeared upon your food at will. Hell yes. Count me in.