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Governor Jerry Brown was spotted by Grub Street yesterday, dining with wife Anne Gust, at the almost one-year-old branch of Hot Italian at Emeryville's Public Market. Co-owner Fabrizio Cercatore tells us that Brown is a fan and frequent guest at Hot Italian's original Sacramento location.

Last week Tablehopper reported on a sighting of Homeland star and Broadway vet Mandy Patinkin, who was dining at Universal Café. [Tablehopper]

Over in Oakland, Daniel Patterson's Haven just announced a couple of upcoming events for which reservations are recommended. The first, on Monday, February 4, features a group of alumni from the Manresa kitchen joining fellow alum and Haven exec chef Kim Alter for a collaborative, six-course dinner. Free agents John Paul Carmona and Zack Freitas (formerly of Station 1 and Zaré at Fly Trap) will be cooking along with Marty Cattaneo (Dio Deka), and Spruce staffers Johnny Madriga and Berto Vallejos. It's $90 per person, with $45 additional for pairings. See the full menu here, and reserve at 510-663-4440.

Local legend Cecilia Chiang, who at 93 remains a spritely and sociable presence at restaurant openings and food events throughout the year (see her pictured at b. patisserie's preview event here), will be honored with a lifetime achievement prize at the 2013 James Beard Foundation Awards in New York. Chiang is credited with having widely influenced the way Americans perceive Chinese cuisine, via her upscale restaurant The Mandarin which opened at Ghirardelli Square in 1968. As critic Patricia Unterman once wrote, "[Chiang] was the first to offer many of the rich and spicy dishes of Szechuan and Hunan provinces ... the garlicky, chili-infused sauces offered new taste sensations for Westerners used to adulterated Cantonese cooking." And as JBF president Susan Ungaro said today, on announcing the award, "Cecilia elevated Chinese cuisine far beyond the takeout box. She completely embodies the spirit of this award.”

Mr. Bauer has filed his official thoughts on Martin Yan's M.Y. China, the flashy new noodle emporium on the fourth floor of the Westfield mall. He likes the space, and the theater provided via noodle "dancers," pulling dough into long noodles, although he says, "I'd rather see it in the kitchen and not the dining room." He's a fan of the noodle dishes he tried, including a beef soup with albeit tough simmered ribeye; and the wild boar scissor cut noodles, which Anna Roth also called out. The dim sum is "better than most places," he sayss but "can't compete with Yank Sing." And he advises skipping the wok section of the menu, which he calls the "weakest link." All told: two and a half stars. [Chron]

Over the weekend, the city's Office of Labor Standards Enforcement released to the Chron their list of restaurants, restaurant groups, and other companies that, according to a city audit for the year 2011, collected Healthy S.F. surcharges far in excess of what they spent on healthcare. Now, one might argue that the way the city initially wrote and enacted its universal healthcare law in 2008 was loose enough to allow for this sort of accounting, however the City Attorney and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano are characterizing it far more negatively — and it certainly does look bad on paper. After comparing surcharges collected to health costs outlaid, the total across this group of large businesses is, as Dennis Herrera earlier said, about $5 million. Topping the list of those with large, unspent health care funds are the Mina Group ($328,000), Wayfare Tavern ($235,000), Prospect ($170,000), The Cheesecake Factory ($159,000), and Squat & Gobble ($160,000). But of those, we should note, Squat & Gobble is alone in not having spent a dime on health care (according to this audit), though they collected that full sum from customers.