Originally Posted by Rudeboyelvis
(Post 721770)
We arrived home late yesterday night from a trip to San Francisco, Monterey, and Napa. Franny, Gooey, DeboDeb, Uncly and I had a great time.
I shall delight you with my culinary memories of the trip.
Thursday evening: street food from a farmer's market in San Luis Obispo, the highlight being fish tacos. Heh heh.
Friday breakfast: so-so breakfast from hotel, nummy sausage from elsewhere.
Friday lunch: wonderful burgers at an American-themed café called Archie’s near the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in the opposite direction of Cannery Row. We drew on the paper tablecloth with crayons - UNCLY STOP IT!!!! This is a family place!!
Friday dinner: Cafe Gibraltar in El Granada, a chic restaurant in a tiny beachside town south of San Francisco and just north of Half Moon Bay. Moroccan food. We ate on pillows on the floor in a cozy nook. Superb ambiance, wonderful bread. DeboDeb loved the food; it didn't work for me personally, but my shrimp bisque was still quite good. Gooey had a lamb stew-type meal, Uncly had dumplings (surprise!), Franny had rabbit with noodles. Gooey and DeboDeb also had great salads that they let us sample. Uncly sweet-talked the hostess into the restaurant's bread recipe (BANG!! SECOND SURPRISE!!!).
Shortly before we ate, I leapt out of the car in Half Moon Bay to see an infamous alpaca; I did not eat him, though I must admit to pondering the thought of smuggling him back for Clyde.
Friday evening: Amante, a bar. Great decor, so-so mixed drinks. The waitress inadvertently flashed Uncly and Gooey, who were both pleased. I was too busy watching the balloon woman who had a balloon creation of a naked woman on her cart and made a flower for two half-drunken women who declared the balloon woman the most fantastic person ever. Whatevah.
Saturday brunch: tasty sandwiches at Molinari's, an Italian market with outdoor seating only on a busy avenue. Ingredients in our tasty sandwiches included various Italian meats, cheeses, turkey, artichoke hearts, sweet peppers, and more. Nom nom.
Saturday dinner: Le Colonial, a French/Vietnamese restaurant recommended by Derby Cat. Located in a narrow white building with a staircase up to the portico (where we ate), a dark interior with colonial decor, and a bar upstairs. Uncly chose the appetizer: crispy duck rolls. I ate a lovely dish of chicken, white and dark, with shitake mushrooms and green beans; meal could have been a bit spicier or sweeter, and desperately needed more mushrooms, but it was presented well. The dark chicken morsels were especially good. Franny had a wonderful vegetable curry with broken rice sauteed with three kinds of onions -- sooo good. Gooey and DeboDeb both had so-so pho.
Saturday evening: coffee at a chocolate bar and cafe joint in the Castro recommended by Vic. Nice little place with black, brown, and white candy-stripe decor. Enjoyed the Castro -- no one seemed bothered by anybody else or anything. If you know what ah mean. Gooey and Franny debated buying chocolate cream-filled penispops from a delicious-smelling bakery, but we all felt a little too full for more food.
Saturday night: Toronado, a bar recommended by a Uncly's hosebag waitress friend from Half Moon Bay. The walls are lined with shelves that contain no-longer used taps. There are hundreds and hundreds of them. Uncly had pomegranate cider (“Two Rivers”), DeboDeb had a dark chocolate-y porter, and I had a very bitter pale ale. We couldn't get seats so we left..... SPIT!!
Sunday: overpriced dim sum at Yank Sing. The pot stickers were quite good. The building had a three-story waterfall in the center – amazing!
Sunday afternoon: excellent, excellent, excellent coffee at Blue Bottle Coffee Company, recommended by yours truly. The company has “a hands-on approach to every step possible to discover and preserve the true nature of excellent coffee -- no matter how inconvenient or time-consuming.” Extremely, if not excessively, trendy place. Kind, helpful [and many] baristas. I don’t think Gooey liked their mochas better than Intelligentsia’s, but who could? My latte was scrumptious. They make their drip coffee with vacuum siphon pots and actually give mini ones out to coffee-goers to share at the bar.
Sunday dinner: Ubuntu in Napa, an overpriced, snooty, unbalanced, but generally very good vegetarian/vegan food restaurant and local yoga studio. (People do yoga in the loft above the restaurant during lunch.) Met Coach Pants there. The waitress kept pushing for us to get multiples of their overpriced dishes, which soured the experience to a large degree. Coach jabbed his fork in her eye. They just seemed to be trying too hard. They needed a tasting menu. Highlights included the bread, the "foie-vocado" (which consisted of essentially guacamole, gooseberries, a spicy sweet sauce, and yellow plums eaten in a piece of bread), the grits, and their magica salad or symphony salad or whatever they called it. The presentation of this last dish was the most interesting: it consisted only of things they have in their own garden, which included leafy greens, brightly colored flowers, sprouts, spicy “dirt,” and a bug (not so vegetarian, eh?). I loved the Ad Astra chardonnay that DeboDeb chose. I mean to track it down. Franny liked her Napa Valley pilsner; quite nice, quite sweet.
Sunday evening: coffee at the Starbucks nearby our hotel. Meh.
Monday morning: a surprisingly okay breakfast from the nice Holiday Inn Express in American Canyon.
Monday late morning/early afternoon: wine tasting! We went to Clos du Val, Rutherford, and the Beaulieu Vineyard tasting room. The pourer at CDV illuminated us of his former coke habit in Miami. Interesting individual. He told me he doesn’t drink beer because he’ll get fat and won’t get ass. I high-fived him. He gave us two big glasses of $125/bottle wine and poured way too much Merlot. The other wine pourers were a tad stodgy, though Rutherford did give us wines not on their list and even let us taste a port (strange, since we embarked on the white list). Napa Valley, I learned, is heavy on reds because it’s so hot. (It got to 105 ° at one point.) Country is not as beautiful as Santa Ynez.
Monday afternoon/lunch: Gooey took us to Taylor’s Automatic Refresher. Good burgers, really good garlic (and green!) garlic fries. They served wine there! Holy crap. They had a corkage fee. We didn’t do that.
Monday dinner: Mexican food in Soledad. Carne aside wasn’t great, too fatty, but the chicken was delicious.
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All in all, quite satisfactory.
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