We braved the bridge and tunnel crowd on a Saturday night to visit North Beach in the Westbay (San Francisco). Maykadeh has been serving up amazing Persian food for 35 years. We were so glad we declined all the offers to "come and do some shots" from the gentlemen on the street and actually made it to dinner. This place was worth the hardship of refusing those tempting offers...
Ladies lunch at Tadich Grill in San Francisco! We went on a field trip to the West Bay for a bit of San Francisco tradition.
Buns, Baby! "The street food of Asia" comes to Mission Truck Stop every Tuesday brought to us by The Chairman. The line is long. You can sometimes catch The Chairman at Off The Grid Berkeley. The buns are very good and have an almost cult-like following.
When it comes to me and fish tacos it is not the pursuit of happiness but the happiness of the pursuit of the best version that makes my lunch hour fun. I'm always looking, no matter what side of the bay I'm on. In the East Bay, my current favorite is at Tacubaya. But if I'm at work in SF, I'll walk down to the Ferry Building at lunch to Mijita. I feel so lucky to be able to walk to such a beautiful place for lunch (a place that is a vacation destination for people from all over the ...
Lunch and happy hour at Town Hall in SOMA.
They don't think I'm a bitch in New York City. My propensity for speaking directly and not wasting time with meaningless pleasantries about the weather doesn't count against me there at all. It's appreciated. New Yorkers, in my experience, tend to be efficient in their approach to most things. I love it there. It's my spiritual home. There is a sense that no one has time to waste. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the service in New York restaurants. It is, in a word, professional. And while we have food in Northern California that rivals New York in terms of ...
When I was a kid, I was constantly killing off my parents. Well, not killing them maybe, but definitely disappearing them in my mind. It's not that they were terrible parents (they weren't). It was just that I really wanted to be an orphan. I was a voracious reader and I loved books about orphans (The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, Jane Eyre, The Jungle Book). Something about coming from no family and finding the exact life you were meant to live (the common theme) was so appealing to a lonely only child like me. Anyway, astute readers will notice and ...
On nice days I like to take a walk at lunch. Up near the Moscone Center and Yerba Buena Gardens is Split Bread. Split Bread is the artisan sandwich place started by the owners of Mixt Greens, another of my favorite SF places. Both places source locally and use organic ingredients. I usually get a salad...the Split Cobb is really good with fresh avocado and rotisserie chicken. But today I got the Braised Short Rib sandwich with the side kale salad because I have not been able to get my favorite green kale drink all week. Both ...
Reflecting on my meal at Heyday, the new restaurant on Spear in downtown SF opened by Chez Panisse Cafe alums, it occurred to me that this page would more accurately be named "Meat Oakland." When I was a kid,the vacations my family took were always road trips. Each morning of those trips, facing endless hours of counting Interstate signs and tired already from begging my parents to let me swim through the slimy flotsam in the hotel pool just one more time, I directed my best whining at the need for breakfast to be at Denny's. It had to be Denny's. ...