Food

Having not updated in a month, I clearly don't remember everything I've eaten. Here's what I do remember.

Tara (123 2nd St, between Minna and Mission). This is a new Thai/Asian-fusion place that opened up near work (just down the street from Osha Thai) that I'd been meaning to try for a while and finally got in for dinner Wed night when I was in a rush to get to AT&T Park for the Boitano show. They said they could get me in and out in 30 minutes, so yay! The service was great - the guy was unobtrusively refilling my water glass every 2 seconds, the food was quick, it was easy to grab someone's attention to get my doggie bag and check... The food... well I got the Pad See Ew with beef, which is a favorite of mine. The dish tasted fine - not the best I've ever had but certainly not the worst - but the beef was tough and chewy. Not so good when you're in a rush, or in general. It's cheaper than Osha, the *flavors* were fine, but the textures and the meat need work. Only having had one dish, I hesitate to judge the place overall, but it did give me pause...

Amici's East Coast Pizzeria (216 King St) - so it's a chain I've been to several times before, so maybe it's not entirely fair to review it. But I don't really like it. Never had a pizza here I particularly liked (and their pizza is gross once it starts to cool - my group ordered some for dinner one night and I got there late and the crust was so tough I had to tear pieces off instead of just biting pieces). So I went here b/c it was across the street from AT&T Park and I needed to grab quick food before dress rehearsal for the Boitano show. Got a spaghetti b/c really, how far wrong can you go with spaghetti? Also because their pasta choices are crap. And the spaghetti was both expensive ($10+ for a small portion with meat sauce) and pretty crappy. I had better tasting spaghetti in the IAD airport while waiting for a flight one night, and I watched them scoop the spaghetti out of a bin where it'd been sitting for who knows how long. So yeah, this is me dumping on Amici's. NOT recommended.

Brenda's French Soul Food (652 Polk St between Eddy and Turk). Closed on Sundays. So sad.

Dottie's True Blue Cafe (522 Jones between Geary and O'Farrell). Where we went when we discovered Brenda's was closed. Very popular spot - the line went halfway down the block and stayed that way the entire time we were there. Specials menu had some fairly unique items on it. My friend and bf both got the Banana Chocolate Chip French Toast with Balsamic Strawberries, which was pretty good. Not nearly as sweet as you would expect. Also not as spectacular as you would expect, but yummy. I was hungry and saw a combination that appealed - 2 eggs, piece of ham, hash browns, 2 pieces of French toast...yes, I'm a pig. The eggs were fine - standard scrambled, not entirely flavorful but bury it with enough ketchup and anything is yummy. The hash browns were the same - very standard. The ham was good - a nice big slice of real ham, and not some dinky little bits. The French toast was fine as well - their French toast is on big thick slices of bread which don't absorb the syrup quite as much as I'd like. Oddly, my combo cost like $1-$2 more than the special French toast and I only had one half slice less of toast than they got with their special. Maybe we should have tried some of their more exotic specials, but my conclusion is that the place was good but probably not worth waiting 1/2 an hour or more in line for...

Went to Abacus again for dinner the other night with bf's coworkers. Got more interesting food than the last time we went with coworkers - mongolian beef, tangerine chicken, creamed corn and crab meat soup, and house special chow mein (or lo mein?). I still think the dessert here is the best part - we got the ice cream sampler again, this time with lychee, coconut, mango, and double chocolate ice cream. The mango was kind of icy but otherwise so yummy. The food is ok. Soup was nice on a warm night.

Ziryab (528 Divisadero between Fell and Hayes). Looking for a quick place to eat Friday night before a comedy show at the Independent, and finding long waits everywhere, a local clued us into this place. We were seated immediately, no problem. It's a Mediterranean place so most of the people I was with ended up getting kebabs of some kind which they polished off so I assume they were quite good. My bf got a smoked trout? appetizer special (there was some confusion about whether it was an appetizer or an entree but luckily he also ordered some mediterranean herb bread so he had enough to eat) which he said was really good. I got the chicken schwerma plate - bunch o' little pita bread pockets into which I could stuff the schwerma and sauce. Quite tasty. Overall, not cheap, but a good meal in a not-overly crowded place with decent service.

It's never fair to judge a place by just getting takeout from them, especially when you have like a 15-20 minute walk to get the food home, and you placed the order before leaving work, a 30+ minute bus ride away. But that's what I did with Siam Lotus Thai Cuisine (1705 Haight St at Cole). The Golden Triangle appetizer I ordered actually still tasted quite yummy when I got home, despite it being in a crispy wrapper which you would think would get mushy (and got a bit softer than I'm sure it started as) and gross. These were little triangle shaped "crepes" stuffed with mashed potatoes, yams, and peas and weren't nearly as heavy as samosas and such tend to be. They had a nice, lightly sweet, almost fluffy texture and taste, and were quite yummy. The Pineapple Cashew Nuts Chicken wasn't as good, though I really do wonder if it's b/c of the delay in eating from prep time. The flavors of the sauce and such were quite good but the chicken itself was strips of quite bland dry white meat. Maybe they would have been better warmer? I definitely want to try this place again sometime from within the restaurant.

Got takeout a fair amount that week, actually. Well, delivery in this case. The North Beach Pizza on Stanyan St only delivers or has takeout - there's no sit in. We felt lazy one day so we ordered our typical pizza with pepperoni & tomatoes. Yummy. My only complaint is that North Beach isn't particularly fast - I think the order arrived like 50 minutes after I made it? Need to plan ahead better - they have an online ordering system and you can specify a time if you order ahead of time. I should try that and see how well it works. But I love North Beach Pizza. Yum yum yum.

Decided to try Tsuna mi Sushi Bar (1300 Fulton at Divisadero). My bf liked it a lot more than me. It's a fairly trendy type place - famous for its diverse sake selection, with kind of loungey-seating around the walls and tables in the middle. They have a relatively small, IMO, sushi menu with some unusual stuff. We ended up getting a Tsunami - maguro, bincho and asparagus flash-fried, topped with spicy aioli, tobiko, and scallions (Bincho is apparently albacore - what goes by white tuna or shiro maguro elsewhere?). That was fairly yummy. We also got sake sashimi and I forget what other fish...either hamachi or maguro, but pretty sure it wasn't bincho. I also think we may have gotten the Five Sisters roll, which I think is known as a rainbow roll elsewhere - california topped with five types of fish. It was all quite good. I guess my lack of enthusiasm mainly stemmed from the prices - we had only gone to Sushi Bistro like the week before, and Tsunami is decidedly more expensive. And I guess also the selection since there were less choices than Sushi Bistro. Given that they're in entirely different areas of the city, though, it's not like you'd necessarily skip one to go to the other. I guess my conclusion is it's a decent sushi place, but on the expensive side, and unnecessarily trendy (which means long waits on weekend nights).

That's all I can remember for now...

On a personal note, I had fun over Thanksgiving weekend going to see Kurt Browning in "Peter Pan", which was a fun stage musical. Also had fun going to the Boitano show at AT&T Park, which was quite an interesting experience - it was kind of funky being out on the field looking up into the stands. Big park! Went to a Comedians of Comedy show at the Independent - Patton Oswalt and the other two headliners (a guy from the Sarah Silverman show, a woman from I'm not sure where) were quite funny, but there were two comedians in a row who were the first to go after Patton warmed up the crowd who really sucked. None of us liked them, and they set the wrong tone for the evening for us, I think. I was in a bad mood for a while and wasn't ready to concede the following acts were actually funny at times, and some of the other people left early. It's a shame. Also odd was that it was a music venue so there were no seats, just standing room. And it was PACKED. Quite unpleasant. I'm so cranky =).