San Francisco Food

My three stars of San Francisco food, like how three stars are named after each hockey game. Keep in mind that there are many other restaurants in San Francisco that offer delicious food.

Pizzeria Delfina (Mission)

stringy cheesy pizza from Delfina

Delicious thin crust pizzas the way I had them in Italy. The cheese had the perfect gooey texture, the flavours were in great harmony. Thoroughly enjoyable fare! I also had the Brodo with asparagus, rice, egg, and parmagiano. It does look like the menu changes regularly (with the season, presumably), naturally the offerings will differ with each visit. Arrive early, or the line does get long! We got in at about 1730, just before the rush. It's worth the wait, but why wait if you can avoid it? Register on the chalkboard at the entrance to be seated!
 
Blue Bottle Café (Various, including SoMa)

Locally sourced goodness. I don't want to get into the local vs global debate, but I do think there are pros and cons to both sides. The pro for locally sourced food is that Blue Bottle Café serves amazingly delicious breakfast. I liked the steel cut oats and waffle a great deal, just look at the fine icing sugar that topped the waffle. Delactable. That said, I wasn't completely a fan of the cinnamon toast (I'm not used to really crisply toasted bread).


They offer a small selection of caffinated drinks, including two types of iced coffee. The coffee was fragrant, but just a touch strong for my taste. I'm not really a huge coffee drinker, but I do like sweet drinks. I ended up opting for hot cocoa; no better way to start the day! Bumhead liked the coffee, though

Muracci's Japanese Curry & Grill (Financial District)

sooooo crispy and moist.

I think Katsu Curry is an art. Your katsu has to be crispy without being overcoated with panko, your curry can't overpower the katsu. On top of that, you can't let your katsu sit too long lest it become soggy (this is all written by fish-ii who has no training whatsoever in cooking katsu). That's why this one definitely takes the prize. I'll let your tastebuds do the talking, because my words simply won't do it justice. They also offer different types of curry (vegetarian version available), and options for rice (brown and white). You can also choose the level of spiciness. I was blown away.

veggie curry with brown rice

The downside is that the store is ridiculously warm, so it wasn't the best setting to enjoy the food. One more thing to note is their short operating hours, perhaps due to its location in the Financial District. They only open until 6 on certain days, so if you're not going for lunch, you're in for an early dinner.

The San Francisco series will conclude with one last post on Marin Headlands and Sausalito. Stay tuned!

By fishii with No comments

Let's Talk Food

Food is a large part of life, right? At least it's a large part of mine. I'm a self professed glutton (who can't eat much). So this post will be dedicated to some of the meals that I had in the first stretch of my San Francisco trip.

車仔麵 and I don't know what it's called in English

腸粉 rice flour rolls?

ABC Café in Chinatown. I think that's the name. Nothing spectacular, but a cheap meal that's definitely worth the small price. Came to less than $20 including tax and tips with a drink between the two of us.

Next up, the Pork Shop (in Haight-Ashbury). There seems to be a few around town, but we only tried this one. Cheap, hearty fare. Good breakfast foods, though admittedly more oily than what I generally eat.

Chipotle Sasuage? I can't remember anymore. Tasted like chili

Excuse the bad lighting. This one is the bird's nest

This meal stuffed me to the rim, and promptly messed up my eating schedule for the rest of the day. I wish I could've eaten more at other places... but it was a delicious meal. Also try their freshly squeezed OJ!

I leave you today with the delicious baked goods of Tartine Bakery!

Tartine Bakery would've been one of the star restaurants. But it kind of got demoted a little, just below my 3 star choices (do you see hockey influence here?). This cake, unlike the one in Portal, is not a lie. I am about to "get" the cake that GLaDOS promises in Portal...

I need to blog earlier. I'm not sure if this is called Dolce de Leche anymore... but definitely delicious and moist!

This lemon tart is just the right balance of sour and sweet. The cream isn't as light as the once that I tasted in Belgium, but I think that's partially attributable to cultural differences. The petal does add a tinge of fragrance into the cream. Not heavy, but I guess I do prefer slightly lighter creams.

Finally! Ti Couz Creperie to end the day. Since the first x-number of crepes I've ever had were Japanese crepes, French crepes are really foreign to me! It was good none the less, I don't know if it's something I would want often given the price. Maybe once in a while when a craving hits.

Ratatouille Crepe, whole wheat flour makes it look burnt, but it's not! Slightly crispy.

That marks the end of our day 0 and 1 menu. Took a week to write... I'll finish off all the food posts with one "stars list", just like NHL, where after every game there are 3 stars. BTW, saw lots of Sharks jerseys while in San Francisco. Sorry~ #nowayjose =D

By fishii with 1 comment

Paris Menu

Paris and food can't really be separated, right? So I thought that requires a post on food of its own. Introducing, fish-ii's menu in Paris!

I think this was Kosher food?

Just nicely displayed buns from Tokyo Palace

Plat du jour at Tokyo Palace, couscous!

Chai tea latte (deeeeelish) and a chocolate macaroon (double deeeeelish)

Raw salmon on tartar sauce with an amazing salad on the side. The dressing had spices

Spinach soup with another delicious salad from a cute little cafe in Latin Quarters

This post seems to be filled with only photos and the word delicious in its multiple forms. I promise the next post will have a little more variety in the vocabulary. Next up, skiing in Belgium? Or I might skip that and go straight to Edinbugh.

By fishii with 2 comments

kyushu food

I'm back to posting about food. Recently I've been obsessing about food, what am I going to have for dinner? Oh look! A fries shop! A bakery! A chocolate store! What recipe should I try out? So today I'm going to let that keep going and post Only about food.

 

Hakata ramen from a store in Daimyo-ku, Fukuoka (I forgot the name...)

So I've decided that I absolutely love Hakata ramen. I've only been to one place that successfully made me thing it was mediocre, all the other ramen places just blew me away. This one had a soup base so milky it's hard not to just drink it up. Delicious gyoza too! Man... I want gyoza... the skin was so thin, the insides were so good, indescribable!

From this lunch, the bumhead of my little brother and I headed to Beppu for tons of hot spring enjoyment. But that's not the point of this post! So no talk of hot springs, onto the topic of dinner we go. We bought some sushi and okonomiyaki from a supermarket just across a park from our hotel. Luckily we just hit discount time (where they start putting a discount on all ready-made-food that hasn't been sold yet), and dinner was tres cheap =D.

So lunch the next day is going to be the last part of this post, or I'll seriously go buy a ticket and fly back to Fukuoka to eat. There's this amazingly delicious restaurant a block away from our hotel called Toyo Tsune. When I say amazing, I mean it's super famous too. The lines were insane (we got there just before lunch hour rush) and managed to get in within 10 minutes. 

 

toyo tsune set - even the rice looks perfectly cooked.

bumhead's ten-don. i would've ordered it too, if i wasn't coughing up a storm. the store is famous for this dish, and understandably so. The batter is light and the sauce has just enough flavour.

a look at their kitchen - this is where we sat and got served hot off the grill food.

和牛 cabbage wrap.

What is 和牛 in English anyway? That's it for today! Stay tuned for more food photos from fishii!

By fishii with 3 comments

The Fukuoka Menu

Due to a delay in our flight (with bad weather conditions in both HK where the flight departs and Fukuoka where the flight lands), we didn’t get to our hotel until 10:30PM. Made me super tired and susceptible to Arnold’s cold. I’m now coughing.

It seems that I have neglected posting about the delicious shaved ice I had at XiMen before I left for the airport, so I must include a photo in this post. It’s as attractive visually as it is… taste…wise? Wow, my English…

The menus on the table are almost unbelievable.

Anyway, we started yesterday with a quick lunch at Hakata Station. Nothing like Soba to beat the heat (it’s supposed to help lower body temperature, according to my host family mother).

my brother’s lunch, an original at the restaurant

my inaka soba

For our afternoon snack (we always have those), we visited a super market and grabbed some croquette and milk tea. We also decided to “gaijin smash” it, and ate on the side of a shopping street. It’s not really appropriate if you’re Japanese… But it was fun watching people glance at us from time to time. LOL

In Fukuoka, there are food stalls that set up alongside a river that runs through city centre for dinner. They offer a wide variety of foods and tons of people visit these stalls. However, given the heat that I’m not used to, I decided for the two of us that we were going to hit up a restaurant for some famous Hakata ramen…

Which, by the way, turned out to be delicious. Sometimes I find ramen to be too salty, actually, a lot of times, I find ramen to be too salty, but the place I went to (which unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of…) was great! It was flavourful without being overbearing, and all in all very good for only ¥500 – ¥800 for each menu item.

Sightseeing will go in another post so I don’t have the food tag on every bloody post I make. I also apologize for the poor quality of the photos. Too lazy to take out the dSLR all the time...

By fishii with 1 comment

the last of taipei

Due to a request, I refrained from posting photos of food yesterday because it was “making [people] hungry”, so I didn’t post yesterday! (Actually, I was going to do it at 11:59 last night so I can turn right around and start posting food, but I was too busy watching Top Gear.) Today, however, you fill be flooded with photos of food.

Arnold and I decided to have some desserts (actually, I decided…) so we chose a piece of cake from 3 different bakeries to compare and see which has the best cake.

Anyway, Kobe Atelier’s strawberry shortcake seemed to be the one for us, it was also the most expensive. I think it was NT$80. The third one was so not to our taste that we decided not to take a photo of it (yea, we just forgot).

For dinner, I met up with a friend who now lives in Taipei. She brought us to have good beef noodles! I enjoyed it thoroughly. We also went to a café nearby for cake (together, Arnold and I had 5 slices of cake that day). The cakes were all so cute, not to mention they were also delicious. They weren’t that expensive either, averaging about NT$60 for a piece (about $2 CAD). Why can’t Vancouver have this type of a cake store (or more if there is already)?

Yes, I quite like cake and desserts, in case you have forgotten. ^^;;

I also wanted to talk about fandom stuff (yes, totally irrelevant). There’s so muck K-Pop and J-Pop everywhere! There’s a lot of CNBLUE, SHINee, NEWS, ARASHI, KAT-TUN, etc. Large Super Junior posters at 2/5 of all CD/Record stores, and some were so large they span the whole wall (You can insert fangirly flailing here if you could see that happening).

It’s so weird for me to know so many of the songs they play on the streets / in the stores. At the record store I was shopping at yesterday played lots of SUJU. The records store across the street from my hotel was playing CNBLUE’s Bluetory, and I definitely heard SUJU at many other places too. But you’re not actually interested in my fangirling, so that concludes my posting about Taipei.

Next stop, Fukuoka.

By fishii with 1 comment

Jiu Fen

I was going to make a post on this wonderful teahouse in Jiu Fen (九份), about how their service is absolutely stunning, how they teach you how to brew the tea in the perfect way, and how their cheesecake is delicious, but I found a post that's already floating around on the internet! I wouldn't be able to describe it better than them, so I'll just lead you right over to their blog. I'll supplement it slightly with a photo of my own, I guess.

(Sorry, you'll be plagued with my bad photography...)

The teahouse was really traditional in all senses, and it offered a good view if you chose to sit on the balcony... bu tI didn't, so there isn't much I can talk about in terms of the view. However, because Jiu Fen is situated higher up on the mountain, the view is quite captivating, to say the least. You can see layers and layers of mountains melting into the horizon. Picturesque is as close as I can get to describing it.

Another thing that I really enjoyed in this little town...? of Jiu Fen was the taro balls! I have this thing for all things sweet and glutinous (and thus fattening =.=;;) and taro balls are both of those! I went to the one that's supposed to be the "original" called Lai Ah Po Taro Balls (賴阿婆芋圓). It was good, they put lots of ice in it, but the beans make the melted ice sweet and perfect for a hot summer day.

That was pretty much all the exciting food stuff for today? I have nothing much to say, do I? I wanted to mention that Super Junior (yes, again) can be seen quite often, with their large posters at 1/5 of all CD stores here. Arnold reported that he heard the new song on the streets, over the sounds of construction. Too bad I missed it that time. I also really enjoy hearing songs that I know everywhere. It's fun!

Oh did anyone else know that Show Luo is an international mega star? No? I didn't either.

By fishii with No comments