I can’t not even believe the number of restaurants in this city alone, not to mention the ones we have eaten at in wine country! I think we are already planning a trip back here in early November. I know there is a Food Buzz waiting list, but we were told that early November is gorge in Napa, so I may just come out anyway, see if I could grab a drink with some of you, then head up to wine country for some autumn wine drinking 🙂 More on that later, after we look at the financial damage of this trip! For our first dinner in San Francisco, I booked a little Mexican restaurant that I found on Open Table, a site that I sometimes seem to live on 🙂 Colibri was only a few blocks from our hotel, off of Union Square, and it was adorable. It is always a good sign to me when I see a restaurant packed with people in work clothes. If locals are flocking there after work, one would hope the place is good! 
We started with the house made guacamole. They actually make it to order, so you can choose your level of spiciness. We chose medium, and it had a nice little kick. It was served with the BEST tortillas ever. Not the chips you see in the basket, which we were also good, but the hot, fluffy, homemade corn tortillas kind of hidden by my water glass. They were so warm and pillowy soft that I really can not imagine store bought tortillas ever again. I just need to learn how to make my own. The guac was chunky with excellent flavors of fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers. We devoured this bowl over the course of the meal. It wasn’t as deep as it looks! We ended up splitting a bunch of appetizers as we often do. We ordered the fish tacos, the jicama salad, and Colibri’s famous Tamales Oaxaqueños with their legendary mole sauce. The fish tacos were my absolute favorite, with lightly breaded tender fish, onion, cilantro, and pineapple. They also served us 3 ramekins of various salsas, one of which was pineapple. I feel as though the pineapple made all the difference in making this dish really stand out. It brought the flavors together and gave them zing! The tamales were interesting, in a good way. The flavors were definitely intense, the tamales themselves were soft and full of chicken, and the mole just had a complexity that I liked most of the time, but found almost too sweet at other times. This would definitely be a dish I would order again, I think I need a second round to decide! For dessert we saw that Colibri served caramel-filled churros rellenos. Our Brazilian waiter at Upstairs on the Square told us about this deliciousness from his homeland, so we had to try them! 
Hot, crispy, filled with real caramel, not the grocery store, cloying stuff! Topped with dulce de leche ice cream. I am so glad that I found Colibri and that we were able to get a reservation. The food was top notch, our server was sweet and accommodating, and the prices were totally reasonable which was key as you will soon learn about our wine country splurges! I would definitely go back to Colibri next time I visit San Francisco which I hope will be soon! I am off to enjoy our last day here, but I can assure you that this is just the beginning of my CA recap. Question- do you prefer to read long posts about multiple things or shorter ones that zoom in on one event, like this one? I have so much to write about this week (ha, very unusual!), and sometimes I hate going on and on. Just curious to see what your reading styles are. Enjoy the rest of your Labor Day!
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Tags: Food, San Francisco
Hi everyone and Happy Sunday! I am psyched to have another day off to hang out with my hubby. I can’t tell you how nice it has been being able to devote time to each other alone, without housework or work or family around. We are off exploring Napa today, but I wanted to tell you about some of our trip so far.
Right after checking into our lovely hotel, we needed lunch like never before. As always, I had done a lot of research on the restaurant offerings in the area, and I knew where I wanted to go. There was no time for photos along the way, it was mission food.
We only had to walk a few blocks before we reached Market Bar. Located in the Ferry Building, Market Bar has a beautiful outdoor eating area, and we scored a nice table that was partially shaded.
One of my favorite vacation-y things to do is to order a drink at lunch. A pint of the local Anchor Steam while people watching was the perfect choice, and it went down smoothly and deliciously.
With many glasses of water. . . flying dehydrates me SO much!
Lunch was a no brainer. We had actually decided on the fresh seafood platter for two before we even arrived.
Lobster, shrimp, oysters, and Dungeness crab, along with crusty French bread and butter. The seafood was incredibly fresh and cold. I usually do not like West Coast oysters, but then again I never had them on the West coast. We had local Hog Island as well as Kumamoto oysters, and I loved them both. Much smaller than East coast oysters, but juicy, briny, and plump with flavor. The crab was my favorite though, it was meaty and tasted of the sea. The beer was a perfect accompaniment, and we were quite satisfied after our meal.
After lunch we walked along the Embarcadero and enjoyed the sun and not having to be anywhere.
The Bay Bridge
The heavenly market outside of the Ferry Building. There is something about beautiful, colorful vegetables and flowers in the sunshine that brings me so much joy.
However, the highlight of my afternoon was these guys:
Pier 39 is home to hundreds of sea lions, and we watched them for quite awhile. They are hilarious! They bark, they swim, they argue, and they are so cute! After standing in the hot sun, we needed a refresher, so we headed to Pier 39’s San Francisco Coffee. The iced vanilla latte that I had was the best coffee I have had in a long time. The coffee was perfectly roasted, rich, buttery, and not bitter at all. I wish they had one of these in Boston!
We headed inland after our coffee treat and started walking some of San Francisco’s famous hills. What an awesome workout! I love walking a lot when I travel and trying to see everything by foot.
We found this delightful candy shop, Z Cioccolato in North Beach.
The entire store was filled with the sound and aroma of freshly popped caramel popcorn.When I found out that it was $1 a bag, I had to have some! It was as good as it smelled, sweet and crunchy with a soft buttery caramel. The store offered so many different types of candy; the taffy display was pretty and colorful!
The walk back to our hotel included Little Italy, which is HUGE! All of the cafe’s and pastry shops were tempting, but we were pretty full and planning on a big dinner so we kept going and made it back to the hotel in time for the hosted wine hour.
The hotel was having a Chagall exhibit and was serving French wine, whose name I unfortunately didn’t get. I did have a cool glass of white rather than my usual red, and it was the perfect way to relax and unwind after walking miles.
I hope you are enjoying a nice long weekend. My next post will definitely delve more into the food and wine scene here in San Francisco and in Sonoma Valley.
Don’t forget to leave me an ingredient comment on my Chopped challenge post, and to link to it on your own blog if you decide to participate! I will randomly choose 3 ingredients on Saturday and will do my shopping, brainstorming, and cooking on Sunday.
See you again soon! 🙂
Tags: Food, San Francisco, Travel, vacation
Hello from a zillion feet (36245 really) over Nebraska! Can I just tell you that I spent the morning eating cheese and grapes with iced coffee and blogging from the air and loving it? Its only been a little while, but so far Virgin America totally rocks. And the ticket was super cheap. This morning was kind of a blur. I never sleep well when I have a morning flight for fear that I’ll miss it, so I was up and out of bed playing with the kitties just around sunrise. Wanting to use up a lot of food around the house, I made big ol Green Monsters with spinach, tons of strawberries, 2 bananas, flaxseed, and vanilla soy milk. They were yummy and kept us full until now, where we easily used the touch screen at our seats to order food and bevvies and paid right there with a credit card.
Easy touch screen ordering
Travel Eat Love’s first flight!
Gotta tell ya, I love these modern conveniences 😉 We planned perfectly so that we had just enough time to get through security with a few minutes to spare. On the way to the gate I stopped to snap a photo of the Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts shops which are side by side. I am DEFINITELY a Starbucks fan over Dunkin. I know in Massachusetts thats pretty much sacrilege but the hubs and I call Dunkin “Dirty Dunkin”. I swear I think that sometimes their coffee is like water and dirt mixed together. But to each her/his own!
The whole airport thing usually makes me a little bit cranky and definitely brings about a few of my pet peeves. Since Sophia wrote a post on pet peeves yesterday, I think I was even more focused on these things that annoy me while traveling. I have gotten MUCH better about letting go of annoyances, but still, i wonder if people just thought a bit more, things could run a lot more smoothly. . .
1) Some people like to stand on escalators. I don’t. If stairs are an option, then I take them, but there is nothing that annoys me more than the people who get on the escalator, hold on to both handrails, and chill for the several minutes it can take to go up. Europeans stand on the right, walk on the left, and it works like a charm. Everyone gets to travel up to the next level the way they would like, and everybody is happy. This especially irks me when I am heading down an escalator to the subway and the TRAIN IS THERE.
2) In the security line, there are people telling you to remove your shoes, laptop, belt, change etc. There are also a variety of lovely signs and/or screens that serve as a reminder. Alas you don’t need to wait until you are actually up AT the x-ray machine to start doing these things. Standing in a long line? Take your coat off and start preparing. Traveling with a flock of small children? Help them get ready to go through!
3) Once you go through security, don’t set up shop an inch from where your bag comes out. People and bags are coming behind you. I like to grab my little plastic tray and step over to a bench on the side to repack, put my shoes on, and allow the dozens of people behind me to make their flights on time.
4) If you are traveling with children, watch them. Now, this view of mine might be a little harsh seeming, but I am a firm believer in your child being your responsibility and sometimes, problem. Some children maybe aren’t meant to travel. Some parents too. I have 8 nieces and nephews who have been across the ocean more times than most adults. Our families are spread out from Boston to Bologna which means kids travel from infancy. Sometimes they misbehave, yes, but their parents are uber stocked with toys, snacks, games, puzzles, coloring books, pacifiers, pillows, jammies, DVD’s, you name it. If you are a parent and are traveling with your children, don’t let them spend 4 hours kicking the seat in front of them. If they are screaming at the top of their lungs, at least try to stop them. I kid you not, I once flew on a night flight from Dublin to Tunisia, and the mother put a sleep mask on and earplugs in while her 4 year old shrieked and the father stared sheepishly at the child. . . for 4 hours.
Also, please do not let them turn around and spit in someone’s face. Yes. This happened to me. Last year on an Aer Lingus flight from Boston to Shannon, before takeoff, a child actually turned around in the seat in front of me and spat on my face. And his mother called him a “bold boy” and did not apologize. The lovely air hostess moved us to the front of the plane where we each had our own empty row, and we never had to see the little beast again. I am pretty sure my name pulls up a code or something with the airlines that says “seat her in front of a screaming family of 6” because it happens pretty much every single time I fly.
Do you have certain things that really annoy you when you travel?
I am grateful for the opportunity to be traveling at all, but sometimes things could easily be a bit more organized and everyone pitched in!
Moving on from my traveling rant. . . 🙂
Writing out my peeves actually made me feel a little less stressed! As this post has been written over the course of a few hours, we have had lunch. Sure we could have packed our own food, and I did bring bananas, Adora disks, and Amazing Grass, but I just love the full airplane experience. Lunch was more seltzer and a turkey Florentine wrap that we shared. Delicious! It was chock full of good roasted turkey, loads of fresh spinach, red and yellow peppers, and artichoke hearts. Score again for Virgin America!
Tasted better than it looked!
Seltzer fiend
The hubs working two laptops, doing Masters’ homework. Randomly enough the guy in the plaid in the next row is my neighbor’s brother. Small world!
I am going to sign off now to maybe watch the film Corked on Netflix. I always wondered about super long flights like to Australia, but I must say, if I could purchase internet access, I think I would be all set! I am totally enjoying having nothing to do but read blogs, news, and fun San Francisco facts (and checking a bit of work email :()
See ya’ll soon!
Tags: Food, San Francisco, Travel
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