Heurism

Please find below a quick recap of food/eats from the trip bin and I took to the bay area last weekend. Yeah, I knew you’d be interested….

Sat:

Ferry Building: We arrived too late to partake of the many food trucks (sorry Tom) that are usually there on Saturday (some rather severe traffic coming in over the bridge). We did, however, hit up the Slanted Door for drinks and appetizers. The food was amazing and the drinks citrusy and well thought out. We’ll be going back here I think.

Elephant and Castle Pub: Meh. Gross.

Sunday:

Mifune Don: bin had been on the look0ut for SF okonomiyaki since visiting Japan years ago. Yelp recommend this place. Mifune Don (not to be confused with Mifune) is in the smaller portion of the Peace Plaza in Japantown. It’s a tiny little place that features some classic Japanese food. We had some delicious tempura shrimp and the amazing okonomiyaki which is a rice flower pancake topped with cabbage, seafood, crisp noodles, sauce, and more sauce served in a skillet. Wow. I was totally blown away. I’m SOLD!

Cafe Zoetrope: Francis Ford Coppola’s little cafe in the financial district. We had a prosciutto pizza which was pretty damn good (I mean…how wrong can you go with prosciutto pizza?) and some really damn lovely wine. We got to make fun of the couples next to us who came in to a wine cafe and ordered a Mai Tai. Not great, but good…and wonderful atmosphere and a place to just hang out and take in the city.

Bourbon and Branch: A speakeasy smack dab in the middle of the tenderloin district. You have to have a reservation (email only, please) and the password for the night. Otherwise, you aren’t getting in. The club is nicely decorated and the aura is interesting…but to be frank I was a bit disappointed. The service was horrible. You’d think that a place serving super high-end cocktails would be constantly coming by to refill your drink, but that wasn’t the case. The waitress really pushed the Valentine’s Day menu (I mean REALLY pushing it) so bin and I had some. Mine was really rather tasty. We finished up with a flight of Irish Whiskeys including a “peated” version which did, indeed, taste like camping. Truth be told, the Chapel does just as good a job of combining high end liquors and home made concoctions into tasty cocktails…with less pretension, lower prices, and much better service.

El Sol Taqueria: Hot damn. This is a hole in the wall a block’s stumble away from the Bourbon and Branch. We had the hugest plate of hot, delicious chicken nachos ever and a beer for 8 bucks. Easily the best Mex food I’ve ever had in SF.

bin’s Bradley Collins in our room: bin is perfecting her version of the Applejack based Bradley Collins. It’s a thing of beauty.

Monday:

Ton Kiang: All the way out Geary in Richmond is Ton Kiang…home for reasonably priced dim sum. Good lord I always walk away from this place pleasantly stuffed. Shrimp and scallop, shrimp and shrimp, shrimp and chive, pot stickers….mmmm. Highly recommended.

All in all, we were totally blissed out with food and booze. Can’t wait to go back.

It’s been forever since I really read comic books, but I’m still a fan of the genre. I played the heck out of City of Heroes the MMORPG. And now, from some of those same folks, comes the next logical iteration. Champions Online, based on the ’80s pencil and paper RPG is going to be released in September. It looks fantastic and I await it with baited breath. This video makes me all giddy fan-boy inside.

I don’t get to do as much computer gaming as I once did, but I will admit to being pretty excited about All Points Bulletin. APB is an MMORPG centered around the ancient cops n’ robbers formula. It looks vaguely like a first person shooter with a ton of personalization options. The character customization system strikes about every computer gaming fun button I have. I can only hope that the game is any good. The cops n’ robbers thing is near and dear to my heart, being raised, as I was, in a time when playing with toy guns was accepted and not a way to get shot by actual law enforcement. I had the most complete selection of toy guns in the neighborhood and was the go to guy for all your childhood gunplay needs.

Link – game site

Link – video of the character customization system

I’ll preface this post by saying I’ve only had Dim Sum twice. So, I guess that makes me a complete amateur. Regardless of my amateur status, I had some delicious Dim Sum yesterday. In Reno!

bin and I, accompanied by Miss C and Mr. T, ventured to CaiE’s (note the weird cap E at the end there) for brunch. Weekdays they have an all you can eat Dim Sum with a very limited menu. On Weekends they have a not all you can eat menu with quite a bit more variety. We tried a vast variety of things. Listed here are my favorites:

Salt and Pepper Shrimp: I could eat several pounds of this. Deep fried shrimp with jalapenos, battered and fried garlic, and salt. Amazing.

Shrimp Har Gow: Steamed shrimp dumplings. Simple and amazingly tasty.

Shrimp and Chive pockets steamed then lightly fried. Delicious.

If you go, don’t expect the standard Dim Sum experience. Food is ordered off a menu, not off cute little trolleys, and the place was almost sedate and quiet. Very nice actually. I’ll most certainly be going back, and Mr. T and I might take in the weekday lunch menu just to compare.

Having my own domain is pretty swank but I’m find the care/maintenance/feeding of an actual wordpress.org setup (as opposed to the wordpress.com freeness) is a bit wonky. God my tech skills are out of practice. Sad, huh?