San Francisco has a lot of great food, and more restaurants than we could possibly visit. Over the past month or so we’ve tried a couple more and returned to a couple of our favorites.
While MJ was working in the city, I finally got to visit Hakkasan, an upscale Cantonese restaurant. They have an array of delicious entrees, but their “small eats” and dim sum are exceptional. The food is also beautiful, upon receiving our first round of dishes, including the amazing Crispy prawn with mango, MJ asked where I wanted to start. “I want to start by taking a picture of my food!”
Our new dining adventures continued with a visit to Tadich Grill, arguably “the oldest continuously running restaurant in San Francisco” (via wikipedia). The place started out as a coffee stand in 1849 and has changed names and owners, making their “oldest” claim a bit tenuous, but however you count, it is an old place by San Francisco standards and they’ve been in their current location since 1967. They don’t take reservations, and we came in around 9PM and still had about a half hour wait along with the crowd that was mostly tourists. We were finally seated as one of the last seatings of the evening. They specialize in seafood dishes, and the wait staff where all wearing white jackets, looking pretty formal. The appetizers and entrees didn’t blow me away, but it was a decent seafood. What did make me happy was dessert, they have a solid carrot cake, which I’m not used to finding in San Francisco. Paired with a Claiborne & Churchill 2014 Dry Gewürztraminer, it was a perfect ending to the evening. As a bonus, it made me explore Claiborne & Churchill’s wines, and their selection of sweet wines is really nice, I’ve ordered a Port, a couple of their Muscats and of course some more Gewürztraminer.
We also recently joined friends for a dinner at Lazy Bear, which we first went to in December. As I wrote then, the seating is family style and they serve a fixed tasting menu. This time I also did the wine pairing, which was totally worth it, they had a really nice list of wines and the portions were nicely timed with the dishes.
Going to Lazy Bear is always an experience, more photos from the evening here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157669411350191
Last, but the most important, we went back to Jardiniere to celebrate our third wedding anniversary… a couple months late. I was traveling on our actual anniversary at the end of April, and then between trips and general being busy, it took until July to actually get reservations and settle on the evening. It was nice to finally go out to celebrate together. They have a variety of French inspired dishes that I love, but they prepare an amazing rare wagyu both proper the Japanese Wagyu, and American. We got one of each, along with a lovely dessert.
