Dinner at breakneck speed!

I'm going to write an extremely rushed and succinct review of Suriya Thai in the Mission. This is only fair considering that this is probably the quickest dinner I have ever ordered and eaten.

We got there on a Saturday night after Lit Crawl, 10 minutes before closing. We knew that we would have to decide our orders quickly - but we had no idea how quickly. The server was literally around our necks forcing us to order quickly. With so much pressure, of course we ended up ordering too much, and definitely waaay to much tofu. No sonner had we ordered our food, that it started appearing at such a fast pace, I'm sure these guys set the record for the fastest service ever! In the next 5 minutes every single dish we had ordered was on the table, and the kitchen was closed! If this was a relationship, it would be one of those definitely headed towards disaster for moving too fast!

The rest of dinner was a blur - the pace had been set, and we ate dinner at breakneck speed too, in case they made us leave the restuarant in the next 5 minutes because they wanted to close up. Anyway, half an hour later, and with the feeling of being spun around too fast we left Suriya Thai - a little dizzy, and convinced that some places are just better for take-out.

Vegetarian sushi?

I love sushi - it's weird coming from a vegetarian's mouth, but true. I always think how fortunate I am to live in San Francisco with so many restaurants that cater to, or atleast recognize vegetariansm. And I have not one, but two favorite sushi places that have so many vegetarian options that you feel like a kid in a candy shop.

The first one is Cha-ya, there was a point when I ate here so often, I guess because it only serves vegetarian food. Here was a place that I could eat, literally everything on the menu ( and I'm saying this because they don't have a single dish that has eggplant in it... hehe). So, I have my staples at Cha-ya that I would recommend to anyone - start with the miso soup and an order of the gyoza for appetizers. Next, order some rolls to share, I love the kappa rolls, the Shattuck and the tempura rolls. I also loooove the Cha-ya Delight, it's this wholesome hearty rice dish, with almost spice or salt, but it is still so flavorful. I don't know what it is about this dish, when it's served to you it looks like a bunch of boiled vegetables sitting on a bed of brown rice - almost too healthy looking to be tasty. But one bite of it and you know you were so wrong in judging this awesome dish - the vegetables are cooked to perfection, I think they marinate them in something because although there is no visible sign of spices, there is a certain subtle flavor to them. Moving on... the only thing I haven't had at Cha-ya is dessert, I'm usually so full and happy by the time I'm done with dinner that I never have room for dessert - and I think all their dessert options have B-fruit in them :)

So my second vegertatian-friendly sushi place is one that I recently discovered thanks to Siddharth. It's called Minako, and is in a pretty grimy part of the Mission. This place has attitude! And I mean that in a good way. As soon as you enter the small space, the individualism of the owners and the patrons is evident - the menu has caricatures and poems wirtten over the years by customers of the restaurant. That's a pretty novel concept according to me. The menu is pretty exhaustive - in addition to the regular menu, they had this little board on every table with 10 specials for the day. Pretty cool! So anyway, I was pretty impressed with how much character this place had... but what about the food?

It was a tough choice deciding between so many vegetarian and fish options (Minako is not an only-veg sushi place, but it still has more than enough vegetarian options). We ended up ordering the almond encrusted tofu, seaweed salad, gyoza, kappa rolls (of course), and my favorite - the vegetarian spicy eel roll. The soup is entirely passable - so don't order that. Instead the sushi options and the noodle options are safer bets. The fish-eaters on the table ordered some hamachi and Ashish's usual inari. Overall I think everyone was really happy with the food - we ordered too much, but surprisingly finished almost everything. I think the highlight for me though was the personalized touches - the menus with the customer drawings, the owner (?) of the place who chatted with us after dinner, and the little metal board with smart comments and the specials of the day. This is the kind of place you want to be a regular at - if only it was closer to home.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/cha-ya-vegetarian-japanese-restaurant-san-francisco
http://www.yelp.com/biz/minako-organic-japanese-restaurant-san-francisco

Chez Panisse Cafe

This is completely inexcusable - that I would go to Chez Panisse Cafe for lunch more than a month ago and not blog about it. It is just the cafe we are talking about, but still - it is associated with Alice Waters, the pioneer of Californian cuisine. Better late than never I guess, so I'm going o try my best to remember the fine nuances that make this restaurant and the food as famous as it is.

Chez Panisse Cafe is on the second floor of a beautiful house in Berkeley. The lower level houses the California landmark restaurant - Chez Panisse. Maybe I'll go there for a special dinner someday.. but on that Saturday it was the girls and me, mere mortals out for brunch at the cafe upstairs. According to Grace, Alice Waters herself showed us to our seats. I both want and don't want this to be true. Can you imagine meeting someone famous and not showing a glimmer of recognition or respect towards them? So, anyway, I had really high expectations of this place. the dinner menu looked scrumptuous, and had lots of veggie options, so I was looking for something similar with the lunch menu. I have to say, the lunch menu was not half as exciting as the dinner menu - there was nothing vegetarian, just one dish with poached eggs. So I ended up asking for the chicken pasta minus the chicken, of course the choices for the non-veg entrees were stellar, the meat tender and the vegetables all looked as fresh and organic as ever. We shared a baby romaine salad with avocados as an appetizer and that was delish!!

I guess I'm committing an act of blashpemy by even implying that my food that day was not the best - I wonder if I'm even allowed to think that. But, I'm going to attribute it to the fact that I imposed this bad food on myself by asking for a dish which was clearly designed to be a meat dish to be converted to one with vegetables. Thank God the menu keeps changing so I think the next time I will definitely be more than happy with my food. What was beyond any measure of greatness though was the dessert. Oh My God!!!! I wished that I had only eaten dessert for my entire meal. btw, a little bit of trivia - did you know that there is a restaurant in Barcelona where they serve only dessert, this is not a dessert shop, it's a restaurant where the actual dinner entrees are sweet. How awesome is that! Anyway, back to the dessert at Chez Panisse - we ordered two to share between the four of us - a chocolate brownie, and honey ice-cream with toasted figs. I almost can't complete writing this entry because my mind is stuck craving a bite of that ice-cream and figs.... waaah, I want! Oh well, I guess all good things must come to an end, and we literally licked off every last morsel of what was on the plate and headed out complete satiated (with me deciding that I couldn't wait to blog about this place and the dessert). And we all know how much I couldn't wait :)