Flour + Water

What is with all these new pizza places opening up in the Mission? First there was Beretta, and now Flour + Water which has the same concept. Gourmet Italian food and thin crust pizzas.

We went to Flour + Water as part of my extended birthday celebrations. After Radio Africa Kitchen on Friday, my girl friends took me to Flour+Water on Saturday. This is why your birthday should fall on a weekend :) Apparently this place is crazy popular, the only reservation they had available was for 10:30 pm. So, we decided to try out luck and show up there anyway, since they hold half their tables for walk-ins.

We were seated pretty promptly, and our server was this really sweet Asian girl. I think we were starving... we ordered a salad with avocado, marinated beans and some kind of lettuce, two margherita pizzas and two pastas - between 3 girls. In our defense though, the pasta was tiny, and the pizzas really thin, and Grace was hungry after her triathlon. Anyway... the food was pretty good, I think the pizzas at Beretta are better, but the pastas were good. I think the highlight of the meal for me was dessert - no surprise there :) We got a pistachio and honey kulfi kind of thing, with cherries... quite delicious.

So... I don't know what I think of Flour+Water. It didn't impress me so much that I'm dying to go back, but it didn't unimpress me so much that I wouldn't go back.

http://flourandwater.com/

The best restaurant in San Francisco!!!

Or atleast one of the best.... there is only one word to describe Radio Africa Kitchen - AWESOME!!! RAK has been on my radar for atleast two years and so when my friends said they would take me out for dinner there to celebrate my birthday I jumped at the opportunity. Why did I wait this long? Well... to start with I thought that the style of dining was communal, so you had to have a large enough group to be able to go there (I was wrong, or maybe thats how Chef Eskender Aseged started it?), and then the menu changes weekly so I was waiting for a menu with some great veggie options. As if on cue... the menu for my birthday had a fantasy of vegetables with beets, carrots, lentil and basmati rice... yummy.

RAK is a nomadic kitchen, it's open only on Thursday and Friday at Coffee Bar - awesome coffee shop during the day, restaurant at night. The place has a really cool, industrial vibe to it. It's not a date place - the noise levels are so loud that they could compare to Beretta. But it is a great place to go with a large group of people, because then you can do what we did - order family style :) The menu is pretty limited, and the familiy style prix fixe menu of $35 per person had more than enough food for everyone and let us get a sample of everything on the menu. And trust me, you want to try every single thing on the menu.

Our dinner started off with tartine bread and edamame hummus, an arugula and feta salad, and a couple of fish dishes that I don't quite remember. The next course was barley and mushroom soup. At this point everyone was already blown away by the food, and the entrees only got better. We had a lamb dish, a fish dish (I should really get a meat eater to co-author my blog, I am doing no justice at all to all the meat dishes which were apparently quite spectacular), and the vegetable fantasy I mentioned before. By the end of the main course we were all so full that dessert looked iffy - but one look at the thin slice of chocolate cake and the hibiscus cream soda (I know... how exotic!) and we all knew we were going to eat dessert even if it made us explode.

So, there you have it... after four courses of some pretty amazing food, we dragged ourselves out of there completely stuffed and satiated.

http://www.radioafricakitchen.com/

Beretta

Beretta has been the talk of the Mission restaurant scene for the past several months. I've walked past it so many times and thought to myself - why on earth is this restaurant so crowded? I knew I had to try it myself to figure out if it was worth all the hype. And I did just that - twice in one week. I guess I really liked it :)

So what is it about this place that has people willing to wait over an hour for a table?!? Well to start with they have amazing amazing cocktails, with some very unique names. I had the Airmail - gin, lime, cane juice topped with bitters. That was one good cocktail, so good in fact that I had it when I went back the second time.

On to the food now - nice cocktails are all good, but the most important thing about any restaurant is the food. And beretta does food well! The menu is Italian, lots of small plates, a few salads, risottos, but the thin crust pizzas are definitely the star of the show. If you think Delfina's pizza is awesome, you are absolutely going to love the pizza here. I highly recommend the pizza with the spicy marinara and pepperoncini - it's the most amazingly simple, tangy, spicy, flavor in each bite pizza. The funghi one is pretty good too. And did you know that egg on pizza tastes awesome - who would have thought? Ok so there's all this good food and all these great cocktails, but in these tough economic times (I just had to throw that in :)) the question is "Is dinner here going to burn a hole in my pocket?" The answer to that is "somewhat" - beretta is definitely not a cheap eat, but 30 buks could get you a couple of drinks and a filling meal. Thats not so bad i think. And if you share with friends even better!

So far everything sounds perfect, doesn't it? There is a but though - there always is. It's the noise - don't even think of going here if you want to have a conversation with the person you are with. So first dates are a complete no-no here. This restaurant is loud! I mean lip reading loud - theres music blaring, people talking, people shouting, you get the picture.

In summary, beretta is definitely worth a visit, my tip though is to either get there really early or really late. It'll save you from the extremely long wait and may also spare your ear drums from getting blown off!