Adieu San Francisco....

Or should I say... till we meet again my dear city by the sea.

It's been about a month since I started my 4 month break from San Francisco. It's not long, but for some reason I felt like I had to get through some restaurants on my list before it's too late.

Anyway, the result of that was that I ended up trying a whole lot of new places, and revisited some good old ones in my last month in SF. Of course none of them made it to this blog, it's not my fault I'm lazzy!

So, here's my attempt to update you with little tidbits on all these amazing places I went to, and what I would recommend.

Xanh - This is a French-Vietnamese restaurant in Mountain View. The place is huge! It's very modern and chic-looking, with a nice bar/lounge area out front. The drinks menu is pretty extensive and they have some very interesting cocktails. I played safe and got the lychee martini - with extra lychees of course!

I was really impressed with the food at Xanh - they had a lot of the standard asian menu options like papaya salad, but also had some unique items. We had the grapefruit salad - tofu, pineapple, grapefruit in a nice, tangy sauce. For entrees we got the Clay Pot with some coconut rice - the Clay Pot was ok, just a large piece of tofu with some sauce, I've definitely had better. But, the other entree, an eggplant dish (no I did not eat the eggplant!) was a big hit around the table.

Dessert was another highlight... we ordered a couple of things that looked almost too pretty to eat. I'm glad we ate it though :) because both were really yummy! I forget what they are called, but have photos up, one of they looks like a pyramid and is named something like that too.

In a nutshell... Xanh is a great restaurant to go with a group, or for a date, especially if you are in the South Bay!

I'm back :)

After a very long hiatus.. just like the fog in San Francisco. I think it's poetic that all the time that I was on a break from blogging, there was also no fog in the city... hehe.

Apologies to all you sweet, sweet people that actually take the time to read my ramblings about restaurants in San Francisco. Arun, I didn't stop eating :) I just haven't been to any places that made me go - " I have to blog about this!"

So, what made me go - "I have to blog about this!"? It's Le Colonial, a French-Vietnamese place in Nob Hill. Ashish and me were hanging out last evening wondering what to do to kill time between watching Kedar's band play in the evening, and a pub crawl at night, and we thought, why not go have a nice, fancy dinner in some neighborhood we're never hung out in... so, no Mission, no Marina, no Haight. After 'yelp'ing around for a bit, we made a reservation on opentable, and we were set!

Both Ashish and me were kicked that we actually managed to get a reservation on a Saturday night at this really popular restaurant, but we got there and I realized why - this place is huge! Like 2 floors and multiple dining rooms huge! And fancy - so if you plan to go, dress up!

The cocktail list looked pretty interesting, although we decided to skip ordering drinks (in preparation for the long night of drinking that lay ahead of us). Straight to appetizers then, we ordered the vegetarian spring rolls, the fresh, non-fried kind with a yummy peanut dipping sauce. Wiped that out in a minute and we were ready for our main course. I have to say that the menu leans heavily toward meat and fish dishes. Everything looked great though... our server was really sweet and pointed out everything that they could make vegetarian. We ended up ordering the sticky rice with coconut sauce, a mango-potato-tofu curry, and asparagus in garlic sauce. The food was in one word - awesome! It reminded me why I think the whole restaurant dining experience is so much fun, and more importantly, got me to start writing my blog again :) The flavors we re just right, the sticky rice was this interesting sweet/savory combination. The asparagus was nice and tender, and the curry had just the right level of spice.

We were so full at the end of dinner that I almost did the unthinkable - I was going to skip dessert. Thankfully, sanity prevailed and we ordered the flourless Vietnamese chocolate cake. Yummmmmmmy!!! If you go to Le Colonial, and have one thing on their menu, have this! It looked so pretty when our waitress brought it out, that I almost didn't want to cut into it, but one bite was all it took to change my mind. Ashish and me pretty much devoured the cake, it was warm, and moist and just sweet enough - oooh, just writing about it now is making me crave some more.

In case you guys are wondering, no pub crawling happened last night for me... we went to one pub, and then I crawled straight into bed, dreaming about fancy people, curry and decadent vietnamese chocolate cake.

http://www.lecolonialsf.com/index_flash.html