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!

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 :)

Kasa

Who would have thought that some day you could get kathi rolls right here in San Francisco?!? Kasa is his new (ok, it's not new any more, I just took a long time getting there) Indian place in the Castro that I've been meaning to try out forever - and finally one Saturday night I convinced Judy and Karen that we should go there for our neighbors night out together.

Boy, was it a good call! First off the place was pretty empty, which was surprising because I had heard such good things about it. But I liked the ambience of the place - it's very clean, industrial looking with lots of metal everywhere, staple Indian B&W pictures on the walls.


A kathi roll, for the uninformed, is an "Indian burrito" (as the cute American guy behind the counter pointed out) . I was seriously impressed with him though when he asked me if I wanted an "anda" kathi roll - anda means egg, but he didn't just say egg, he said anda. Bonus points for that!

Kasa's menu is pretty simple - meaning they have about 5 different options for the filling of your roll. The veggie options are paneer and masala aloo (potato). They also have the usual meat options like chicken tikka, kebabs etc. So, pretty simple, you pick what you want in your roll, you decide if you want anda in your roll, or if you didn't want a roll at all you could just get a thali, which is an open kathi roll with rice, raita and dal.


We ended up ordering 3 kathi rolls and a thali and sharing it. It was sooooo good! Ok I am running out of things to say - so I'll stop rambling and conclude by saying that Kasa is great if you are looking for a cheap, clean, healthy (?), quick meal. Not exactly a date place.. but it's a great place to chill out with your friends (or neighbors, if they are as nice as mine :)).

http://www.kasaindian.com/