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/