I'm back! Back from a honeymoon in San Francisco with my new wife, Mary, and just in time for a new Vampire's Lair.
I've visited this great city many, many times. This was
Mary's first time there and she loved it. Tourism is the
city's number one revenue-producer and it shows. Everywhere
we went, the people (not the tourists) were friendly and
helpful. This is a place we'll be going back to
again and again for many years to come. Here are some
details of our vacation...
We arrived at San Francisco early Monday afternoon on June 23. We walked from our hotel in the theater district to the Financial District where we ate steak and lobster burritos at 360 Gourmet Burritos and a Jamba Juice drink for lunch. We walked through Chinatown and took a short cable car ride to Fisherman's Wharf where we visited the touristy museums, such as Ripley's Believe It Or Not, had tasty clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls at Boudin's Bakery, and shared an ice cream soda at the ice cream parlor at Ghirardelli Square.
Tuesday we had lunch at The St. Francis Cafe below The Franciscan (both have awesome Dungeness Crabs and cioppino and clam chowder soups in sourdough bread bowls), rented a wine red Chrysler Sebring convertible, toured the town, and drove down Route 1 stopping at four of the various beaches along the way to the Pigeon Point lighthouse, nothing but wind blowing through our hair and the stereo turned up to deafening levels. Around mid-afternoon, we headed back to the city and beyond, going across the bridge to Sausalito where we had one of our week's best seafood dinners at Scoma's. We started with the most excellent Dungeness Crab cakes and, for entrees, I had a light and tender salmon filet and Mary had some succulent garlic shrimps mixed with sauteed veggies.
Kalina's Educational Tip of the Day: Dungeness Crabs are indigenous to Alaska, Oregon, and Northern California. No other crab rivals its sweet, delicate taste. A wonderful appetizer, or a meal in itself. One crab comfortably serves one person.
After dinner, we drove around Sausalito and into Tiburon. It was late evening when we got back into the city, so we decided to drive down the twisty trail of Lombard Street. Fun! Some idiot in a pickup truck behind us tried to zip down the street faster than he should have and screeched all the way down. Someone told us about how a double-decker tour bus got stuck driving down Lombard Street one year. To get the bus "unstuck," the bus had to be cut in half and brought down the street in pieces.
Wednesday night, as a wedding gift, one of Mary's salon clients purchased us dinner at one of the city's best new restaurants called Hawthorne Lane. You know a place has got to be decent if it has a number of BMW's and Mercedes' docked in its parking strip. Started and run by two former chefs who partnered with Wolfgang Puck at Postrio's, Hawthorne Lane boasts cuisine that hints of a little bit of every major flavor style (French, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese) with just a little bit of Northern California flair thrown in for good measure.
There is plenty of atmosphere here. A restaurant reviewer described Hawthorne Lane aptly: "The cafe and bar, a room of almost Japanese like simplicity with hardwood floors, features picture windows and a repeating tree-branch motif in wrought iron. In the rear is the more opulent main dining area, dominated by the requisite exhibition kitchen and a huge spray of flowers set on twin golden marble tables in the center of the room."
Now let's begin by describing the food. The bread basket was phenomenal, boasting five different varieties of homemade bread, including buttermilk biscuits, a large motza/saltine cracker, slices of sourdough loaf, a wheat roll, and a white loaf with mushrooms embedded in the bread. A wine dude (for lack of a better term) helped us select a bottle of cabernet sauvignon for our meals. For appetizers, I had a bowl of seafood mushroom dumpling soup and Mary had softshell crabs that were wrapped in layers of different colored vegetables, made to resemble sushi. Both were excellent, although they should have included more than just two dumplings in my soup!
For entrees, I chose the grilled Sonoma lamb and Mary selected the Maine lobster atop homemade angel hair pasta. From the first to the last bite, the lamb was tender and tantalizing and easily ranked among the best of the veal and lamb dishes I've ever eaten (and I've eaten everywhere from the Le Bec Fin's to the Dillulo Centro's in Philadelphia). Mary enjoyed her dish equally. We finished our meal with a chocolate tort sitting on top of a design made with raspberry sauce. The word "Congratulations!" was spelled out in chocolate sauce on the outer rim of the dish and a card wishing us the same was presented to us from our generous benefactor from Philadelphia.
Thursday we took a Gray Line tour of the city. We ended going around many of the same places we had already seen, but our bus driver was cool and gave us interesting tidbits of information on each of the places we passed by. Our tour began through the Civic Center area and up Market Street to Twin Peaks for some awesome views of the city. Our next stop was the Golden Gate Park where we stopped for a little bit to see the Japanese Tea Gardens. We then passed by the Seven Sisters, the seven famous colored houses you see in all of the photo books of San Francisco. We trekked up to Seal Rock, went across the Golden Gate bridge to take a quick look at the city, and headed back to Fisherman's Wharf. The second part of our tour was a visit to Alcatraz Island, where we learned that Al Capone really didn't die there, the prisoners really did eat well, and how three prisoners escaped using highly unrealistic dummies. Were those guards snoozing or just plain dumb?
After our touring, we ate at Neptune's Palace for dinner, supposedly ranked as one of the top ten restaurants in the city, but don't you believe the hype. It's a tourist trap! The shrimp and scallop potstickers were good, but the Dungeness Crab cakes were kind of icky. We shared a Dungeness Crab for dinner, but it wasn't as "light and fluffy" as the place we ate at a couple of days ago. After dinner, we went to Underwater World, a cool-as-beans underwater planetarium and had dessert at Ghirardelli Square's ice cream parlor where we feasted on a Gold Rush sundae. We took a cable car back into town.
We toured the Wine Country via Gray Line on Friday, going to three different wineries, including the Franciscan and Viansa. Viansa is neat because they have this Italian market inside that sells interesting kinds of food. We bought several jars of apple butter, plum rum jam, and raspberry honey creme. You have not lived until you've try these confections! Also, if you ever take this tour, hopefully you'll get a bus driver named Vaughn. He was a really cool down-to-earth type of guy who has a surfer (cool, dude) attitude about him.
Later that night, we had dinner at The Stinking Rose, a North Beach restaraunt for lovers of garlic. I had the cioppino and Mary had the lasagna. Both were excellent! After plenty of mints and a change of clothes, we went to Kimo's on Polk and Pine Streets for their phenomenal drag show called En Drag. There were three shows at 9:00pm, 10:00pm, and 11:30pm. If you go, be sure to bring lots of dollar bills, because you will drool when you see the likes of Chablis, Montana, and Chandra, the latter of whom looks like a young Jayne Seymour (and winner of Miss Gay Youth in Denver)! "We hate her 'cuz she's young," was the statement made by more than one of the other performers.
Saturday we went to Yank Sing for dim sum (which we
don't recommend) and a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the
theater district called Cafe Mason. The food was
tolerable, but the decor ranked as one of the tackiest we've
seen yet. It seems as if several places were trying to mimic
that 50's diner kind of look, like Lori's and
Ruby's. Contrary to popular belief, Elvis is dead!
After dinner, we had seats right behind the orchestra seats
(I think they were called "second orchestra") to see Concetta
Tomei in George Bernard Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession" at
the American Conservatory Theater.
After our cultural event, we headed to The Sound Factory, supposedly one of the best dance clubs in the city according to a few of the underaged-looking kids that were there. It was a drip because they were playing guido music from 1989 on the main dance floor. The music in the Latin room was a little more interesting, but it attracted an older Latino crowd. Maybe the owners will get a clue that these two types of crowds don't exactly mix. Hmm... I have a feeling Hercules or even The Endup would have been better choices.
On Sunday, Market Street hosted the 27th Annual Gay Parade in San Francisco. Wow, what timing! We didn't even plan our trip around it! The parade featured a colorful assortment of drag queens and female impersonators, including queen of camp, Polly Esther. Although the actual parade was slated as being two hours long, the fun continued well into the evening hours.
We took a break from the parade in the middle of the day to visit Coit Tower with its panoramic views of the city. We then headed towards The Franciscan (above the St. Francis Cafe) for another dose of Dungeness Crabs, a far lighter and tastier treat than the overcooked, overbuttered crabs they served at Neptune's Palace a couple of nights before. We took a motorized cable car (it was a converted cable car with rubber tires that didn't need to run on the tracks) to Market Street and stopped into the mall complex that housed Nordstrom's.
Youch! With all that food, it's time to get in gear with my article on How to Lose Two Inches From Your Waist in Seven Days! In truth, we actually lost weight with all of the walking we did after eating. See you next month!
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