I was entrusted with the responsibility of choosing the restaurant for our department’s dinner. We reserved a private room at The Cosmopolitan Cafe.
I ordered the duck trio, salmon in corn husk with sweet corn, zucchini and tomatoes and churros with dipping chocolate and strawberry sauce.
I love this show! It’s an Australian show and so all the characters are super cute claymation. They have music with diggerydoos. Perhaps its just the accents that makes it that much better. Aussies are always really cool. I’m glad they have some good kids shows still.
Posted in General
While I was in SF I had the chance to dine with an old friend and the newest San Francisco Chronicle critic Bill Addison. He took me to a restaurant he was in the process of reviewing, Zagora. For more information about the overall experience, and not the food, watch for my posting coming soon to Paper Palate on the Well Fed Network. For Bill’s review go to
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/09/22/DDGUAL9HTM1.DTL&type=food
We started with the mamona salad, merguez sausage and chicken bastilla (pictured above). The mamona salad was a nice blend of cinnamony carrots, ruby grapefruit segments and spring greens with vinagrette. Individually the pieces did not stand out, but when eaten together in one bite it was a wonderful, piquant combination. The sourness of the grapefruit cut through what could have been cloying carrots and then was also complimented by the bitterness and saltyness of the salad.
The merguez sausage was flavorful. Garlicky and pungent, it puts many other boring Mexican chorizoes to shame. However, the pairing with olives and hummus didn’t do much to its cause the way the mamona salad did in its combination.
The bastilla was a curiosity in itself. Beautifully constructed, with a nice sprinkling of powdered sugar, it reminded me vaguely of fried ice cream. But then came the surprise inside, chicken with saffron. It’s a combination that I don’t quite understand. But as Bill pointed out, surely out there surely must make earth-shatteringly good bastilla. We also sat and pondered if it was a celebration of liberation from the French, seeing as the name seems to come from bastille.
From there we moved on to the entrees…
I’m skipping around a little because some things are easier to write, and some of these are tying into something else I am working on. I’ve always wanted to try raw oysters, especially after reading Anthony Bourdain’s book. Walking around SF’s Ferry Terminal Building I spotted Hog Island Oyster Company, it was a month with an ‘r’ in it, so I figured it would be good to try some out. Continue reading
Milk tea cream puff from Beard Papas (l)
First off let me diss on SF cabbies. Holy crap! I almost died back there. And unhelpful. Do not balk at your small tip fellow… you deserved every discount on it. I got to stay at the trendy W Hotel. S. and I had lunch at XYZ, the in-hotel restaurant. Nice decor with great loungey booths. I ordered sashimi tuna with heirloom tomatoes and pickled string beans. The pickling on the beans contrasted nicely with the fattyness of the tuna and the tomatoes. Although there weren’t enough beans to provide the contrast. S. ordered a grilled chicken sandwich with fries. The fries were yummy until they got cold. Continue reading
|
