Offbeat Eats

On our third day in Southern California, we decided to take a morning and head down to San Diego and check out a few sights off the beaten path. We ended up hiking most of the length of Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve, which was a pleasantly quiet and nice canyon, considering that it’s nestled in between dense subdivisions to both the north and south. I still recommend it if you are looking for a nice urban-area hike. After our hike, however, we were a little hungry. We already had dinner plans back up in Temecula that involves copious amount of food and wine, so we were looking for something light. Luckily, I actually follow several other blogs that cover San Diego, including mmm-Yoso!!! (several contributors of which were my companions on the Yuma taco crawl a few years back) and A Radiused Corner (whose owner Dennis and I have been trading recommendations, and occasionally visiting the same places, for a few years now). Both blogs recommended stopping by Nijiya Market, one of San Diego’s best Japanese grocery stores, as a good place for both Japanese groceries and light meals.

While we were in Southern California visiting Carol’s sister and brother-in-law, we took a day trip down to Palomar Mountain. The route we took there had us take I-15 down from the Temecula area to Highway 76 in Fallbrook, CA. I wouldn’t call Fallbrook the middle of nowhere (I’ve been to various places, even some on this blog, that were way more out of the way than Fallbrook, which is only ~15 miles away from SoCal suburban splendor), but it’s not exactly the most happening location either. But it was notable that when we got off the highway, a noticeable feature was a little trailer parked in a parking lot with a long line of people waiting for food. That trailer is Nessy Burgers…

The day after the Death March, I unsurprisingly found myself rather hungry (walking across most of San Francisco will do that to you), so Steve and Emily took me to Plow in the Potrero Hill neighborhood (walking about, including checking out a rather cool antiques store, while waiting for our name to come to the top of the waiting list). A relatively new restaurant, Plow focuses on breakfast and lunch, focusing on quality ingredients. We settled in at a pleasant table outside on the sidewalk and watched the other diners as we perused the menu….

While my trip to Humphrey Slocombe left me a little bit disappointed, that wasn’t the last of my San Francisco ice cream forays. While doing the March, our route took us through the north end of the Mission, we headed over to Dolores Park and Bi-Rite Creamery for another snack. This was my first trip to Bi-Rite Creamery, but I’d been to their parent store (Bi-Rite Market, just down the street) several times to indulge in various delicacies, like a few slices of some good Iberian jamon. And I’d always known that Bi-Rite’s ice cream stand was well-regarded, but both times I had previously thought of stopping there, the lines were long and scared me away…

(Closed) Checkpoint #3 on the March was the famous Ferry Building, which was also a good excuse for a Second Lunch, since the Ferry building has all sorts of wonderful little food vendors, ranging from a mushroom vendor, Prather Ranch Meats (where I bought a “Praise the Lard” t-shirt), a Rancho Gordo stand (where I bought 5 lbs of beans to bring back), beef sushi from Delica, and a wonderfully sinful strawberry cream cupcake from Miette. But my most-craved stop for this trip was Boccalone. Boccalone’s motto is “Tasty Salted Pig Parts”. Besides, who can go wrong with a motto like that…

(Closed) When discussing some of the activities around the Death March, one of the participants mentioned that he’d been craving a good burger, and was going to go make a pilgrimage to In-N-Out while in San Francisco. I responded that while I’m quite the fan of In-N-Out, there are a lot of unique burger places in San Francisco, and most of them better and more interesting than In-N-Out. Indeed, without even having to look anything up online, I easily came up with a list of 10 San Francisco burger joints worth checking out. Of the places I’ve actually been, there’s Burger Joint, Whiz Burger, Rosamunde Sausage Grill, and Pearl’s. Additionally, Burger Bar, Joe’s Cable Car, Big Mouth Burgers, Burgermeister, and Urbun Burger have been on my hit list for a while as well. Since I had met up with two other Death Marchers, Steve and Kevin, for another trip to Dynamo Donuts, that put us in the Mission, so we could easily knock off Burger Bar or Urbun Burger. We ended up deciding on Urbun…

(Closed) One of the nice things about visiting Steve and Emily is that they enjoy playing the roles of culinary tour guides. After Emily showed me Dynamo Donuts for breakfast, and Mission Cheese for lunch, for dinner Steve and Emily decided to take me to one of their favorites in Noe Valley: Contigo. So we set off for dinner. A short walk (about a mile or so from their place in the Mission) later, we arrived at Contigo. Nestled into a converted residential house (a feature common to most of the Noe Valley restaurants I’ve been to, actually), Contigo is a modest sized restaurant focusing on tapas, particularly those from Catalan…

When Emily took me to visit Dynamo Donuts, on the way back passed by Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream. I’ve heard of Humphrey Slocombe several times (it’s one of the most yelp-ed places on the planet, and has gotten exposure on several TV shows), and it’s been a place I’ve been wanting to try. However, they don’t open until noon, so I had to make it a point to come back later. But after visiting Mission Cheese earlier in the day, I decided that a good walk was in order, and went on a pleasant little hike up to Bernal Heights Park, through “downtown” Bernal Heights, and then coming back to the Mission by ealking around the park. This route very nicely passed me by Humphrey Slocombe again, so I decided to stop in and give them a try…

(Closed) After a bit more roaming around the Mission with Emily, we decided that checking out Mission Cheese would be a good idea for lunch, especially since they had opened only a few weeks before. Mission Cheese is actually quite a simple concept: a neighbor restaurant space with a menu focusing on, well, cheese, as well as raclettes, light plates, and sandwiches featuring cheeses. The idea is to find some really good cheeses and make sharing plates and sandwiches that highlight them…

My first morning in San Francisco, I decided that it was time to knock Dynamo Donuts off of my hit list. I had been craving a trip to Dynamo Donuts since reading about them on David Lebovitz’s blog almost three years ago. Luckily, it’s only about a mile away from Steve and Emily’s place, and they’ve been there several times, so it wasn’t hard to convince Emily to come with me for a trip to Dynamo. Located in the Eastern part of the Mission, Dynamo is a little bit of an odd fit, being located in a block that’s mostly various Latin American restaurants and stores. But being the Mission, this isn’t too out of place (if I had to pick the two major types of dining establishments in this part of town, “taqueria” and “coffee shop” are probably on the top of the list). It’s also a fairly subtle storefront, being basically just a short ordering counter and a door that leads both inside, and through to a nice patio in back (that’s easy to miss). But really, it’s about the donuts anyways…