Save Me San Francisco

Every year for the past two years I've gone to DC to visit Courtney and I've never blogged about it... why not? Because pretty much all we do there is eat and silly things like buy a dozen gourmet cupcakes and pay way too much money to pet cute kitties in a cafe setting. Last year I realized I had some extra time off around the Fourth of July and we decided to meet in California for a change of scenery :) This trip was five nights total with two of them being in San Francisco, two of them in a cabin close to Yosemite and then the last one at an airport hotel for ease of making our morning flights home (Yosemite is a 4 hour drive). 

As you probably already imagined, this post is going to be mostly about food :P This is a Becca and Courtney adventure after all.... always on the hunt for the best noms. We landed at SFO around 9:30pm - Courtney got there a little earlier... she literally flew coast to coast from DC. Super classy 4-5 hour domestic flights still don't serve any food (not even those dinky bags of pretzels), so after we took an uber to the Airbnb studio we booked, we set off on a hunt for food. It's the city... places must still be open at 10:30 right? Nope. Bars were open though... desperate for something besides beer for dinner, we used Grub Hub to order a pizza from a local place that didn't arrive until midnight (2am Chicago, 3am DC time). 

The studio we booked is a tiny 200 square foot converted garage/basement type dwelling. It had enough room for a bed, small kitchenette and bathroom and not much else (like sitting or walking lol). The neighborhood is called NoPa (North of Panhandle) or Western Addition. In the morning we decided to walk to the Presidio neighborhood because it looked like a large green space on the map that would lead us to the Golden Gate Bridge. Omg don't do this. Presidio is mostly residential and it takes forever to get around on foot... for heaven's sake, take a car or public transportation to the bridge. 2.5 hours and several blisters later, we're at the bridge. Woo! 

It was crazy windy there! 

Man, all the walking made us hungry! We ubered our way over to China Town to grab some lunch at the Lai Hong Lounge... but when we got there, we were met by a massive group of people waiting around for tables. The vast majority of the people waiting were Chinese, so we figured the food was definitely worth the wait. They have you fill out a sheet of what you want to order and when you're finally seated (I think we waited a good 45 minutes), you hand over your menu and you cannot make changes after that! They immediately bring you tea and print out your order on a receipt and set it on your table so the servers know what to bring you. The food here is AMAZING. Come here hungry and feast. 

And don't worry, we saved room for dessert. All that waiting around at Lai Hong Lounge gave us some time to research an ice cream adventure. This little shop called the Baked Bear will make you an ice cream cookie sandwich where you can mix and match the cookie and ice cream flavors as well as various toppings. They will "hot press" the sandwich for you to make the cookies warm... we did it but I don't necessarily recommend it :P All it did was make my ice cream melt just enough to slip all over - I had to eat the whole thing with my spoon... but that's where my complaining stops. This place was awesome - I had chocolate with snickerdoodles + almonds, Courtney had salted caramel ice cream with chocolate chip cookies + brownie bits. I told you, we do not mess around with food :)

More wandering around doing touristy things! Here is Lombard street, the famous winding road.

Painted Ladies in Alamo Square

We also went to the Fisherman's Wharf - this is mostly a tourist area with lots of street shopping and food - which we were actually full by this point - but I did see lots of clam chowder bread bowls going around. There is another location for the Baked Bear down here and it was slammed. Glad we went to one near Chinatown :) San Francisco is pretty neat in that you can walk a couple blocks and just feel the cultures change. Chinatown is directly adjacent to North Beach, which is San Francisco's Little Italy... and it actually felt like Europe. The Italian cafes had al fresco dining set up all over the sidewalk and we heard more Italian than English for a few blocks. We wished we could have fit more into our stomach by this point because the pasta was looking great... guess we'll have to go back! 

Exhausted from trekking around all day, we headed back to the studio to clean up before dinner. On our walk to dinner, we walked right through the Panhandle (a long, narrow park) and stumbled into Haight and Ashbury neighborhood - the famous neighborhood known for the beginning of the hippie counter culture revolution. This place is like dread locks and weed central... plus head shops every other store and other specialty shops, restaurants and bars. This neighborhood has apparently also been home to The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin... as well as the first ever head shop (no surprise there). 

We had dinner at a French-American place called Zazie in the Cole Valley neighborhood just a few blocks further south. This dinner was delicious... Chevre-arugula-fig bruchetta was one of the best things I ate in this city (goat cheese and all actually, it just wasn't very goat-y lol). 

"Baked hot chocolate" it was basically the center of a molten chocolate cake with toasted marshmallows on top. YUM.

No line for a tip!! This restaurant does not expect tips because they pay their servers a "living wage"... and guess what - our service was superb :)

After dinner, we went back to Haight-Ashbury for a drink at an eclectic dive bar called Zam Zam. The bartender had a spider tattooed on his face and Courtney was pretty sure she saw him do cocaine behind the bar. I did notice him get super happy and singing along with the house music about halfway through our time there... we left after one drink. I should note that we never felt unsafe in this city... ever. Not sure what it is about SF, but it feels pretty safe even when you're two women wandering around after dark.

The next morning we had brunch at Nopa (the restaurant). We actually tried to book this place for dinner but it was completely booked up, so we settled for brunch. This might have been my favorite meal in the city and definitely my favorite cocktail :) 

Brunchin' like champions

We walked to Golden Gate Park after brunch 

We decided to pick up our rental car in the early afternoon and head out to our cabin nearby Yosemite in a town called Mariposa. We stopped for lunch at In and Out Burger... these are the Animal Style fries off their secret menu... they're cheese fries with onions and "special sauce", aka thousand island. I'm incredibly biased of course, but Portillos is way better :P Glad to have finally tried it though! 

I definitely think San Francisco deserves a re-visit sometime in the future. I'd love to stay a little longer and get a better feel for the city - but I knew it would feel like a bit of a whirlwind. We needed that extra time for hiking in Yosemite! I wish I had known, though, that all those city hills would destroy my legs going into two long days of hiking... we had the Four Mile Trail up to Glacier Point planned for the first day and the Mist Trail to Vernal and Nevada falls for the second. We were nervous going in but we still had no idea what was in store... to be continued...