Monday 31 May 2010

Memorial Day Weekend 2010

May came and went bloody quickly this year. Can't pinpoint why time seems to be flying by so furiously this year but that it has. After a bit of a light post last week, I return with a bit more substance to close out an eventful month.


Back from a wedding down in LA (and a drive from Sacramento), Melissa dropped by RWC for lunch at Sancho's Taqueria. After walking around Seaport with Nick (to log steps on my pedometer), we grabbed some frozen yoghurt at Culture in Palo Alto. Plain w/choco-hazelnut crisp for Melissa and a blueberry w/granola for me.

Melissa hung out for a bit longer to help me collect Kurt from SFO. He decided to drop by and spend the weekend here in the Bay Area rather than LA. Good call I'd say. Anyways, we played a bit of MW2 on the PS3 before making our way to Refuge, a beer and pastrami place in San Carlos. Being known primarily for having a comprehensive selection of Belgian beers on tap, I sampled "La Chouffe". The description for that beer read: "Experience the power of the gnome". Can't argue with that.

I ate a tasty mushroom and brie burger with some garlic fries (they earned the underlining due to their potency).

Nick chose to try the pastrami, of which this place is known for secondarily. You probably can't tell from the pic, but that's some of the thickest cut pastrami I've ever seen.

Kurt, his beer and his mushroom & brie. The amount of food we ate probably doesn't look like much, but we left the restaurant feeling absolutely stuffed.

That apparently didn't stop us from waddling down Laurel St to search for dessert. We eventually found Harmony (it moved from its previous location) and got ourselves some fro-yo. You can see my plain + mochi above. Yes, I ate frozen yoghurt twice in the same day. No, I'm not obsessed.

The three of us enjoying our yoghurt. This pic got taken just before a massive fly circled around and deposited itself in Kurt's yoghurt. It then could not fly out of the calcium rich grave it found itself. Death by fro-yo. I didn't make this up.

Finding ourselves in the midst of some brilliant Bay Area weather, Kurt & I decided to enjoy the great outdoors. Kurt and the creek in the midst of our hike in Huddart Park in Woodside.

5 miles (~10,000 steps) later, Kurt and I have worked up quite an appetite and decided we needed to find some lunch.

We ended up at Himawari in San Mateo for a feed. It began with some agedashi tofu.

And continued with all you see below. Deluxe Tan tan men with kakuni & rice for Kurt, Miso buttercorn ramen and fried rice (not pictured) for me. We ate ALL of it.

After that monster lunch, we took a monster nap. That pushed back dinner a bit later than we wanted but all worked out in the end. We made it to San Fran for dinner at Cafe Claude without incident (even managing to find a great parking spot in front). The meal began with a tasty chèvre chaud (warm goat cheese salad).

Poor lighting meant that I couldn't get a great photo of some really tasty food. Apologies for that but you can make out Kurt's duck confit above and my coq au vin below. Very delicious. We ate quickly so that we could make it to see Prince of Persia at the Metreon. Enjoyable film that compares favorably with other, recent video game movies.

There you have it. Thanks to Melissa, Kurt and Nick for contributing to a fun weekend. That brings the wonderful month of May to a close. Here we go June...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

And to think, I gave up spending the weekend with throngs of women in bikinis wading through waist deep water amidst 1,000 people and boats in the Gulf of Mexico in a little place called Destin, FL.

It was worth it.