Okay, so off to Yosemite we head after LA.
At the famous Ahwahnee, with its massive (taller than me) fireplace, large dining hall etc, we were faced with a very limited yawn-inducing lunch menu of mainly sandwiches.
The service was slow. In this grand hall of 50 tables, only 5 were taken at the time we went in and most tables only had two-somes – we still had to wait a good twenty minutes for our sandwiches. Perhaps the assumption is that we’d love the grandeur of the dining hall so much that we would wait.
But hungry people do not have the stomach for good views. We were just waiting and wondering when food would come.
The top sandwich was okay, nothing to shout home about.
The Monte Cristo however, was quite different. The whole sandwich was coated in a batter and then deep fried and topped with icing/confectioner’s sugar. On the side, a cranberry dip. It was like a savoury dessert.
But both were too big and got jelak after a while.
Not pictured, we also had the sweet potato fries. Nice on a wintry day.
It was an expensive meal. But meals in the middle of nowhere tend to be like that. I think it’s worth skipping a meal at the Awahnee. You can just walk through the hotel, get out and find overpriced but still cheaper food elsewhere.
We skip over several meals – remember, I’m just covering the memorable ones – and find ourselves at Mustards Grill in Napa.
The watercress dip was interesting, but the fries were a dismal failure.
The next appetiser was the Mini Colorado Lamb Chops and that was very enjoyable. But for those looking for a thick chop, you’ll be disappointed. It came with two dips, forget what they were, but as you can see, we preferred the red, spicier one.
For mains, we skipped the popular Mongolian Pork Chops and tried the Tea Smoked Peking Duck with 100-almond onion sauce.
Again, we split the mains, so this is one half of it. This dish took influence from India (spices, Basmati rice), China (Peking duck), Thailand (mango) and who knows where else. It was okay, but I felt it was trying to do too much. Or maybe there was just too much tumeric. The duck skin wasn’t that crispy.
Maybe next time, I’ll try their Mongolian Pork Chops.
They call it by another name, but a Lemon Meringue Pie is a Lemon Meringue Pie. Crust was thin and short, but the sides were thicker than necessary. Meringue was properly browned. Meringue was soft. Overall, a pleasant dessert, and the highlight was the sugar coated lemon rind. A nice finish.
Into San Francisco, we were recommended Fuji, a Japanese restaurant actually run by Koreans. Apparently famous for their rolls.
I don’t know the names of the rolls, they’re all given fancy names. And I hope I’m getting the fish names right.
It was all good. Really fresh. Someone felt the mango was overpowering, but I felt it was unripe. The Albacore was melt in your mouth. Really nice.
Now we head into Oregon and it’s been raining so much all my photos have rain drops on them. My jeans are soaked and it’s winter and I’ve been cold and hankering for a warm soup.
I don’t get a soup, but a warm cider tea instead and a slice of asparagus quiche from Two Loons Cafe in Bandon, OR.
The soft focus look is not some special effect, but simply that my camera kept fogging up.
The quiche comes with a fruit salad on the side, which was a nice surprise. Most of the inside is not asparagus, but beans, that provide a good crunch. A very nice quiche indeed.
After that, we had a quick walk around the old town of Bandon, which is known for its trade in Cranberry produce.
With this road trip, we had no end in mind, so we simply drove as far as we wanted and the stop happened to be in Lincoln City, which isn’t much, as a city. It would be our Northern-most stop before we turned around.
Here, we stopped at the Tanger Outlets, but they were a bit boring. I asked a sales lady where we could get seafood and she recommended two restaurants. One was listed on the AAA Oregon guide, the other was Pier 101. We decided to take our chances based on the number of cars parked outside: 0: 3. One of those was a BMW and we wondered if it belonged to a diner or an employee of the restaurant.
The super dark restaurant was warmed with two fireplaces. We had very fresh steamer clams from the area. It was too salty, but the clams still tasted great and I’d still go back and have them.
As an indication of how fresh the clams were, NONE of the clams stayed shut. Everyone of them was open and edible. And it wasn’t overdone at all.
We also had the fresh shrimp salad, that was huge. It was so huge, we each had 3 helpings and there was still half of the salad left on the plate. The shrimp, also harvested from the area, were sweet and flavourful.
It turns out the owner/chef has been running the place for 35 years. This was what the lady manning the cash register and the bar – where there was no one – told me. She herself has worked at Pier 101 for 15 years.
The next day, we visited a few lighthouses and stopped at Newport, OR for lunch. The place, Local Ocean Seafoods.
Using local produce, this place had a more contemporary menu mixing influences from South America and the East. The place was full and we had to sit at the bar that skirts the perimeter of the open kitchen.
Fine by me. I like to see the action of the kitchen, and the chef was not always on top of his game, but kept his cool. He had an excellent right hand woman sous chef though, who consistently put food out.
This was an excellent soup, loaded with crab. And so quick to get out to the table. The chef put in a bunch of already peeled Dungeness crab, then headed to the pot for the broth. A sprig of fennel, a chunk of bread. Serve.
When oysters are fresh, they are so sweet. I had them straight up, no lemon, no nothing.
An interesting wrap with Thai flavours. Lots of fresh greens. Topped with cilantro. Nice and light.
As you notice, we didn’t have mains. I didn’t notice at first. But thinking back on it, I realised why. With fresh seafood, I like to see something very plain and simple, that allows the flavour and freshness of the seafood to stand out. And the other stuff they had on offer, seemed to do too much with the food.
We tried looking for Krispy Kremes, but they were elusive. Indeed, it would be much later in our trip, and in another country that we’d find them – in Seoul, Korea – where there were two within a five minute walk of our hotel, one of which has three storeys and always had a line.
So because I started thinking about doughnuts, I decided to try the GPS and see if it had any recommendations. From where we were house sitting, it spat out Chick Donuts.
I was quite excited, having thought about donuts for several days now. It was pretty good, if you like the soft type of donut. I still prefer the chewier ones of the Doughnut Plant in NY – but I don’t know how good it is now, after having tasted some horrid ones of the Doughnut Plant in Seoul.
Turned out Chick’s opens at 5:30am so we decided to return for a diner-type breakfast with eggs over easy another day. That day turned out to be the day we’d fly off from San Francisco.
The breakfast was pretty good, but I’ve had better.
We returned to Palo Alto and this time we ate at the Palo Alto Creamery Fountain and Grill.
Out of their huge menu, we had the Philly Cheese Steak sandwich, an excellent salad of cheese, cranberries and candied walnuts and finished off with a very filling and very good dark cherry milkshake.
On Christmas Day, where everything is basically dead, most businesses closed, we headed back to San Francisco for dinner with a friend and to meet his new girlfriend.
We were introduced to Tart to Tart (not the girlfriend’s name), along Irving Street, pretty near the Golden Gate Park, where I had excellent Key Lime Pie and a Ginger Bread Tart that tastes much better than it looks.
What’s so great about this Key Lime Pie? It’s the crust. It’s not short crust, but phyllo! It was very enjoyable.
The next meal in Gilroy was at Famous Dave’s, where I’d been wanting to go even in my last trip but didn’t.
All I can say is:
And some wise words from Famous Dave’s:
It was a good rib meal. Much better than the awful one at Barney’s Hickory Pit in Concord.
To top off a great meal, as first time diners at Famous Dave’s we were each given a small bottle of Famous Dave’s BBQ Sauce.
And that brings to the end my meal highlights in USA. And now my stomach is gggrrrrrowling.