Entries Tagged 'Reviews' ↓

This post appeared on SF Foodie today: San Francisco’s Top Five Coffee Shops

We’ve been to all those listed, some several times in fact. I like the reviewers scene-setting at the start, what he’s looking for in a great coffee/coffee shop. The only slightly dodgy candidate is Cafe Trieste – we’ve been there a couple of times but I think the coffee is made too hurriedly so the taste is not up to it.

Here are my previous reviews on 4 of the 5 listed:

• Ritual Roasters
• Grand Coffee
• Blue Bottle – SF MOMA | Ferry |  Mint
• Four Barrel

Currently we’re drinking Reveille Coffee from their truck just around the corner from work which I’d put in the top 5 today, and of course we spent the last year drinking from Elite Audio Cafe before our office moved.

Well well aren’t we getting all citified and metropolitan … just realized the last 3 Sundays in a row we’ve been out for brunch. Mid-morning is my ideal coffee and a cookie time of day but it’s not when I like eating breakfast: as a reasonably early riser, it’s way too long after I wake up to wait for coffee, brunch places don’t usually have toast and peanut butter so you’re forced to have something large like pancakes or eggs however, the silver lining is that by having a ‘large’ late breakfast, I don’t need lunch! The meal I actually hate most. The late coffee headaches haven’t been too bad either so perhaps it’s a trend that will continue.

3 Sundays ago – we went to a new neighborhood for us in San Fransisco, Noe Valley, where some other fairly recent New Zealand arrivals have set up their home, people we knew in Wellington, but not that well. We went to Zazie where our friends had to arrive before 9am to line up and wait for a sheet of paper on a clipboard to be hung on the cafe window, at which time everyone milling on the sidewalk lined up to write their name and number in their party on the list. When the cafe opened at 9am (by then we’d arrived) the owner came out and called good morning to everyone, took down the clipboard, and read out each name in turn, escorting them into a table until the cafe was full, then he crossed the first 20 names off the list, shut the door, and went out again to call the next name when the first set of diners started leaving.

The system worked! I had pancakes that time, and orange juice. Wasn’t going to trust the coffee, and a sip of the Mister’s told me I’d made the right choice. However, being New Zealanders, they knew we’d need a second stop for decent coffee pretty quickly. We walked along Haight Street and got some Blue Bottle in the Haight Street Market before spending the rest of the morning strolling through Golden Gate Park. Very nice.

Last Sunday we were in New York – yippeeee! Upon Cousin Grant’s recommendation we found our way to Market Table in the West Village for brunch – he was out on a 4-hour bike ride through New Jersey while we were eating. Unlike San Francisco, when we got there at 10am when they opened, there was no line around the block and in fact we were the first to arrive. Turned out it was a combination of daylight savings starting the night before so lots of people thought it was 9am, it was pretty cold and New Yorkers are late to rise, late to bed. However the place started filling up pretty quickly after we went in.

Again I didn’t trust the coffee so had some freshly squeezed juice which was fresh and this time poached eggs on grain toast. Man it was good. I can’t remember the last time I had a poached egg and this one was organic and almost cooked hard through, just perfect. And the toast, was toast. Not strange sweet bread with white butter. I was very impressed. The coffee stop following was Third Rail nearby in The Village, a spot I’d heard much about but never visited, great coffee.

And today, back in San Francisco we headed over to North Beach to meet Kara to stand in line for brunch at Mama’s. Famous in these parts. We’d stood there a couple of years ago with Bev and Dan but gave up after not moving much for 45 minutes.

This time we were there earlier and an hour after we arrived, we were at our table waiting for our brunch, after standing at a second line inside where you order at the counter before sitting down. A rather strange system. The place was mostly full of tourists, a very small L-shaped cafe. The food was a bit more diner-style which I didn’t enjoy that much – this time my poached eggs were floating in water in a side dish on a plate of plastic-bag loaf sweet white bread toast, a pile of chopped fried potatoes and a decorative slice of orange. The eggs weren’t quite cooked enough for my liking and I could still taste the vinegar they were poached in. However we were there for a long overdue catchup with Kara not having spent much time with her because of trips to New Zealand, Florida, New York and a bit of a cold. We also had a few sips of house coffee from large green mugs, but did go for the coffee seconds at Trieste in Little Italy not far away afterwards.

Not sure if we’ll be out for brunch next weekend or where we might end up – New York is the winning brunch so far!

This isn’t a particularly good photo so it certainly won’t support the high rating I’d give our dinner at the bar at the Bonny Doon vineyard’s cellar door in Santa Cruz. When we were having coffee at Verve Coffee Roasters I overhead a couple of locals talking about how great the restaurant was with a new chef and that they had a very cool community table idea. A bit of quick Googling we found they did a couple of sittings each evening, being Saturday we weren’t sure of our chances but as it was just out of town on the drive back to San Francisco we thought we’d call in hoping to be in time for the early sitting so we could get on the road for the 1.5 hour drive back.

When we got there the restaurant was fully booked but the greeter lady said we were welcome to do a tasting at the bar and try something from the limited bar menu – just a few items from the full menu. We looked at the menu and it might’ve seem limited to ordinary folk but for me it had the only couple of things on it I’d want anyway – pizza and potatoes.

Plus we love sitting at the bar. We got up on the stools and had a very knowledgeable chap run us through a wine tasting and bring us a selection of dishes from the menu. Roasted fingerling potatoes & aoili, some kind of speck, cheese & onion pizza and green salad with crumbled hazel nuts. Also I got to drink something non-alcoholic from the vineyard which gives them a huge thumbs up – they had some recently harvested grape juice – delicious!

Bonny Doon Vineyard, 321 Ingalls Street, Santa Cruz

Last night we went to Marlowe for dinner – was a bit of a blind date really. One of Xero’s investors who lives here wasn’t able to catch up with us due to being out of town so he introduced us to his good friends, one an ex-Kiwi, over email. They emailed us and suggested early drinks and dinner at Marlowe.

It was a lovely rustic dining room in the bottom of a brick warehouse-type building – dark wooden chairs and rustic wooden tables – some long shared tables, a high table with stools and a bar. I’d already checked out their website and menu and was pretty sure that Anna in the couple we were meeting owned the restaurant – turned out she did! She’s an ex-Kiwi, opening her 3rd San Francisco restaurant shortly so we sat at the high table drinking wine and eating the first of their specialties – fried Brussels sprout chips. I know … sounds gross right?! Actually surprisingly edible … the fleshy stalk bit tasted slightly vegetabley otherwise they were blacked and salty. The Mister was addicted – so Mother, there’s hope!!

We met a rather gregarious investor in the restaurant – a fairly rich man who owns planes and has been the CEO of various tech companies that I recognised – felt like rather a socialite! We were joined by James after a while, Anna’s husband, who works in tech so we chatted another hour or so before they had to take off and invited us to stay on without them and eat at the bar – we had a couple of their second specialty – the Marlowe Burger. OMG – really good! Not too big, nice moist meat, tasty sauce that wasn’t too spicy hot, and great fries with some skin still on. I couldn’t manage it all but we noticed a couple of plates going out with half burgers so maybe I could order that next time! Have to admit not quite as good as Shake Shack to my taste – just can’t go past the sweet potato buns and small meat patties.

They had one of those wall wine racks, wooden with slanted down holes in rows where normally wine bottles would slip in neck first – but they had lemons stuck in the holes – looked really cool but couldn’t get a photo without leaning all over people (we’re too new in town for that kind of behaviour) and it was quite dark. Only confusing part of the evening was when I went to the ‘Restrooms’ – I couldn’t figure out why the door was locked and huffed and puffed and shoved at it before realising it was locked … wondering why someone would lock the hall door through to the restrooms … later I discovered that was the bathroom, right there through that door, 1 toilet, so the’RestroomS’ sign was a bit misleading! When Craig asked for the check the maitre d’ told us that Anna had taken care of it – our mouths practically dropped open and we felt SUPER special – we’ve never met a restaurant owner who’s shouted us a meal at their restaurant – we’ve made it in this town!

We’ll definitely be back there when we’re in San Francisco again – somewhere great to take friends and family to feel like a local.

Marlowe, 330 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 @marlowesf