Eating in San Francisco

I daren’t go into The Shops right now: I’m blowing all my funds on my Big Trip out West and there’s certainly no cash left over for feeding my book, shoe and cooking equipment habits. Usually this means I promptly console myself by buying lots of delicious food, trying to con myself that, as I am being so abstemious elsewhere and that food is a necessity, a leetle extra in the shopping basket from somewhere delicious won’t make much of a dent in my budget.

Oh look, there’s a pink pig flying across the sky.

Anyway, being on the road for the last week, broke as usual, & away from my usual gourmet food pushers, means I’ve been subsisting on chips/crisps, veggieburgers, emergency cookies (which I keep stashed under the passenger seat so I can only reach them if I am stopped in traffic, of which there is bugger all), bad Chinese and oranges. This has not made me enormously happy.

So I cannot express just how excited I was to see San Francisco glimmer in the distance on Friday afternoon, after a punishing five hour trip up from the bottom end of Big Sur. I wasn’t excited because I was dying for the loo, or because I thought my right knee might be permanently locked at 135˚ for having sat at a steady 65mph the whole way, but because I was heading for a city with restaurants that didn’t serve their entire menu encased in bread rolls.

Yup, I spent the weekend with my head face down in the trough, feeding and being fed. I will glaze over the food at Supperclub on Friday night which was Not Good, (oh, but I must mention the fruit pudding which was served in a dog bowl, with latex gloves to scoop it up. This was not sexy/funny, merely contrived and irritating), and head straight to Saturday’s very deep fried spring Vietnamese spring rolls & hoi sin sauce in Sunset, which mopped up my alcohol abuse of the night before.

We closed the day with quintessential San Francisco sandwiches, eaten on the hoof, ( couldn’t help comparing to the London corner shop version which would have been sweaty cheese and pickle in a plastic triangle box),

followed a few hours later by pulling small dishes of deliciousness off the sushi conveyor belt at Sushi Boat Downtown.

Sunday morning won out with the best brunch I’ve eaten this year. Savor in Noe Valley dished up an enormous textbook omelette filled with veg chorizo, black bean chili, huge chunks of avocado and jack cheese, served with crispy, crunchy home fries and the freshest, softest sourdough, slathered in butter, which we ate outside on their patio in the unexpected 65F heat. I dream of food like that. Especially at $9.95 for the lot.

Savor, 3913 24th Street at Sanchez. Tel: 415-282-0344