bay area

girls reunited!

dining, friends, travel

I had the best weekend spending it with three of my bridesmaids back in the City.  We reminisced as we strolled through the Cal campus, caught up on life and love, explored one of my favorite parts of town and tried some new eats in the best city ever!  What was so great is that even though we hadn’t seen each other in over a year, we talked and chatted as if we had seen each other a week ago.

We started the weekend waiting over a hour for a seat at the counter for brunch at Plow in a neighborhood I had never really been to.  We traded plates so that we could share and try the lemon ricotta pancakes, fluffy French toast and a soft egg scramble.  We then drove over to the Ferry Building and walked along the Embarcadero and caught a glimpse of the planes flying overhead for Fleet Week.  We caught the Filbert Steps toward Telegraph Hill for another view of the City.  On the way back down, we cute across through the Levi’s headquarters, a beautiful building with floor to ceiling windows and warm brick.  It housed a small museum that had jeans from different eras starting from the 1880s.

Dinner at Delfina was a culinary adventure, at least for me.  We ordered mildly seasoned grilled sardines, crostini at green pea, white bean and rustic chicken liver pate.  The pastas were delicious including a square spaghetti with breadcrumbs and roasted cauliflower, spaghetti with squid ink, gnocchi with ragu and trips in tomato sauce.  Dinner with accompanied with an Italian red: Carmignano – Capezzana 2003 Toscana.

We saved room for Bi-Rite ice cream.  It’s apparently the new place for gourmet ice cream.  We shared scoops of ginger, salted caramel, honey lavender (my favorite) and strawberry balsamic.

After dim sum the next morning, we headed to the East Bay and tried to remember all the names of the buildings on our old campus and visited the new East Asian library.  A walk down Telegraph surprised us.  Although establishments we remembered, like Espresso Express who made bulgogi sandwiches, Musical Offering-the classical music shop and cafe in one, Bancroft Clothing Co, Avant Card, Jenny’s Healthy cafe, Le Petit Cheval, La Burrita, Fat Slice, Blondie’s, Yogurt Park, Ned’s Bookstore, Rasputin’s, Amoeba, Cafe Milano, Steve’s BBQ, Thai Basil, IB Hoagies and Durant Cafe were still there, so many commercialized places replaced the old shops and restaurants.  BUT….Top Dog was still there to serve up Lemon Chick, Bratwurts and Kielbasas!  AND we were also able to get a GIANT tossed salad of beans, avocado, tomato, carrots topped with poppy seed dressing just as I remember it (but sans sprouts)!

The weekend was great to listen and talk about relationships since we all in different stages of relationships.  Once again, I felt very lucky that I found my perfect guy and happily married.  Hopefully they didn’t mind hearing my perspective as a married person.  It was a wonderful girl’s weekend, and I really hope that we do an SD version very very soon!  But nevertheless, I was so very happy to be back at home snuggled up in bed with B on Sunday night 🙂