Besides awesome pastries, La Boulange also has a nice little menu of breakfast and lunch items like eggs, sandwiches and salads.  I opted for a cup of the Soup du Jour – Potato Leek, a Breakfast Pizza with Bacon and a Nonfat Latte.

This is the kind of place where you order at the counter, get a number and find a place to sit.  Then you sit down and wait for your food to be delivered.  We waited a little while and then the soup came first.  It was pretty good — not quite as sweet as I expected it to be, but nonetheless, good.  The soup came with a little slice of french bread which was really good. Once the bread was gone I really had no reason to continue eating the soup, but I did anyway… just because.

Above is the breakfast pizza with bacon.  It is very interesting… basically the crust is a sweet flakey phyllo-ish kind of dough, topped with melted cheese, diced tomatoes, chunks of bacon and finally some scrambled eggs (oh, then sprinkled with chopped parsley i think?).  I usually cut it in slices the short way and eat.  It is very good and filling.  The buttery-ness of the crust and eggs mixed with the smokey saltiness of the bacon is the perfect combo and worth every bite.  I’ve had it twice so far.

This is a “real” latte.  Drink it right from the bowl.

La Boulange
500 Hayes St
(between Laguna St & Octavia St)
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 863-3376
www.baybread.com

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I’m definitely a corn-ie and will rarely refuse anything with corn in it.  The Cream of Corn soup is pureed very finely (there are no whole pieces of corn in it).  They use alot of butter also so it is buttery and corn-y with a smooth n silky texture, yum!  (I actually went to Zebulon two days in a row to get this soup).

The sandwich on the other hand was just good.  Nothing spectacular about it.  My general complaint with most hot sandwiches is that they could be hotter (don’t just toast the bread and broil the cheese down, heat up the meat too, geez!), and this sandwich was no exception.  The sweet potato fries were excellent as usual – sweet, crispy and chock full of yam.  The sweet potato fries are magnet that keeps pulling me back to Zebulon, I could eat them everyday and every night for the rest of my life.

Overall, a good lunch.

Zebulon
83 Natoma Street
(between 2nd St & James Lick Fwy)
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 975-5705
www.zebulonsf.com (this place is now closed)

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I started off with Tamarindo’s daily aqua fresca – it was cucumber melon. The most amazing cucumber melon aqua fresca I’ve ever had… you could taste the freshness of the cucumbers and the sweetness of the melons… AMAZING…!! (I had 2)

Since “antojeria” means “place of little cravings” you can simply say it’s Mexican tapas. We ordered a bunch of different things, starting with (above) the sopecitos. OMG I’m freaking out right now, these aren’t on the online menu, I wonder if they took them off?! Anyhow, I can’t tell you offically what’s on them, but I can try to remember…. There were 3 different ones. the first one was vegetarian and had potatoes, spices, onion and cotija cheese, the second one had chicken asada and the third had carne asada, all topped with some onion and cotija. These little puppies were amazing!! The mini sopas are all warm, and the sopa itself is warm a little crispy on the bottom. The carne asade one was really really spicy…

Next we have the chilequiles. What are Chilequiles you ask? Well, at this place, they are heaven meets my last meal in jail. They are not nachos — basically they are tortilla chips, tossed in chipotle puree and topped with cotija (white cheese) and cilantro. At some other taquerias the chips come doused in red sauce, but not at Tamarindo. First of all, the chips are the thick, crunchy homemade kind. They are awesome because they’re the kind that stay crunchy through the meal… no sogginess here! And even though the chips are covered in sauce and cheese and the outsie might get a little soggy, the inside is still crunchy! If you go to Tamarindo, you HAVE to get this dish. In the time we were eating dinner, I think almost every table had a plate of them – they looked so good coming out of the kitchen that everyone started ordering it!!

This is the rice and plantains side dish. Now, words can’t really describe how delicious this side dish is. I could probably eat 2 or 3 of them as my meal. The rice was special. It wasn’t just a scoop of regular white rice. They definitely cook it with spices and maybe some coconut milk or something sweet, because it is a light, slightly salty sweet rice. The plantains were soft and warm, and very plantain-like… nothing over the top there… it was the rice that really sent this dish over the edge.

Here is the Sopa Azteca. This wasn’t one of my choices but I tasted it and took a pic anyway. This is one of the vegetarian options. It’s a chili puree soup and has chunks of cheese and avocado in it. It’s spicy and has a very rich and spicy flavor… spicy in the heavy, smokey way.

Lastly, some nachos and guacamole. I was still hungry so I ordered this, and boy was it good!! I think it’s the chips that finally did me in — after I ate half a plate of those chilequiles and then an order of nachos… The chips are the addictive kind, the kind that are buttery, salty and super crunchy – the kind when you eat one, you need to eat another and another and it snowballs until you’re left swiping the crumbs up with your finger to eat them too. The guacamole was really good – the mushy sweet kind with chunks of diced tomato and sprinkled with white cheese.

Tamarindo definitely gets a slam dunk for this meal, thanks to the chilequiles, the rice and plantains and the chips. Woo hoo!!

Tamarindo Antojeria
468 8th St
(between Broadway & Washington St)
Oakland, CA 94607
(510) 444-1944
www.tamarindoantojeria.com

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This soup is a great afternoon snack.

Eddie Rickenbacker’s
133 2nd St
(between Minna St & Natoma St)
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 543-3498

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We started with the corn cakes. The plate came with 2 corn cakes, each about 4″ in diameter. It was pretty good, sweet, a little crisp on the outside and even sweeter with the sweet cucumber sauce on top. The corn cakes at Thaihouse were nice and simple… Basically, just corn flattened into patties. I’ve had corn cakes at other places where they had veggies and meat… these corn cakes were good. Less is more!

Above is the “award winning” Pad Thai. According to the menu, the SF Guardian has rated Thaihouse Pad Thai as the best Pad Thai in San Francisco. This reason alone is why I decided to order this dish. When it came out, I thought I smelled hamster bedding, but then I realized it was probably just the nutty smell of crushed peanuts mixed with the sweet sauce.

Overall, the pad thai was pretty good. I can’t say that it was amazing or even the best that I’ve had.. but it was good. It’s downfall was that the noodles were just a tad bit overcooked… they were so soft that it made the dish a little softer and mushier than I would’ve liked, but overall, it was pretty tasty.

Thai House Express
599 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
(415) 864-5000
www.thhexpress.com/

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For a started I ordered a cup of Tom Kha Gai aka, a spicy hot sweet coconut soup with chicken. There are usually pieces of hard lemongrass in the soup along with the mushrooms but on this particular evening there were some new unidentifiable mystery pieces floating around inside. The little pieces were so hard they felt like little rocks in my mouth so I picked them all out (see photo)… and later found out it is called Galanga, a spicy thai relative of the ginger family. It is harder, firmer and more dense than normal ginger. To find out more about galanga, click here.

I don’t care what other people say, I love Osha, and Osha gets DISCO FRIES!!

Osha
149 2nd St
(between Minna St & Natoma St)
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 278-9991
www.oshathai.com

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