Saturday, August 16, 2008

San Francisco Double Dutch Disco* (day 1)

*bonus points to whoever knows what song that is from! :)

My mom and I left for San Francisco at 4AM Monday morning- it was a bit crazy, considering I'd only gotten 1 1/2 hours of sleep. Not to mention we 'didn't show up' in the system and we had to buy new tickets! (thankfully we are now being reimbursed)

We arrived in San Francisco at 8AM, which was actually quite fantastic because now we could actually have the whole day there!


First stop was the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art! This was where we picked up our Citypasses- we decided that we didn't want to bother with a car, walking and taking the bus is where it's at. This also included free admission to the SFMOMA, which was awesome!

I'm a big fan of Andy Warhol, so it was very exciting to see some of his paintings there.

For lunch, we walked down over to the Mission District. Before we left, I'd put together a nice little list of restaurants & addresses on an index card and circled them on a map. This really saved us a lot of time. Unfortunately, two of the restaurants we closed for lunch.... but finally we stumbled upon Udupi Palace.

This was a nice little South Indian Vegetarian place, and as soon as we walked in we were hit by the most heavenly scents of delicious food being cooked up in the kitchen.

My mom ordered the vegetable curry:
I had a few bites of her meal, and it was good. Not exceptional, but it was a good curry. The orangey sauce on the left was sort of citrusy and really yummy. We didn't even touch the yogurty sauce- my mom said that she'd go vegan for the entire trip, and she stuck with that!

I ordered the mix vegetable uthappam- a rice/lentil pancake with vegetables mixed right in. It was pretty good! I'd love to try making it on my own sometime.


The top sauces were some sort of spicy chili sauce, a coconut sauce, and what I think was a cilantro-y one. They were all pretty good, but I liked the green one the best.
The orange sauce in the metal bowl was okay- it tasted like my mom's curry, which doesn't mean that it was BAD, just nothing special.

*EDIT: it seems that the 'orange sauce' is actually a soup known as sambal. oops! That's what I get for not doing my research!

Overall, though, it was a great meal and very satisfying for two hungry travellers. :)

Then... we went shopping at a random mall we came across.

We dropped off our bags at the hotel, and then headed down to Cafe Gratitude! It's a mostly-raw, vegan restaurant. It's also the only 100% organic restaurant, according to or server (most restaurants that claim to be organic are only 'organic when available')
I started off with 'I am Bold', a tomato/carrot/celery juice. Yum!

My mom ordered the soup of the day, a bean & rice chili, as well as the 'I am Graceful' Thai quinoa bowl. I tried some of each, and they were good.

We ordered two sides as well, a carrot-flax cracker and the sprouted almond and sesame hummus. The crackers were especially delicous!

I ordered the Asian Kale salad... and it was SO GOOD. I was craving some greens, and this towering mountain of raw kale was definitely what I was looking for. Mmm!I really, really, really like Cafe Gratitude, or at least the Mission location. We ended up going back on Wednesday- more on that later!

2 comments:

ChocolateCoveredVegan said...

You are SERIOUSLY adorable in your sunglases and super-funky shirt!

And your mom is awesome for committing to go vegan for the trip! I'm always excited when my mom eats a vegan meal :o).

Hope you're having an awesome time (it certainly sounds like you are, so far).

Peggy said...

Aw, thanks :D

Yeah, I was really quite proud of her! She does notice that she feels a lot better, too, so maybe she'll end up going totally veg at some point.

I'm sorry that I didn't make this clear- I'm actually back now, I'm just recounting my 'adventures' one day at a time. But it was indeed awesome!