The plan was to go to Snooze, one of the most popular brunch spots in San Diego that happens to be in our neighborhood. The week before Teddy arrived, we decided to take advantage of our fleeting freedom and work-at-home status (definitely can’t step away for too long now given the pup’s hourly bathroom needs) and walked into Snooze only to find out the wait was 40 minutes on a Wednesday at 10 a.m. Sorry, but I gave up waiting for restaurants towards the end of my New York tenure.
Screw it, we said, and walked around the corner to the small, cute and less crowded Fig Tree Cafe. The menu has all the sweets and savories you’d want at reasonable prices. Eaman and I shared the veggie scramble ($9.25 for eggs with goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, toast and the most perfect roasted potatoes) as well as French toast with whipped cream and strawberries ($10.45). Make sure to try the orange zest-flavored syrup, too. It’s got zing.
Given his Persian roots, naturally one of the first questions Eaman asked upon arriving in San Diego was, “Where can we get a decent kabob around here?” It’s a tough one to answer because despite a fairly large Iranian population, San Diego can’t lay claim to as many great Persian food options as you’d think. Iranians give most of the restaurants lukewarm reviews, and the food is regarded as average at best. (One that gets a lot of recognition is Bandar. We haven’t been yet, but if we asked where to find the most expensive kabob, Bandar would surely be the answer.)
That said, if you don’t have a Persian mother who serves up some of the best asheh reshteh and fesenjoon you’ve ever tasted, I’m sure you’ll be as happy as I was at Balboa International Market. Last week for Persian New Year, we checked out the part-Middle Eastern/Indian grocery store, part-fast-food joint, where we ordered the lamb koobideh (a ground lamb kabob) and boneless chicken kabob plates, both of which came with a roasted tomato, mound of rice, lavash bread and side salad. (The salad is a nod to Western customers because it’s definitely not traditional.) The quality of meat was great — tender, juicy and well-marinated — and I definitely went to town on the sumac, a spice gingerly sprinkled on the rice. In my case, it was shoveled on top. I really can’t get enough.
Despite what my lace top might imply, it’s certainly not a fancy place, but for the price, taste and quality, Balboa Market is your best bet for Persian food, even according to an native son like Eaman. (Oh, and they make fresh noon barbari, a traditional oven-baked flatbread, too!)
In an effort to get to know my city better, I’ve started venturing to different neighborhoods where I spend hours (literally) in checking out stores, talking to local business owners and trying new food. I must annoy my friends and boyfriend enough — making them wait to eat until I photograph their food, asking them to move out of a shot or filming them for my videos — so I also figured this would be a way to give them a break. It gave me some alone time, too.
Truth be told, I love shopping alone and actually hate shopping with company. Anxious thoughts run through my mind: Am I holding them up? Are they bored? I’ll come back and spend more time in this shop later. Sometimes, a girl wants to spend 2 hours in one shop and 5 minutes in another. Am I alone here?
Anywho, I knew where I wanted to go first: Adams Avenue. We’ve driven down this street in University Heights/Normal Heights/North Park/Kensington (the neighborhood boundaries change as you go east and are in turn, hotly debated) a few times but there are so many small local shops that I told myself a by-foot exploration was in order. San Diego neighborhood divisions aren’t as drastic as they are in, say, New York, but each ‘hood does have a slightly different flavor. Adams Avenue, also dubbed Antique Row for its handful of vintage shops, feels like Old Town, U.S.A. One store owner told me that people liken it to what Greenwich Village was back in the day. Most businesses are mom-and-pop operations, traffic is virtually non-existent and bikes are a popular mode of transportation. In the last few years, the area has witnessed an influx of noteworthy shops and a burgeoning food scene. It’s no surprise that it’s becoming a new favorite.
I didn’t know if it was possible just two months into a new life in a new city, but this past weekend felt like the first normal weekend in a long time. Even though I’m still making weekly Target trips for apartment essentials and despite spending a good chunk of the weekend painting furniture in our still-incomplete apartment, I finally felt rooted. It’s a feeling I missed a lot while backpacking.
Until now, I had felt like I was being led around town, trying desperately to take mental notes only to be overwhelmed by how much I didn’t know. But this weekend I felt like I was starting to get the hang of things. I knew a good cafe for a late Friday night. I wanted to go to yoga taught by a great teacher on Sunday morning. And I knew I wanted dedicated girl-time.
Girlfriends: That’s something worth mentioning. I think it’s tough when a couple moves somewhere new where they know so few people; it’s hard to do anything on your own without making the other person feel left behind. But Eaman and I are starting to make friends and able to get in some bro-time and girl-time, respectively. It’s healthy, fun and necessary because he can hear about my eyeliner issues and I can hear about fantasy basketball only so many times.
Convoy is one smorgasbord of delicious Asian food. It’s a street in the neighborhood of Kearny Mesa that’s filled with eats from Thailand, China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and The Philippines. Food is usually cheap and almost always authentic, but the problem is picking a place. How do you know what’s best when there are so many options?
Well, you blindly pick one.
OK, maybe you shouldn’t do that, but that method worked well for me on Saturday night. If my recent hunger pangs for pho meant anything, we started knowing that we wanted Vietnamese food. Since Yelp and its too-many opinions can be overwhelming, I flipped through San Diego Magazine‘s Asian Food Guide issue instead and took a shot in the dark.
The place? Phuong Trang. The prices? Crazy good. (Like $6.25-for-a-large-noodle-entree good.) The food? Also crazy good — Vietnamese with everything from pho and noodle bowls to hot pots and rice paper wraps (a DIY dish Eaman loved in Vietnam). Apparently my blind pick was pretty on-target because the next morning a friend told me that Phuong Trang comes highly recommended from her Vietnamese friends.
Between the six of us, there were shrimp noodle bowls, vegetarian noodle bowls, pho and garlic chicken wings. The bun xao bo hoac ga — a beef noodle dish and our favorite street eat in Hanoi — was a faithful rendition and the garlic wings had a nice kick and tender meat. Oh and as for the pho, after all those dreams about hot, tangy soup, I wasn’t even paying attention when I ordered and asked for the vegetarian noodle bowl by accident. (It comes with its own non-fish, vegetarian sauce!) Fortunately this place is so good that even when you order just as absent-mindedly as your process was to pick the place, you still get something worth writing home about. (See: this blog post.) And I don’t totally mind that I messed up my own order; it’s a good excuse for going back sooner rather than later.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a bit of a food snob after living in New York for four years. But it’s not just about the quality of food; sometimes it’s about that feeling of dinnerbeing the main event. San Diego is decidedly more casual and far less rabid about its food scene than New Yorkers, but it was like a breath of fresh air to eat at Bencotto in Little Italy this week. It was there that I finally felt that same excitement about eating out.
Bathed in red and black colors (my favorite combo!), Bencotto has that inviting feel like it would be perfectly acceptable to settle into a four-hour dinner. The longer, the better in my opinion. It’s the kind of place where you wouldn’t seem out of place for getting dolled up, and frankly, I had been missing that now that I work from home and log more time in sweatpants than jeans. So thank, you, Bencotto, for giving my skirts and heels some air-time.
Northern California may have Napa and wine, but Southern California has San Diego and beer — beer (hoppy in particular) that’s won accolades and microbreweries that have earned international recognition. Eaman had been to a couple without me, but with my friend Katy in town this past week I finally had a chance to see what all the fuss was about.
Let me first put it out there that I don’t like beer. I don’t enjoy drinking at all actually. I once did, but those were different times when I could go clubbing until 4am, eat Taco Bell and then wake up to study for a psychology exam the next day. Now I have trouble even smelling the stuff. So why am I even telling you about breweries? Well, 1. They’re a staple of San Diego culture, 2. I had a trio of taste-testers at my disposal and 3. These microbreweries are such interesting set-ups that it’s fun to check out even if you’re not imbibing. Many, including the ones we went to, are located in industrial parks in the suburbs. The reason being that the space is large and rent cheap enough. But since these breweries are a happy hour favorite, people are basically going from one office building to the next. If you build it, they will come I guess.
We started at AleSmith, a smaller operation located in Miramar where you can see a few barrels and try saucily named drinks. (Most 4 oz. samples are $1.) Our friend Mike, who has lived in SD for a number of years and counts AleSmith as his favorite, is fond of the Grand Cru, while Eaman liked the Old Numbskull. What did I like? The enormous, beautiful, gentle Newfoundland, Jake, who seems to be something of a brew house pet.
I live for hiking. But I hate camping. I hate going to the bathroom outside and feeling grimy as I sleep, but I lurve hiking. And SoCal’s many hiking trails is part of the reason we moved here. We recently took a mini-road trip with our friends Sara and Adam to Cuyamaca, located about an hour away, for a Saturday hike. There weren’t any steep ascents and much of the trail grounds are still burned to a crisp after the horrible 2003 Cedar Fire, but it felt good to exercise the way I love most with good people, good conversation and the gorgeous green mountains in the distance.
But the real reason we drove all that way for a hike was to reward ourselves with dessert afterward. (Duh.) Near Cuyamaca is the town of Julian, an old mining center that’s still reminiscent of the Wild Wild West — homogenous population and all! — and famous for its apple pie. We walked through the (touristy) town, bypassed a llama (yep) and made a beeline for Julian Pie Company, where we obliterated any calorie burn with slices of Apple Mountain Berry Crumb (apples, raspberries, boysenberries and strawberries), caramel apple pie and a cider donut. They also offer a wollop — certainly not a “dollop” size — of homemade whipped cream. Four slices of pie, a donut and coffee? That’s acceptable. But tack on cream? That’s just crazy.
