As much as I’ve been enjoying my internship, it can’t really hold a candle to all the fun stuff I’ve gotten to do in my free time. (Also, having just re-read this post, I noticed that the fun stuff is more often than not related to food stuff. Bear with me, and cross your fingers that this isn’t just morphing into another clichéd amateur food blog.)
On Wednesday, Steph came back to Berkeley after a brief trip to more archives in Sacramento. We met up with Liza (another Seneca member) and Ashley (one of my friends from HAPA) for dinner in Berkeley at Alborz, as per Polly and Alex’s recommendation. We had never had Persian food before, and while it was good, I wasn’t over the moon about it or anything. For an appetizer, we had crispy rice with a pomegranate-flavored stewy sauce over it. It was quite interesting. I think it’s called Tahdig. I like how there is such a huge variety of cuisines to sample out here – even more so than in Boston! The company was much better than the food. It was so great to be back in the company of a group of friends (whereas I usually have only gotten to see 1 or maybe 2 friends at a time out here).
Thursday was an excellent day, probably one of my favorite of the summer. A lot of that is owed to having such a great day at work (see previous post all about work), but the post-work festivities were also fabulous. I went home after work with Alisa to return the bike she had kindly lent me for the summer, and then met up with Liza and Steph (who had to fly out soon after) in the Mission at Mission Chinese Food (which I’ve seen on food blogs so many times that I was very eager to finally check it out). This restaurant is very cool: it started out as a popup restaurant, and gained such a cult following that it became a full-fledged dining institution. The façade of the building is very unassuming (I actually passed it a couple of times, because it looks like a cheap crappy Chinese takeout place from the outside). Inside it was very crowded (trying to squeeze back to our table, I actually came very close to knocking a bowl of soup off of another diner’s table… oops!) and they had Top 40 music playing, which was very unexpected in an authentic Chinese restaurant, and thus made it cool. My friends had already ordered and mostly finished eating, but I had some of what was left: nian gao (I prefer Grammy-style flavors, but the rice cakes themselves were cooked perfectly – not too gooey but not too hard), a spicy soup with shrimp wontons, Ma Po tofu (SO SPICY!!!!), and sea urchin and caviar egg custard. The food was Sichuan style, and thus needed to be washed down with hearty chopstick-fuls of rice, but it was definitely all very good and very authentic! I didn’t really care for the egg custard (I guess sea urchin is an acquired taste), but the rest was good.
Steph had to head to SFO after dinner, so after saying goodbye to her Liza and I walked around the mission some more. We passed Bi-Rite and poked our heads in. It was basically a free-spirit/non-corporate version of Whole Foods and clearly is a huge hit, because the line snaked all the way to the back of the store. Bi-Rite Creamery across the street is heralded as one of the best ice cream shops in SF and Alisa and Polly have sung its praises many times, so we had to stop by for a taste. I had a scoop of brown sugar with ginger caramel swirl and it was DELICIOUS! (Although I do wish that the ginger flavor had come through more.) I also sampled the honey lavender flavor, which was interesting but not my cup of tea (or should I say scoop of ice cream?). I was very pleased to notice that they use reusable spoons to give samples (see photos) to reduce waste. I LOVE that people and businesses here (generally) walk the walk in terms of sustainability. Sometimes in Massachusetts it seems like a bit of a publicity stunt, whereas here it seems like businesses don’t even think twice about it. It’s pretty cool that composting is a norm!
Next Liza and I headed to a Seneca alumnae’s apartment in a nice (read: expensive) part of the Mission for “Seneca Summer Sync,” which is a series of cocktail parties held simultaneously in cities across the U.S. for Seneca alumnae and undergrads to get together.
The Seneca alumnae are all so amazing! I never fail to have a great time meeting them and spending more time with those I already know. It’s really awesome to see women who haven’t met be able to really click and just totally hit it off, even if separated by years in age. And it was also nice to talk to San Francisco alumnae and get a feel for what it would be like to live here postgrad. Verdict: AWESOME!
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