so, with the whole beer in the computer incident last week, i was afraid we had lost over a year & a half of pictures that hadn’t been backed up…including all of our pictures from mexico & california that aren’t living on this blog.  luckily, the hard drive was salvageable & we recovered everything.  & backed it all up.  & then backed it all up again.

back up your pictures, people.

…we really only had one full day in the city & we were going to eat our way across it.

it began a few blocks from our hotel at café de la presse.  we had coffee & breakfast while watching people pass through the dragon’s gate into chinatown & the waiter accidentally pour syrup into the very expensive bag & all over the iPad of the guy sitting next to us.  sticky.

afterwards, we meandered over to the ferry building & walked around with the growing lunch crowd.  for any food lover, this place is heaven.

{clockwise from top left: ferry building, ferry building inside, cowgirl creamery, meat cone @ boccalone, gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, boccalone}

we had individual drip coffee from blue bottle coffee, a meat cone from boccalone {that spurred us to make several online orders since then}, & just walked around soaking in all the sights & smells before settling in for lunch at the slanted door.

i first heard of the slanted door years ago & knew i always wanted to go, so i’m glad we finally made it on this trip.  i don’t know why, but i had expected a tiny, dimly lit restaurant.  maybe because it had been?  once upon a time in the mission?  well instead, it’s a huge, open restaurant with tons of natural light & floor to ceiling windows overlooking the bay.

the menu is vietnamese influenced & sourced by local farms.  the menu is pretty huge, but our waitress clued us in to the small plate style & let us know that the cocktails shouldn’t be missed, so we ended up getting a few different things like spring rolls, cellophane noodles with dungeness crab & spicy broccoli with tofu & mushrooms, as well as a whiskey cocktail & queen’s park swizzle to wash it all down.

the whole meal was delicious, flavorful & fresh.  & the waitress was right, the cocktails shouldn’t be missed.

it was hard to not notice the white puffs of cotton candy that arrived at almost every table in the restaurant for dessert, & although we were pretty full, there was no way in hell i was leaving without having some.  the flavor of the day was orange bergamot & it was not at all like any other cotton candy i had ever had.  sure, the same fluffy, sugary texture was there, but the flavor was unreal.  instead of tasting like “pink” or “blue”, it had the most vibrant orange flavor.

we really had no trouble polishing it all off.

on the way back to the hotel, we detoured at cask, the most well curated whiskey store with a decent selection of wine & beer & other spirits.  tom was like a kid in candy store.  we eventually left, with a bottle of

{image credit}

& all the russian river beer we could carry back with us.