San Fransisco is Foreign for Someone from the South

I'm pretty sure this could be a post card. But no, its what I saw when I woke up.

I was so aggravated that I was delayed that I bought myself a milkshake

My second lip looks like a mustache. You have to entertain yourself somehow.

If this is not Berkeley hipster then what is?

The fancy restaurants always try to look rustic.

Me staring with a look of awe and love at my salad.

The salad I stared so lovingly at. It was worth it.

The soup that also deserved a look of love.

Gluten. And lots of it.

 Farmers market sunshine.

On a not so recent article on Yahoo News I read that San Francisco is the second snobbiest food town in the US. This in my eyes is incredibly accurate, but in a good way. My mom’s twin (my aunt), Kitty, lives in SF with her partner Louis, and they are our family foodies. In a good way. I would be just as food snobby as them if I had the time and the taste buds for it. In a good way. I was on the phone with Kitty one day suffering a huge bout of senioritis and she offered to fly me out to visit them over break. I said yes because while sometimes stupid, I am not an idiot. The trip was part senioritis cure, part college apps session and part blog work. I mean, the second snobbiest town in the US is just about the best place to visit for a little mentoring project research. Second best, to be accurate but I am not related to venerate foodies in Santa Fe.

After a waiting on delays for a stupidly long amount of time I finally landed and woke up bright and early the next day to a view of the Golden Gate and our first food adventure. They took me to Berkeley for a full day food adventure. Kitty had planned the theme of our trip to be fermentation and that is why those parts of our adventures get their own blog post.

Our first stop was this delicious and fancy (for me) restaurant in Berkeley. Louis had a gluten allergy. Like a real one, not just one of those diet fads. The restaurant called Gather might be opening a second gluten free branch by Kitty and Louis’s apartment so they wanted to show it to me. It was so good. Delicious. While we waited for our reservation time we took a quick tour of UC Berkeley which was beautiful and amazing but totally unattainable and too hipstery for me. The tour and crisp (yes, I use that to describe weather) wind gave me a larger appetite than my normal elephant sized. It was perfect. Because of the whole no gluten thing Kitty rarely eats any because she has no one to share it with, so my presence allowed her to get her gluten fix. We split a pizza. It was so fancy that it had an egg cracked on top of it. If that isn’t fancy then I guess you are just too cool for me. But the salad was the biggest hit. It had homemade pickled things in it like beans and onions and other vegetables and it, like the wind, was perfectly crisp.  We all split a soup that we a red pepper tomato bisque that so good that I think I probably ate all of it which is bad because it wasn’t technically for all of us but I took it over.

After a fermentation tour of Berkeley we went to this beautiful organic farmers market where we bought chestnuts and sweet potatoes and goat cheese from a lady who talked with my aunt for about half an hour about goat food. That was pretty cool, I never thought I would know so much about a goat’s intestines. But now I do, and I am so much cooler.

The whole day was incredibly memorable and also did a great job at proving that the Bay area really is the place to go for a foodie.