Location:
1430 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA
Cost: avg $8
www.bluefrontcafe.com
I've declared this the worst food day during our whole San Francisco journey.
Our breakfast consisted of toasted bagels with (albeit pretty good) Trader Joe's strawberry jam and tea made from the last remaining tea bag in our relative's cupboard. Our Japanese Tea Garden venture was all of one bowl of shared snacks and again, tea, this time, Oolong. You can figure that even before lunch we were dying to try something incredible in the city's famous Haight-Ashbury (or "Hashbury") district.
A very colourful, 'hip' place to be. We only had a limited amount of time to spend there but wanted to eat something memorable, so we asked the lady behind the counter of the Tabacco store where we could find some good fare. Her props were for the Blue Front Cafe where, according to her, we would get great Meditteranean food. Perfect!
And there it was!
Huge-ass menus AND lineup! This place must be amazing! The beefy men behind the counter were needless to say, busy and had a real no-nonsense attitude to them. We were almost afraid to order.
As we waited for our chicken gyros we noticed the accolades decorating the wall....it seemed like this was the place to visit in Hashbury! Awesome. Unfortunately, our gyros took, what seemed like decades, and we had to run to catch the bus back so that we could then catch another bus to Japantown to meet our friend who was giving us a ride to San Jose for the premiere of his film at the festival. Gah!
So, we took the wrap to go, resisting the urge to devour it in the bus in anticipation of sitting down properly with it when we got back to the house.
Finally (and I really do mean, finally) we sat down and unwrapped the gyro. It came with this cream sauce on the side which I greedily doused onto the wrap and took a bite. Then another bite, just to give it another chance.
But no.
The sauce had no kick. And the chicken was GREY!! Or GRAY...whichever you prefer. Or maybe BLUE for Blue Front Cafe. Diiiissguuuuusting. I was heartbroken knowing that we had another long trek ahead of us and all I saw was a half-eaten mess on the plate in front of me.
If you'd like to know what we ate for dinner...let me just say, we didn't have time to eat before the film started and I never knew a Cliff bar could taste so good. That was all we ate before we headed to the film's reception at the San Jose Museum of Art where the line up for whatever it was they were serving snaked into the other room!
So we took in some of the jazz...
And decided to check out Goya and Picasso and then the rest of the Museum upstairs where...
....we settled our teeth into the lovely cupcakes, cake-on-sticks, eclairs and donuts. Yes!
When the pass-arounds came...er...around, I "gorged" on a lettuce leaf, a little cup of asparagus cream soup and later, some veggie mexican mish-mash served in the VIP area. You'd be right in guessing that the reason there are no photographs of these so-called meals is because I was eating with both hands!