Monday, March 19
Coffee from Berkeley Espresso, 1900 Shattuck Ave. (at Hearst), Berkeley. The Boyfriend(TB)’s soy latte was fine, my double tall iced Americano tasted bitter and burnt.
- Taste: Inconsistent
- Portion: Standard espresso drink sizes
- Price: Average ($5.90 without tip), cash only
- Other: Friendly baristas
No lunch to speak of, we munched on snacks we brought with us. We looked for a particular vegan-friendly restaurant at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, didn’t find it, and we realized later it’s closed on Mondays, anyway.
We stopped by a supposedly vegan-friendly dim sum place in Chinatown. I asked about vegan items, but either this place is no longer vegan-friendly or perhaps we had a language problem. It seemed that English was not the primary language of the employee I spoke with, and I don’t know any Chinese. The communication problem may have been a dialect issue. In the Seattle, we pronounce “vegan” as “vee-gun,” in the San Francisco area, it’s “vay-gun.”
We had a list of other vegan and/or vegan-friendly restaurants in San Francisco, but either had a difficult time pinpointing them on the map or figured we didn’t want to walk that far. (We could have taken a bus, I know.)
We finally found Cafe Venue on Leidesdorff Street … and it had closed for the day.
We went back to Berkeley and ate dinner at Cha-Ya Vegetarian Japanese Cuisine, 1686 Shattuck Ave. Partly because it’s so close to where we’re staying, mostly because the food is wonderful.
I had:
- Avocado nigiri* sushi
- Inari nigiri* sushi (seasoned tofu-skin pouch stuff with rice)
- #37 Vege-Tofu Curry soup. Pearl onions, celery, carrots, zucchini, tofu, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, sugar snap peas, kabocha squash and choice of udon or soba noodles in a mild yellow curry broth. (I love me some yellow curry. I admit it—I am, to put it politely, a yellow curry tramp. I’ll try just about any yellow curry as long as I know it’s vegan, and I don’t remember having a yellow curry I didn’t like.)
- Sho Chiku Bai nigori (unfiltered) saké
- #53 Pear Compote. Fresh bosc pear, lightly sweetened, served with vanilla soy milk and green tea sauce.
TB had:
- Portobello mushroom nigari* sushi
- #41 Kinoko soup. Shimeji, eryngll, portobello, and oyster mushrooms with choice of udon or soba noodles in a delicious broth.
- #48 Pineapple Chunks. Lightly sweetened and served with green tea and azuki bean sauces.
* Two large pieces of sushi.
The creamy, sweet nigori saké went well with both the curry and the dessert.
- Taste: Delicious
- Portion size: Just right
- Price: Moderate bordering on expensive, $46 (excluding tip)