Category Archives: Classic American

Bistro Boudin

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http://www.boudinbakery.c…f/bistro-boudin

Our infusion center had a holiday party at Bistro Boudin in Fisherman’s Wharf tonight. I haven’t been to Fisherman’s Wharf in a long time… I look forward to going back again during the day time to explore again. We had Hors d’Ε“uvres, drinks, and just enjoying each others company away from work.

My coworker Monica was nice enough to give me a ride to the party and buy me a drink. This is something called “Passion”.

The delicious food (tuna, chicken, bacon wrapped fig, bacon cheeseburger, crab cakes, sausage):

We did a secret santa exchange and had a nice relaxing time.

They had some cool bread sculptures and also gave us a free loaf of “stocking” bread to take home.

Thanksgiving

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Ah, a good eating weekend.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at Ron’s parents’ home in Millbrae. My family came and also some of our “homeless” friends so we had a pretty big group.

Ron did quite a bit of the food preparation on Thanksgiving day but thank goodness Ron’s mom did most of the grocery shopping the few days before.

He prepared ribs and a beef roast.

Our friends brought over the turkey fryer. It took about an hour to cook our ~15 lb turkey.

While the cooking was still being done, we just hung out and play Wii. We got the new game Raving Rabbids TV Party. It’s a pretty fun game but your arms would be very tired after playing for too long.

Our beef roast.

Our Coca-Cola spicy ribs.

Our deep fried turkey. Yummy and juicy!

Pork tempura.

Marinated cucumbers. One of Ron’s mom’s best dishes.

I prepared these lemon tarts for dessert. I used Splenda to make the crust and part of the lemon cream. The Splenda gave the crust a very dry texture so I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.

Our big dinner party ready to eat!

After dinner Texas Hold’em game.

Enjoying a cup of tea after a big meal.

I miss living in a home to host a Thanksgiving but at least it’s good our parents will let us use their homes πŸ™‚

Can’t wait to use my turkey bones to make porridge!

Broadway Prime in Burlingame

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http://www.broadwayprime.com/

My Dad’s Uncle Kin arrived from Canada this evening so my parents figured it’d be a good opportunity to have dinner and celebrate my birthday, kill a few birds with one stone.

I ended up choosing to have dinner at Broadway Prime in Burlingame. I called around 2:30pm to make a reservation for 7 people at 8pm, pretty easy.

My impression is that the restaurant is pretty much the same as House of Prime Rib in San Francisco except quite a bit smaller and a bit of a different atmosphere, maybe not quite as traditional? Not sure how to explain it. The restaurant has an upstairs dining area where it could be pretty nice for a small party for up to 20 people but you lose the flair upstairs as they don’t make the salad in front of you nor do they bring the prime ribs to your table to let you see them slice it.

The salad was still good though, the thousand island-like dressing with red beets (I really like red beets).

We had a nice cabernet to go with our meal.

My parents and uncle Kin.

My brother and his girlfriend Cali.

The prime rib is served with your choice of baked potato, mashed potatoes, or garlic mashed potatoes. This is the latter.

The meat is served with your choice of creamed corn or creamed spinach. This is the former and the Select Cut (the middle choice, there is also the Peninsula Cut – small and Broadway Cut – large).

There is also a popover (good for soaking up the juices).

My parents got me a cake from Sogo Bakery which makes really good fruit mousse cakes. We ordered our wedding cake from them.

I got all the candles out.. thank goodness it was only 3 and 1 for good luck!

The cake was delicious as expected and the perfect size for the 7 of us.

Oy, stuffed!

Broadway Prime
1316 Broadway Ave
Burlingame, CA

Birthday at Conduit Restaurant

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http://www.conduitrestaurant.com/

We went to dinner for Virginia’s birthday at Conduit Restaurant on Valencia St in SF. They very nicely accommodated our party in the cellar in the back of the restaurant. It was a bit warm inside but they are in the middle of installing ventilation.

We had cocktails and appetizers as we waited for the birthday girl since they had gone to Marine World in Vallejo to relive a bit of their childhood.

I ordered their “Nouveaux Noyeaux” made with Ketel One vodka, prosecco, stone fruit, and lemon. It had quite a bit of alcohol and I couldn’t really find the “stone fruit” flavor.. but that may be because I was looking for a melon-like flavor since I’ve heard cantaloupe called stone fruit before. But now I find out that stone fruit usually refers to peaches, plums, and the like with seeds.

I only photographed a couple of their appetizers but we ordered most of them on the menu. Here is the fig appetizer with blue cheese and argula. This was really light and delicious. The figs were very delicate but yummy.

Here is the hamachi appetizer which I don’t really remember, wasn’t as mouth watering as the fig salad even though hamachi is my favorite fish for sashimi…

We also had the watermelon, tomato, and cheese appetizer. Who knew watermelon and cheese could go well together? We also had the beef carpaccio which was pretty good as well.

After the birthday girl arrived, we ordered our wines.

One white:

One red:

I ordered their halibut roasted with summer squash and smoked tomato. The piece was a bit small for me but left me enough room for dessert so that worked out well πŸ˜€

Ron had the grilled salmon with lobster mushroom and hearts of palm. The salmon was a nice sized portion and the lobster mushrooms were very nice. It’s orange and is a bit crunchy and also soft.

After our dinner, we were all treated to delicious cupcakes! Virginia had one candle to make her wish.

We almost had enough for 2 per person.

This is a red velvet cupcake with white icing and sprinkles.

This is a lemonade cupcake with pink frosting. The straw is more of a decoration than a utility, no lemonade to suck up πŸ™

Another red velvet cupcake but with chocolate frosting.

The yummy moist inside cake:

Afterwards we went for a drink closeby at Nihon, a Japanese whisky bar. We’d been there one time before but thought it’d be fun to try their other drinks. They have whisky cocktails, champagne cocktails, and LOTS of types of whisky. As cocktails go, I’d recommend the lychee mermaid and ginger indochine. I don’t know enough about whisky to say much…

A word of caution, the lounge gets busy in the evening so you may have to stand for a while before getting a seat on one of the couches or tables. They serve food upstairs so you can make a reservation for dinner.

A fun evening…

Conduit Restaurant
280 Valencia Street
San Francisco

Nihon Whisky Lounge
1779 Folsom St @ 14th St
San Francisco

Whaler’s Village and Lahaina Grill

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Ron and I wandered over to Whaler’s Village this morning. You can walk along the beach and reach the shopping center so it’s quite convenient from our hotel. We just wandered through the stores, just to mention a few of our favorites:

Crazy Shirts
David and Goliath – shirts that “play on words”
Maui Toy Works

Afterwards we went to the food court downstairs, I ordered a tuna melt from Nikki’s Pizza. Nothing too special but well priced for tourist food, ~$7 including the fries.

Ron had the fast food Chinese.

We returned to our room for a nap before heading down to our resort’s restaurant Longboards and had our complimentary drinks.

I tried some mango concoction.

Ron had some passion fruit and strawberry swirl drink while reading a magazine.

The drinks were very sweet and didn’t seem like they had much alcohol added. Maybe because they were free?

For dinner, we went to Lahaina Grill. We figured we should have at least one fabulous dinner while we were on vacation and I read good things about this restaurant. Thanks to trusty Opentable, we secured a reservation.

The restaurant is the ground floor of a (former?) inn. It’s dimly lit with lots of interesting art pieces on their walls. Although it looks like it could be a fancy restaurant, everyone seemed pretty casual… should be no surprise since Hawaiians are usually pretty laid back.

Usually if the bread is good, then the meal should be good as well. I can tell you that this bread with the chives butter was delicious. The bread was warmed and the butter was soft and easy to spread. I hate hard butter.

Our appetizer:
THE CAKE WALK
Petite servings of Kona lobster crab cake, sweet Louisiana rock shrimp cake and seared ahi cake.
The two small red dollops of hot sauce went really well with the seared ahi cake.

Our salad:
WARM PECAN CRUSTED GOAT CHEESE AND BABY ARUGULA SALAD
Pears, roasted beets, Poha berry honey-mustard.
I think we’re really starting to like fresh goat cheese. Everything went really well together in this salad.

Ron’s main course:
MACADAMIA NUT SMOKED KUROBUTA PORK CHOP
All natural, organic American pork, Poblano chile and Dungeness crab golden potato hash, pickled red cabbage and apples, pomegranate demi-glace.
Really fatty but Ron liked the pickled red cabbage and apple compote thing. Hard to taste macadamia nut flavor but still a yummy dish.

Jen’s main course:
KONA COFFEE ROASTED RACK OF LAMB
Light coffee-Cabernet demi-glace, herb infused mashed potatoes.
A bit bitter but with some sweetness, just like adding sugar to your coffee. The lamb was cooked perfectly and the sauce was divine.

We were so stuffed, we couldn’t make it to dessert… so instead, finished off our bottle of wine and headed back for the night.

The wine we had was a cabernet sauvignon from Australia, named EVIL. We picked it for it’s unusual name and it turned out to be a pretty good wine. In general I have a hard time drinking red wines but I had no problem at all with this one. I’m shocked to find that this wine is only $11 a bottle online! But I guess we were in a nice restaurant and there’s always markup… it went well with our meal so I’m glad we had it.