19 posts tagged “c'pher”

Tasting @ Vintner's Collective. Buoncristisni Bros. et al. Drunk yet?

"This is the one we DON'T want...."

Rocha Family Vinyards. Bad Boy Red: very good.

Belly up to the bar

Lunch at Ubuntu. So good you hardly miss the meat.

A restaurant that matters

Today, Julie, C'pher and Paula and I took a loverly day trip to Napa. First stop: Domaine Carneros. Don't our lives suck?

Champagne alright for you, Pats?

Here's looking at you, kid.

If you ever needed evidence that guys -- all guys -- think about sex a lot, look no further than my own beloved C'pher. He has been pining away for this guy, who, after likely posing years ago for some stock photography, started appearing in an ad posted in various BART stations and trains while ago. C 'oohed' and 'aahed' all over this admittedly dreamy looking commuter/model/waiter, and when the posters started disappearing (I guess people got the message that we should move over and make room for seniors and persons with disabilities), he was crestfallen.

Imagine our delight just the other day when we saw the guy on the wall of our BART train. We immediately snapped some pictures for posterity (ahem) and C went so far as to make him the wallpaper on his phone.

Anyone having knowledge of the guy from the picture, his name, whereabouts, or contact information is instructed to NOT TELL CHRISTOPHER. That is all.

Now HE can ring MY bell....

Let's just go out. Again.

A Belated Happy 2008!  As you may have noticed, I look a little blog-cation during the month of January (and the first half of February!), but now I’m back, and finally, after much committee discussion, amendments from the floor, and last-minute reprieves from the Governor, I am ready to declare 2008 The Year of Restaurant Eating.

Those of you who know me (and who else is reading this… let’s be honest) will be surprised that 2008 should deserve that distinction considering how large a portion of my income sits in the tills of various eateries in San Francisco and beyond. Well… something occurred to me yesterday as I was signing up for the tablehopper e-newsletter. In a brief questionnaire when you sign up, tablehopper writer Marcia Gagliardi asked how many lunches or dinners I ate out each week. When I realized that I fell into the “6-9 per week” category (I eat lunch out pretty much daily, and that we often have dinner out or takeout once a week), I thought “I have a problem.”

Then, almost immediately, I thought, “how is having food this great a problem?”  Aside from my waistline, I mean.

I thought back on the past 6 weeks and realized that not only had I had ridiculously good food for lunches (La Boulange de Hayes, Modern Tea, Momi Toby’s), I had also managed to make it to some excellent neighborhood favorites (Range, Ti Couz, Mission Beach Café), and even tried out some great places that were new to me (Frisee, The Monk’s Kettle).  This doesn't even count our mid-month trip we made to San Diego! Factor in all the amazing raw materials we have to make food at home, and you can see that, truly, our gastronomic life here in San Francisco does not suck.

The jewel in the crown of the past few weeks, though, has to be our anniversary dinner at Incanto. As many know already, C’pher and I have a tradition going all the way back to the anniversary of our first date: each year we switch off surprising the other with a fantastic meal out at a great restaurant, often beginning with drinks out with friends at another location. 

This year, our 13^th, it was my turn to pick the place. Since we had an amazing trip to Italy this past October, I wanted someplace Italian, preferably Tuscan. I studied the Chronicle’s list of the 100 Best SF Restaurants, and there were several excellent contenders in the City. Once I started investigating and reading up on reviews and blogs, the field was severely narrowed, and I made our reservations. I knew it was a good sign when the very DAY I made the res, we watched an episode of Check Please, Bay Area, and the fabulous Incanto was featured and loved by all three amateur reviewers. That’s what’s called a bulls-eye people. Nailed it!

After a lovely round of drinks at Dalva on a terribly rainy night with the intrepid Mary, Nicole, John, Cricket, and Jason, C and I jumped in the miracle cab that appeared right outside the bar door and got to Noe Valley in no time. The room is comfortable and stylish without being overdesigned. The staff treated us very very well, and we tucked into some house-made salumi, great wine, excellent bread and some very delicious and inventive seasonal dishes. For his main, C’pher had a braised Tuscan-style stew with meat so tender it actually was falling off itself, not to mention the bone. I had two great dishes; salt cod ravioli as a pasta course, and stinging nettle and chard risotto – tasty, seasonal and very well prepared.

Chef Chris Cosentino has a blog called Offal Good wherein he extols the virtues of the leftover parts of the cow, pig, and other animals, both as a way of talking about good eats and as a way of using all parts of the animal in an environmentally-friendlier and animal-respectfuller way. It’s neat reading as he loves showing pictures of exactly how our food animals are raised, slaughtered, and prepared. Everyone should see that.

K + C = 4 Ever

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Since I haven’t done it for a while, maybe it’s time for me to update the list of places C and I have had our anniversary dinners. So, for your edification, here is the list. Vive la Café!  Vive le Bistro! Vive la Brasserie!  Vive la Year of Restaurant Eating!

• '96  1^st  Hyeholde, outside Pittsburgh, PA (K)
• '97  2^nd  A SF gay-owned Italian place on Polk that's closed now, SF (C)
• '98  3^rd  Chez Panisse, Berkeley (K)
• '99  4^th  Hawthorne Lane, SF (C)
• '00  5^th  Boulevard, SF (K)
• '01  6^th  JohnFrank, SF (C)
• '02  7^th  Hyde Street Bistro, SF (K)
• '03  8^th  Evvia, Palo Alto (C)
• '04  9^th  Chez Spencer*, SF (K)
• '05  10^th  Farallon, SF (C)
• ’06  11^th  Chenery Park, SF (K)
• ’07  12^th  The Public, SF (C)
• ’08  13^th  Incanto, SF (K)

In a related story, the Quizno’s I used to frequent so often I became a regular has closed. The Pepper Bar is Dead!  Long live the Pepper Bar!

* We didn't actually go there, though... C got sick and we never did reschedule. Maybe 2008 will be the Year of Chez Spencer?

Show us the one thing that unfailingly makes you smile, no matter what. 
Submitted by Sourire.

There's a liiiiiiight...

Mannie in a tunnell!  Sorry, Mandy and Max.  You make me smile, too!  Thanks to ET for the picture, taken so long ago.

Big forehead = big brain

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Jenny kept asking. Nicole said she missed it. Emily begged. Harold pleaded.  Jeanne said "we've got to get you a blog!" Even Rebecca, who once swore that her dojo's website was the most she would do started posting.  But still I resisted.  Now it's been almost exactly a year since I've blogged.  ::sigh::  Somehow, I remained unmotivated.

BUT... when Christopher started blogging... well, that was the gauntlet I needed.

Let's begin the biguine.

Burp-a-licious

…especially if it’s carbonated.

Christopher and I celebrated eleven years of putting up with each other with another lovely meal two weeks back. Because we just spent a good deal of money at Christmas and since we’re ordering some new furniture, we decided a slightly more… austere… evening was in order, especially compared to last year.

It was my year to choose, so I chose a little neighborhood spot, since a place that fit that category was such a hit back in 2002. We hopped on BART, a confused Christopher wondering why we were on a Millbrae train, and got off in the quaint if foggy village of Glen Park and had a lovely meal at Chenery Park.

Surrounded by more senior citizens than at a Tuesday noontime opera lecture at the local public library, we had a really delicious meal served by a painfully cute waiter. The one dark spot was the bottle of wine we took. We thought we’d save on the check by only paying the $15 corkage fee. It turned out to be not so great, but a perusal of their wine list fixed that situation, if not the size of the bill.

Chenery Park specializes in fancier versions of ‘comfort food,’ so naturally we ordered their macaroni and cheese. It was delicious! Cut to several courses later, and I am full, yet still eyeing the dessert menu. When I saw that they had a Thomas Kemper Orange Cream Soda Float, I couldn’t resist.

It turns out that cocktails + wine + more, better wine + melted cheese and cream + scallops + one Thomas Kemper Orange Cream Soda Float = fucking unbelievable indigestion. And fucking unbelievable indigestion doesn’t really put one in an amorous mood, regardless of how big an anniversary it is. Burp!

Could my famous bottomless iron stomach be failing me?

Nah.

It was much better than Cats.

After much fanfare and anticipation on my part, I got my first ever professional facial this weekend. As expected, it felt great and left my face feeling open and clean and fresh as a spring daisy. Good thing it was a gift from my generous husband Christopher, ‘cause if I’d have had to pay for it, I’m sure I would have just elected to sit in the lobby and drink cucumber water. Still, it was a fabulous luxury, and the 50 minutes it took literally flew by. I highly recommend one for anyone who has $110 burning a hole in their wallet. Oily skin full of blackheads and ingrown hairs like I have is also helpful.

Part of the facial was the consultation with Sarah, the lovely young lady who did my treatment. She asked what I used to wash my face and when I told her I used St. Ives Apricot Scrub, I swear I heard that “pull the needle off the record” sound effect on the boring ambient mood music being piped into the dimly lit room.

Sarah admonished me mightily for using that stuff, saying something I had heard before but didn’t quite believe: using that stuff actually makes you oilier. It strips your skin of its natural oils and so it starts to produce oil overtime to make up for it. Duh! “Only use that apricot stuff on your feet!” she reminded me not too gently.

After steaming, squeezing, sweeping and salving my face, Sarah told me she’d prepared a list of products she recommended for me (any of which I could conveniently pick up at the shop downstairs), and then dropped the bomb.

She told me that I should only be washing my face AT NIGHT. You read that right. “Just water in the morning,” she reiterated. She said she’d ‘balanced me out’ with the treatment, and she suggested a gentle cleanser followed by a moisturizer each night before bed, and a protecting moisturizer in the morning, but no washing. Her list actually included a couple other “pore cleansing” treatments for twice weekly use and a couple of other things, but I was still reeling from the “don’t wash your face in the morning” idea.

So… we’re now on day 2 of me only having washed my face at night. My moisturizer collection is not what it should be for a gay man, and the only pore cleansing treatment I have used recently was the apricot scrub, and we saw how that turned out. My face doesn’t feel particularly greasy or anything, but my forehead does seem a tiny bit less shiny.

I wonder if Walgreen’s has any night-time alcohol-free moisturizers on sale this week?