Inspired by 7×7 magazine, here’s a short but sweet love letter to the Inner Richmond:
The first love letter I ever wrote to the Inner Richmond actually came in the form of a map. I marked off my haunts in giant red exes and recalled the first time I had visited each. I remember the quaint Blue Danube, a sweet yet headstrong café defying the norm of Asian establishments on Clement, always prepared to serve me my regular Rosemary Chicken sandwich. During my first visit, my roommate promised that it was the best sandwich she had tasted in the city. One bite and I knew she was right, as a heavenly chorus began singing in my mouth. Fellow customers complimented my divine voice, but little did they know I owed it all to the culinary masterminds of the Blue Danube. And I remember when I first stepped through the de Young’s sleek, modern doors. The young edifice enticed me lower, lower, to the basement level, where her wild Vivienne Westwood exhibit laid. As if one love affair weren’t enough, I discovered O’Keeffe’s, folded into one of the Inner Richmond’s quiet corners. Mainly frequented by Irishmen (not Americans claiming Irish blood, but actual Irishmen), the gritty dive bar won me over with lusty accents and cheap liquor abound. So with this letter, I proclaim my love for you, Inner Richmond, my physical map with red exes transformed into a literary map of my memories. I’ll let everyone know that we are in love, madly in love, and I will dance in your streets till my legs are old and weary, and even then, seated at your park benches, I will still take in your splendor.
o eat some of that fast food I had sworn off, all for the sake of experiencing Haight at its most raw. Fortunately, it didn’t really come to that. Apparently my observations about the grossness of the McDonald’s on Haight were in line with the class, and we instead made the trip to the nearby Cole Valley for a higher end meal at Zazie. Zazie is a quaint French bistro adorned in light shades of yellow and green, and I immediately fell in love with it. The fact that Zazie saved me from McDonald’s made me love it even more. All aglow with happiness, when I saw some of my classmates down at the other end of the table with 22oz beers in hand, I knew I had to get one for myself. My Fischer Blonde was easily one of the largest beers I have ever ordered in a restaurant. As I skimmed the menu, my eyes popped when I saw the word salmon. I have found that whenever salmon is on a menu, it’s impossible for me to turn down the delicious freshwater flavor. So to accompany my beer, I had the Salmon Grillade with citrus pearl couscous, toybox tomatoes and sugar snap peas. Thoroughly stuffed by the end of my meal, I learned that we were, in fact, heading down to McDonald’s for dessert. Because I had worked myself up so much about going to begin with, the prospect didn’t really frighten me. So I gathered my courage and walked through the door with the rest of the class around me, prepared to observe the eerie otherness of McDonald’s on Haight Street. One of the first things I noticed were two homeless men sitting at a booth around the corner from the counter where customers order, out of sight from the workers. I also noticed that there were only two other parties seated, all of whom were obese. I was actually surprised that the present restaurant demographic fit exactly my preconceived notions of what people who come to Haight Street McDonald’s look like. I decided to order vanilla soft serve ice cream on a cone and further investigate this. As I was waiting for my cone, a younger group of girls and a family entered the McDonald’s, swaying the demographic to something more suburban-esque (what were these girls and this family doing on Haight Street at night?) and less like I had imagined. It became a typical McDonald’s with typical people. I pondered this as I enjoyed my soft serve, and slowly my thoughts drifted to Michael Pollan and his experience with McDonald’s in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I remember how he commented that 13 of the ingredients from his son’s McNuggets were derived from corn. Did my cone squeeze by without any corn-derived ingredients? Probably not. There was high fructose corn syrup in this for sure. I got to thinking how surplus corn was often distilled and fermented and turned into alcohol. Is it possible that my delicious beer at Zazie came from corn? The ironic part is that while most of the food I eat has some sort of corn product in it, I don’t even like corn.
The Chinatown Crüe and I took a quick tour of Chinatown last Monday, peeking through unmarked doors and down alleyways, searching below the surface for something exciting to show the ESF class. One of the first places we discovered was on Waverly Place, which I, embarrassed to admit, had never heard of until that day. Waverly Place has apparently gained the nickname the “Street of Painted Balconies” for all of the colorful terraces that line the street. We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to climb to one of these painted balconies during our discovery of Tin How Temple, one of the oldest Buddhist Temples in North America. Actually, we were fortunate to have even found the door, inconspicuously lodged between storefronts, the small English letters “Tin How Temple” barely visible below the large Chinese characters. The temple was cramped and choked with incense as people came to worship. The woman who ran the temple was nice enough to give us a brief history and overview of the temple and Buddhist religion, explaining the significance of various sculptures and objects around the room. After 
one of our classmates had his fortune told, we scurried down to New Asia, an incredibly popular dim sum restaurant (that doubles as a wedding banquet hall) full to the brim with customers. The wait was longer than expected, but well worth it. It isn’t very often that I go out for dim sum with large groups, but it is certainly an experience to be had. Flagging down cart-pushers for the food that you want, violently shaking your head no for the food that you don’t (that for some reason they feel the need to force on you), wondering exactly what something is the second before you pop it into your mouth. I’ve learned that more often than not, it’s something containing shrimp. Oddly enough, I’m not a shrimp fan at all and the only time I enjoy it is when eating 
dim sum. Dim sum in a large group in only makes it that much better, because everyone can engage in speculation at a certain dish someone ordered and dare each other to try it. Sometimes the more experienced dim sum eater will be able to identify the food before anyone tries it. Other times, everyone can identify the food and no one will want to try it. This happened on Saturday when a fried chicken foot mysteriously appeared on our table. Chicken feet=dim sum? That’s a new one to me, but a quick google search told me it’s common. We all stared anxiously at it wondering who’d be the first to try it. I volunteered myself, claiming I take a bite if someone else did first. Unfortunately for me, Professor Silver was all too willing to take me up on my 
offer and dug his teeth right in. “Tastes like chicken,” he said. I reluctantly grabbed the chicken foot from him, nibbling a the smallest nibble I could manage and feeling to completely nauseated afterward, even though he was right, it tasted like chicken. The chicken foot went around as person after person pecked at the foot and made a face in disgust. Well, this had to be better than the cow’s stomach the other table ordered. After we had had our fill and I had eaten the pork bun’s I’d been begging for, we grabbed the check and hit the alleyways for Chinatown’s last fortune cookie factory—The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. Another hole-in-the-wall place, this narrow little factory has about two Chinese women hand-folding these soft circular cookies into fortune cookie shapes and slipping a fortune inside. Apparently The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory is known for their “adult” fortune cookies with racy fortunes that are actually just random words strung together. If you’re lucky, the fortune might actually make sense.
I came home to indulge in my two favorite guilty pleasures, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (on sourdough) and diet coke. Mm, mmm. No shame here. I’ve probably been eating PB&J and drinking diet coke on a regular basis since I grew teeth. I firmly believe in the daily consumption of essential nutrients like high fructose corn syrup and aspartame, of which PB&J and diet coke contain high amounts. I also recommend that others follow my example in order to live a healthy lifestyle.
It just so happens that USF was having a blood drive today, and what better way to kill time than by saving a life? Sometimes I feel that being O negative is both a blessing and a curse. I take pride in being a hospital hero as a universal donor, but at the same time I feel obligated to continuously suffer the excruciating pain of having a needle plunged intravenously inside me. Alas, it is my duty. After having a pint of blood sucked out of me, the phlebotomists required me to hang around for 15 minutes (in case I faint) and eat and drink their food—the only time in my life someone other than my parents has demanded that I eat. Of course, I wasn’t complaining. Free chocolate chip Chewy bar, honey roasted peanuts and two bottles of water!
Because it’s St. Patty’s Day, my somewhat Irish friends and I decided to celebrate by getting dinner at an Irish pub. However, after a bit of yelping we discovered that no Irish pubs in the Richmond also serve dinner. Not willing to compromise our somewhat Irish heritage by going to a dinner-serving English pub, we instead went out for sushi! But on principle, we refused to try the Japanese beer. The lovely Ichi Raku, on 2nd and Geary, first served us some complimentary Miso soup and barbequed salmon. After resigning to stabbing off portions of the salmon with my chopsticks (why aren’t there knives in Japan?), I noticed this salmon still had bone in it. Ah, so that’s why it was complimentary. After I was finished defiling my napkin, my friend Megan tried to convince me that this was actually a good sign, that they buy their salmon whole rather than in packaged chunks, and this was simply the part of the fish that was not right for sushi. I was still thoroughly grossed out about chewing salmon bone, fresh or not. Needless to say, the salmon remained untouched for the rest of the evening. Fortunately, the sushi itself proved to be very opposite from gross. I ordered the caterpillar roll, which was delightfully shaped like a little avocado and salmon-egg caterpillar with cucumber antennae and an eel tale. Aw. I accidentally ate the head before I remembered to take a picture.
After wandering around Clement and realizing that all the bars were pretty much at max drunken capacity (at 8:00, even! Everyone acting in the way of the Irish, I guess), I remembered that I actually live by this homey little bar inhabited by real Irish people, with accents and everything. All excited to see the Irish in their natural habitat, my friends and I scurried to O’Keefe’s on 5th and Balboa. We entered the smoky (yes, smoky!) tavern and surveyed the scene of jovial, drunken, middle-aged Irishmen, not an American accent to hear but our own. The bartender leaned over the counter littered with cans of Guinness and gruffly asked us our drinks. Seeing as how Guinness and I had a bad experience together last St. Patty’s, I ashamedly ordered a Heineken. Just before the bartender served us our drinks, an angry Irishmen darted from his stool and passionately threw it to the ground, in the belligerent Irish fashion. My friends and I gaped in awe, having only ever heard of such pugnacious Irish behavior, but never before witnessed it. By the end of the night, we did not escape the tavern without first witnessing a beer-bottle throwing and a mooning as woman tried to show off her tattoo. Feeling as if we had successfully engaged in a cultural experience worthy of St. Patrick’s Day, my somewhat Irish friends and I parted ways.
My family has a bit of history relating to the mission. When my great grandparents emigrated from Ireland to the US, they came to San Francisco and eventually found their home on the outskirts of the Mission district, where they raised my grandmother and great aunt. My grandmother eventually moved to a small city just south of San Francisco, but my great aunt, or Aunt Margaret Anne as we call her, remained in the city to eventually inherit the Victorian in which she was raised. By the time my brothers and I were born, spending Thanksgiving and Easter at Aunt Margaret Anne’s house was already an established tradition. So growing up, I equated going to the Mission with eating Irish staples like honey glazed ham and mashed potatoes. Even though I had spent years walking down the Mission’s streets and chatting with cashiers who were making time-and-half for working Thanksgiving/Easter, never once did it occur to me that Mission culture was decidedly more Latino than Irish.
Excursion Cookbook 