One Nob Hill

I am in California with my parents on my way to my sister's graduation. Currently, we are in beautiful yet hilly San Francisco but who knows where we will be tomorrow (as it turns out: San Francisco). We don't know the city that well, so we asked my cousin for recommendations. He suggested an Italian restaurant with a very un-Italian name: Hob Hill Cafe.



I decided to go for the pizza option, where you build on the basic Margherita by adding toppings. I chose spinach, artichokes and mushrooms. Once I got the meal I regretted my decision.



This was not, of course, because the pizza was bad. It was actually quite good. Rather, I regretted it because I have a very ambiguous relationship with gourmet restaurant style pizza. As shameful as it is to say, in many cases I prefer the stuff from an under-the-heatlamp pizzeria. Luckily, we were all fuller than we thought we were when we ordered so I got to sample my parents orders. They had both gotten pasta and it was excellent. The Fettuccine had a delicious creamy pesto sauce but it was the gnocchi where the restaurant really shined. The gnocchi were light but not insubstantial and the sauce was zesty but not overpowering.

So if you are in San Fran, I'd recommend it but chose the pasta over the pizza.

Nob Hill Cafe
1152 Taylor Street, San Francisco, California, USA

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess: My DR vacation

Gentle Readers, I have wronged you by being away too long. In my defense – I had vacation, then a short (but intense) term and then another vacation. I will try to stick to my "Sunday Frugal Sunday" schedule from now on.

Check the space below this entry for some posts I was working on but haven't published yet. In the meantime, here's a report from my vacation to the Dominican Republic.



I spent a week at an all-inclusive resort: $1000 (CDN) got you a roundtrip flight, shelter and the food you can eat and alcohol you can drink. I had a blast, though the days settled into a routine: wake up at noon, go to the beach for a bit, have lunch, go the pool (maybe play some volleyball or water polo), have supper, attend a charmingly amateur show the resort staff put on, hit up the Discoteca and then to a late night beach party or the 24 hour bar. While there are some interesting stories from some of these activities, as this is a food blog I'll describe the food.

The food was a bit of a change of pace for me: while there were veggie options there was certainly nothing frugal about the resort. One of the good things about the massive availability of alcohol was that it inhibited thinking through the political implications of so much waste in a country so poor (to say nothing of an island with such a recent catastrophe). I donated to Haiti again before I left. An indulgence, Martin Luther would sneer.

There were fairly massive quantities of food, I easily tripled my caloric intact for the week. Normally I have a sandwich for lunch and a plate of food for dinner. Here, I'd have a plate of food for lunch and probably two plates of food from the buffet for dinner. The ingredients were also different, I ate a lot of cheese. Generally, my meals followed the same pattern:



I'd have a slice of pizza, some fries, rice with some veggies and pasta with grilled vegetables over it (sometimes the pasta would have a cheese sauce). As you can see, there's nothing really Dominican about the food offerings. The food was, as one of my hipster friends would sniff, "unoffensive". It was good though, and sometimes something would genuinely surprise me. The guacamole was excellent, though I thought it was only served a few select occasions. Turns out it was there but I had been missing it. That was disappointing. Not as disappointing though as when I discovered – on the last night! – there was a vegetarian curried bean dish every night that, again, I had just overlooked. I also had some spiced potatoes that were amazing.

It's not the way I'd like to live for my entire life and it's certainly not the way I'd always like to eat. But it was fun for a week.