After one more morning in Santa Cruz, we spent a wonderful day in San Francisco. We covered a lot of ground; fortunately we had a plan going in and we hit all of our objectives.

The weather was beautiful, and that's never a guarantee in the City by the Bay.  We parked near Fisherman's Wharf in an all-day garage that was not as expensive as I had feared. Then we walked along the waterfront, looked out at Alcatraz, and did more people-watching than window-shopping.

One restaurant we passed proudly proclaimed itself "Home of the 60-ounce Margarita" or some such silliness. It was really crowded, so we headed off toward the famous Ghirardelli Square.

Along the way it was impossible to miss the fact that Fisherman's Wharf is still very much about the seafood. Seafood restaurants are everywhere, and fresh fish markets with Pacific seafood piled high on great glaciers of ice. It was lunchtime but we were not yet even remotely hungry, and there's plenty of foodie awesomeness in San Francisco to we continued our explorations.

In 1893 Ghirardelli Square was headquarters of the chocolate company of the same name, but for the past 50 years it has been an indoor-outdoor shopping area with specialty shops. The old buildings have been restored with the names of spices and chocolate that may have been bought and sold or stored there, or maybe it is just a more modern decorative touch. This is the Mustard Building; I am dubious about a mustard-chocolate connection.

While Lorna and Melissa shopped, I had to stop in at the Buena Vista Café, which is said to be the place that introduced Irish Coffee to America back in 1952. I have long been a fan of a good Irish coffee, and they make it the traditional way, floating thickened cream on top rather than spritzing sweet pressurized canned "whipped cream" onto it.

Of course they mix them by the thousands for the tourists and it's easy to see they make them small and cheap so I observed the process and watched the bar fill up with at least 25 little Irish Coffees while I sipped another of my California-gin Martinis, this time with the piney 209.

From there we trekked up and over Columbus Ave through the North Beach neighborhood. This is San Francisco's Little Italy, and stomping grounds of Joe DiMaggio and the headquarters of the Beat poets.

The street is lined with all kinds of great Italian bakeries,  salumerias, ristorantes and caffes. We shopped around and got a few nibbles but pressed on to Chinatown after selecting an Italian restaurant for dinner on the return.

San Francisco's Chinatown is the largest in the US and second only to Vancouver in all of North America. You see things here that you don't see in Boston.

My favorite was the Vital Tea Leaf tea shop, where we tried many interesting teas and learned quite a lot from the patient woman behind the counter. I am a big tea fan, typically drinking an entire pot every Friday and other days when I work at home, so I was like a kid in a candy store.  

In the end we each bought some prizes that I will write about in the Tea section of this site.

One of the more spectacular discoveries, a flower tea, was already featured on my Facebook page: it comes as a compressed ball of dried tea and it unfolds into a flower in the glass! To be honest, it's more decorative than delicious, but I bought a few. I figure I can make them and freeze them to use in punches this winter, or just set out in a nice glass bowl as a centerpiece for a fancy brunch.

There were many more exciting discoveries in Chinatown, like these yummy-looking salted sea cucumbers. I thought about buying some to experiment with, but then thought about keeping them in my luggage for the coming 3500-mile train ride and decided against it.

I also had to pass on the black chicken. It was really kind of a slate gray color. I asked the seller about it. It sounded/looked like the chicken was prepared or treated in some way to get that unappetizing color, but his English was no better than my Chinese so I had to defer my studies until I could get online.

Even then it took some searching, but here's some information in a NY Times article about black chickens. I also learned a bit from two Chinese coworkers when I got back to the office; I guess it's just a black-skinned chicken. I will have to do some more research before I try to find one in New England. It's mighty unattractive when you see it raw like that.

Lorna and Melissa had a lot of fun shopping in Chinatown, but I had work to do. A friend had given me a hot tip about Bix, a bar in the area known for its excellent selection of top-shelf liquor, so I knew this was my chance to try one of the rarer California gins.

The bartender was friendly and knowledgeable. He quickly set me up with a wonderful Martini made with the very local St George Terroir gin while I gazed lustfully at that top shelf - I saw all kinds of local, artisanal, and just plain rare elixirs there, and I knew I'd probably never get the chance to try half of them.

By then it was getting late and dark and we were getting tired. I rejoined my traveling companions at the famous and fabulous City Lights Bookstore near the border of Chinatown and North Beach. Then we had a serendipitous dinner at the Caffe Michelangelo, where Melissa had dined as a college student many years before and still remembered it.  

I had a wonderfully fresh cioppino made with all local Pacific seafood, pictured here. We ended up having three entrees, a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abbruzzo, and the women had desserts while I enjoyed an espresso.  That was a fine North Beach dinner, and a fine foodie memory of San Francisco!