Krik's Picks

For our November trip to northern California, my wife and I flew in on a Wednesday, arriving in San Francisco just before noon. That gave us enough time to stop along the Embarcadero for lunch before heading to Santa Rosa. On our October trip, we’d spied an interesting looking restaurant that we wanted to try. La Mar is a Peruvian ‘cebicheria.’ (I don’t know if that’s actually a word. I couldn’t find an official definition online. But by implication, it’s a restaurant that specializes in ceviche .) The weather was pretty nice, and we asked for a table on the semi-enclosed patio overlooking San Francisco Bay. The patio was well populated, but the rest of the restaurant was pretty empty. (It did fill in later during the lunch hour.) La Mar offers a daily tasting menu. On our visit, there were two choices, one of them vegetarian. The items offered on both menus were very intriguing and looked interesting. I had the non-vegetarian option. One word: Fabulous. My lunch started wit...

I had two trips to northern California this fall, one in October and one in November. On both trips, I had some business and on both trips, my wife and I spent some additional time on our own. I’ll be posting information on some of the great restaurants we ate at. But this post is about where we stayed, because we stayed at four very different styles of lodging. Here’s the list. Read on for my review of each: Ritz Carlton , Half Moon Bay Inn at Occidental (CA) Vintner’s Inn , Santa Rosa Prescott Hotel , San Francisco I was at the Ritz for a meeting. Half Moon Bay is a small, artsy, and intensely organic agricultural town. A long time ago (1975), when my wife and I lived in San Francisco for a year, we drove down to Half Moon Bay (about 45 minutes) not really knowing what it expect. It was late October, and we discovered that they have a pumpkin festival. Well since then, the Half Moon Bay pumpkin festival has become a BIG deal. The cars are backed up for miles ma...

When I wrote my first review of Bar La Grassa two years ago, I explained all the reasons why I liked it but couldn’t rave about it. At the end of the post , I promised a do-over. Well, it was a while coming, but here it is. The first time we went to Bar La Grassa, we didn’t like our table. This time we got a better table. I also didn’t like the lack of descriptive language about the menu items; I’m over that now. And just like our first visit, the food was very good and creative. We started with a couple of bruschettas. One was peperonata with gorgonzola cheese. The other was eggplant caponata. Both were excellent. Because we are big fans of gorgonzola, I think we liked that one better. But we didn’t realize how large they would be. Each plate had two large thick slices of bread and the toppings were generously piled on. We could easily have gotten by with one order between the two of us. Next we went for two half portions of pasta. One was a foie gras tortellini. It was very ri...

My brother Mike and I usually have lunch between our respective birthdays. His is in October; mine is November. Well, one thing lead to another, and we ended up having lunch in mid-December, coincidentally on our brother Richard’s birthday. Mike asked me to pick the restaurant. Neither of us had eaten before at Cosmos in the Graves Hotel. So I made a reservation there for noon on a recent Friday. When I got there, Mike had already arrived and had perused the wine list. Neither of us were going back to the office on a Friday afternoon, so we shared a bottle of wine with lunch. Mike found a personal favorite on the list and ordered it. We started chatting. Pretty soon I noticed Mike scanning the restaurant, and I realized that we’d been sitting there for at least 15 minutes, and no wine, no server to be seen. He finally caught her attention and waved her over. She apologized for the delay, saying that they’d had trouble finding the bottle. Ok, but then she could have let us know, ...