Last Hurrah in San Francisco

Almost time to head back east! So I started the day with a donut, a Pepples Donut. The Ferry Building has a market place with high-brow eats, and this Oakland-based all-vegan donut maker has a little outpost there. 

The selection was extensive. 

I choose the salted caramel (well-recommended) and skipped the more complicated flavor options (I was looking at White Chocolate Curry.) for a standard vanilla-glazed. They were top quality cake donuts, liken to Seattle’s amazing Mighty-O.

Breakfast in the Mission. St. Francis (or San Francisco) is the oldest ice cream parlor around, founded in 1918. The place clearly hasn’t changed much since the dining room addition in 1948. That is why it’s a wonderful thing that there menu of diner grub is inclusive of vegans. It’s a delight to see the v-bomb adorn the menu of a place like this. 

I created my own Tofu Scramble combo, with tomato, green onion, vegan sausage, and sliced avocado. With a perfect portion of home fries, it was an ideal breakfast. 

We set off to explore some of San Francisco’s famous neighborhoods, like the Lower Haight. I stopped with the clusters of tourists to capture the iconic San Fran-ian image of the Painted Ladies, colorful Victorian homes with the skyline behind them.  

But the bustle of the city wore on me quickly, especially after a walk through the gentrified Haight-Asbury. I missed the sea and wanted to look at it again. We headed back to the Marin Headlands to see the Point Bonita lighthouse. But first, we had to walk through a cliff.

What is the allure of the sea? It’s one of life’s projection screens–a deep and lively realm that holds all you need it to hold (mystery, opportunity, openness, love, loved one’s ashes, whatever) and, acknowledgingly, delivers it back to you. And in this way, I like how I feel looking at it. I like feeling just how much I am able to feel. Is that totally weird? Yeah, I probably inhaled too much of those smoke clouds in Haight-Asbury. 

What do you give the sea? 

And then it was time for the final stop: Millennium Restaurant, the renowned gourmet vegan eatery that I’ve been meaning to try since the nineties. We nabbed an exclusive 5:30pm/Monday night reservation. And I got the 3-course prix fixe so I can sample as much as I could. To start, the Crusted King Trumpet Mushrooms–arborio rice dredged paper-thin mushrooms with a cabbage salad & lime vinaigrette, sitting next to a pool of Gochujang dipping sauce and sprinkled with Szechuan pepper sesame salt. They were absolutely delicious. I appreciated the thicker sliced mushrooms more, as some just tasted like breading.

My entree: Juniper & Mustard Seed Glazed Tempeh strips with a creamy cashew horseradish mashed potatoes, caramelized onion-stout sauce, grilled asparagus and shaved Meyer lemon & fennel with black eyed pea chow chow. The “chow chow” seemed like the outlier on the dish, not quite fitting with assertive stout sauce. I enjoyed the dish a great deal, but was ever so slightly disappointed with the tempeh. I guess I wanted it to blow my mind more. But it tasted like tempeh I could have made. 

Dessert! I choose the Lemon Cornmeal Cake made from red cornmeal topped with balsamic macerated strawberries, vanilla chantilly cream pipings, and garnished with almond brittle. Oh, and there is mint ice cream on the plate too, but I wanted no part of it. 

Done & done! Thanks for the eats, San Francisco.