Eating & Travelling 101

Tuesday, August 19. 2008

Last week, taking advantage of my unemployment and my sweetie's freelance status, we drove up the US 101 from San Francisco to the Humboldt County Fair in Ferndale, CA. This being us, of course, most of the trip focused on food.

We started with breakfast at Theresa & Johnny's Comfort Food in San Rafael, on 4th near the freeway. This was a good choice; for about $25 my sweetie and I got delicious swedish pancakes with strawberries, and a rosemary, blue cheese, and potato scramble with grits.

On the way up, I stopped by a few wineries, but all the ones close to the 101 on the right side (turning left would have meant major delay) were forgettable, except for the Nelson Family Vineyards in Mendocino which was pretty good and very friendly. I bought a bottle of their Zinfandel. More importantly to Kris, located next to them was a strawberry stand in front of its own field. The strawberries we got there turned out to be the best we've eaten in a couple years: red all through, intense flavor.

After driving all day, including the Avenue of the Giants, my wife wanted unpretentious comfort food. So we went to the Eel River Brewery in Fortuna, which as well as making fantastic dark beers (I recommend their stout, porter or Triple Exaltation), has an excellent bar & grill type restaurant. They also have a full horseshoe pit in the back yard, where we played horseshoes until dark and tried to avoid hitting any of their three cats. We then went in for dinner. My wife had a very good beef taco salad. The seafood salad I'd ordered was out, so I got the tuna melt instead. Turns out the gods were looking out for me; that was one of the single best things I ate all week, made with smoked albacore tuna, and coated in Loleta cheddar cheese, then fried. Wow. I had two pints (one stout, one triple) and we had very tasty cinnamon cake for dessert. Total bill was less than $60, plus I bought two 22oz bottles of beer to take home.

This started two themes for the week. For one, we discovered that eateries on the Lost Coast made a big point of using local ingredients, even more so than San Francisco or Berkeley. The second was that I started looking for smoked albacore tuna I could take home with me.

The next day we were going hiking up North of Eureka, so we decided to go to Arcata for brunch. The place we planned to eat, Crosswinds, was unexpectedly closed (no reason given), and our back-up place looked pretty grimy in person. But we noticed a nice little creperie which wasn't listed on Yelp: Renata's. I had a buckwheat crepe stuffed with mashed potatoes and cheese, and Kris had one with eggs, tomatoes, cheese and sausage. Not only were they tasty, as you can see the presentation was extraordinary. Note that this is a quaint, small place which serves only crepes; there is literally nothing else on the menu but beverages.

Continued tommorrow.

Posted by The Fuzzy Chef in Food Tourism at 21:02 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)