pictures of your kids in spiderman shirts
Today was, well, interesting. We got up, checked out of the hotel, and took BART to the Embaradero station to tour the Ferry Market Building. I've been wanting to go there for quite a while, because all of the foodies are always raving about how amazing it is. Overall, I was quite pleased. We got there and sampled some of the goods from the farmer's market out front, and then went inside. We started off getting a breakfast sandwich the Golden Gate Meat Company. It was a very tasty egg, cheese & applewood smoked bacon sandwich:
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After that I got some mung bean & sesame seed dumplings with chile sauce from Out the Door, and Denise got some chili sweet potato fries from Taylor's Refresher. Both were pretty tasty:
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Next I got a chocolate macaroon and Denise got a madeline from Miette. I liked mine alot, and Denise liked hers, but we didn't like eachothers much.
From there we stopped off at Acme Bread Company for a rustic roll, and Cowgirl Creamery for some cropshire sharp cheddar to make a tiny sandwich. The cheese was great, and the roll complimented it well:
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Afterwards, we went on a tour of the ferry building. The tour was a bit on the long side though (nearly an hour). It started off interesting, but gradually got boring towards the end.
Next we got meatball sandwiches for lunch at Mastrelli's Deli. The sandwiches were good, although I was a bit put off by their food preparation methods (microwaving the food to heat it up, and handling food and money with the same hands):
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After lunch we circled back to pick up a few things to take with us. I got a bottle of blood orange infused olive oil from Stone House Olive Oil. They had most of their varieties available for sampling and the blood orange infused was really tasty. Denise got a small loaf of pumpernickle bread from the Acme Bread Company. Outside at the farmer's market, Denise got some salmon jerky from Cap'n Mike's Holy Smoked Salmon. He had samples available, and they were quite tasty. We finished off by getting some dried kiwi fruit slices which were very flavorful.
The drive up to Napa went fairly smoothly. We took 101 up to 37 East, and then 29 North. We're staying at the River Terrace Inn. At this point, I'm liking it alot more than the place we stayed in Burlingame. The room larger, the bed & pillows are more comfortable, there's free broadband, and the complimentary breakfast is quite a bit better (more real food, instead of boxed/packaged crap).
We had reservations at Celedon. Words cannot express what an absolutely horrible experience eating at this place was. We arrived about 15 minutes early for our reservation and the place was mostly empty. We were seated, and this french guy (he had a nearly undecypherable accent) came over. For some reason, I decided to order a Cosmopolitan. What I got was this pink colored vodka. I ordered a "butter lettuce & tomato salad" for a starter. They should have named it a bitter lettuce salad, because that's all it was. Huge leaves of really bitter lettuce (that I had to cut up), with a few cocktail sized tomatoes in a vinagrette dressing. Denise ordered "mongolian BBQ chicken", and I ordered "grilled polenta with fresh mozarella and grilled vegetables":
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Apparently these folks don't have a clue of what mongolian BBQ is, because she ended up getting chicken thighs (with the skin still on) with burnt BBQ sauce, on top of a mound of white rice. To make it worse, the chicken wasn't even fully cooked, and had virtually no flavor at all once the burnt skin was removed. My polenta was ok, however it was in this tower of vegetables. The inch thick circle of purple onion at the bottom, and slice of eggplant just above it were undercooked, and tasted awful. On the side were a bunch of burnt asparagus spears that were both blackened on one side and bitter throughout. While we were enduring this horrible, and overpriced food, this group of people filed in immediately behind us and were carrying a very loud and obnoxious conversation (and that was before they got any drinks). I couldn't finish most of my food, it was just that bad. Denise went to the bathroom, and came back to report that they had a unisex bathroom, with a picture of a 3 year old in a spiderman t-shirt on the wall. The french waiter was really trying to force dessert on us. I asked what the "sorbet of the day" was, and he said tangerine, and we said no thanks. So then he insisted on going back to the kitchen to see if they had anything else, and came back later trying to convince us to have the chocolate sorbet. We refused, paid the bill, and got out of there. Celedon = horrible food, lackluster service, plus a kid in a spiderman tshirt. Just say no.