Category — Restaurant

The quaint seaside Peninsula town of Half Moon Bay has a brand new organic and natural food supermarket called New Leaf Community Market near the intersection of 92 and highway 1. It’s a local version of a large scale natural food market, like a Whole Foods for Half Moon Bay. This recently opened a couple months ago.

My fiance and I took a nice tour of the store-sparking new floors, clean and brightly lit, with tons of fresh organic produce. The ready made food in the deli and hot foods, soup and salad bar were a lot better than I expected for a local market. We picked up some organic raspberries, an organic fennel and pinenut salad as well as a tofu salad to go. I would definitely come back here!

Our real stop was for dinner at a restaurant in Half Moon Bay called Chez Shea. This was my second time eating at this downtown restaurant on Main Street. Almost all of the food is sourced locally and organically. The taste is extremely fresh and clean with global flavors. The first time I ate here, I tried their Indian curry and rice. In my most recent visit, I tried their chile renno with an organic beet salad to start. All of the food was fantastic! My fiance Vivek and I feel that this restaurant is a total find in the area–rated up there with some of the best organic restaurants in San Francisco. Come check it out!

Over the last week, I had frozen yogurt cravings. I went to Harmony Frozen Yogurt located in San Carlos last Thursday, and Fraiche in Palo Alto on Saturday night. They are both great local organic frozen yogurt shops; I would go here over Pinkberry or Red Mango any day.

Here’s my head to head comparison:

Flavor: Harmony frozen yogurt wins. They offer Straus organic yogurt, with flavors like plain, mango and raspberry. Fraiche is good too, but Harmony wins by a slight edge with more unique flavors of yogurt.

Variety: Fraiche wins. They offer fresh real yogurt as well as frozen frozen yogurt. Their sauces include creative options like ollalieberry and varieties of granola and even handmade mochi.

Organic: both win! Both are organic and believe in investing in green and healthy food.

I love Ubuntu. After being vegetarian for 20 years, this is one of the superstar vegetarian restaurants to have launched in a long time. Located in Napa, this is an upscale, Zen like environment without a lot of pretense. Food is prepared with the best local ingredients.

This is my favorite salad. Beets with avocado and grapefruit. Recently its recipe was featured in this month’s Sunset Magazine.

Zen like, relaxing atmosphere. Upstairs is a yoga studio.

Above is their signature dish, a rich cauliflower dish in a cast iron pot. Very creative and rich. However it was a little too creamy for my taste.

Although this doesn’t look the prettiest, this fresh farm egg was to die for. Similar to the type of egg yolk described by Michael Pollan’s Omnivore Dilemma, this yolk was a bright orange yellow and very rich.

All in all, this is an excellent find in downtown Napa. Creative vegetarian food, with great service and a relaxing feel. I’m definitely coming again.

Ubuntu is located on 1140 Main Street in downtown Napa.

In the midst of my own wedding planning, I checked out some interesting organic and green wedding ideas in the Bay Area. One place that I really liked was a restaurant called Barndiva in the beautiful town of Healdsburg.

The owner, Lukka Feldman, gave us a nice tour of the city and offered to host an all inclusive wedding with organic, local food and drinks. The restaurant is a beautiful restored barn with an outdoor garden. It is one of the few restaurants featured in Michelin from the Bay Area. Don’t miss this place for drinks at night if you are in Sonoma wine country.

Ono Gelato Company in Paia. Fresh, local organic gelato. I had a Kula country strawberry gelato. Choose from local fruits like coconut, persimmons, mango, kiwi and more.

So I finally made it to Citrine last weekend. Located in Redwood City, it’s Safeway’s venture into a new, fast, healthy friendly restaurant. Once I walked in, it felt like a cross between IKEA and Whole Foods. Even though you order at the counter, and it’s self service, the wait staff was very accommodating and asked us if we needed anything. The decor was bright, clean, modern and inviting.
Food is clearly international, with a focus on Safeway’s O Organics private food line, along with its beef and Italian private labels. What was confusing for me is that there is no mention of Safeway in the restaurant, but customers aren’t going to understand what the brand O Organics means unless they’ve shopped in Safeway. It might be better for Citrine to label things like “certified organic” or made with organic ingredients instead, because the branding is confusing.

The food came out quickly; my group tried the margherita pizza, the garlic lover’s pizza, the California date blue cheese salad, the Mediterranean hummus salad, Santa Fe chicken breast panini and the thai lemongrass. I think pricing is usually around $12/entree, with salads a little less expensive. My only gripe is that the vegetarian hot entrees are not worth it–stir fried veggies for $11 seemed unreasonably high. The veggie entrees lack a protein like tofu. Other than that, we really enjoyed the surprisingly fresh and tasty blue cheese salad, and the pizzas were well cooked. The wait staff came back to refill our drinks and offer us water. I would come back here again, but I really wish they could improve the hot entree selection of vegetarian food with more substantial options (like pad thai with tofu for example instead of just stir fried veggies).

Whole Foods and Trader Joes shoppers rejoice! There are some new stores in the horizon that will soon provide more options for shoppers:
Tesco, one of the biggest markets worldwide, is coming to the US, first in the Los Angeles area. Tesco is opening convenient stores with healthy, already made fresh meals to go. They are trying to brand themselves as a cross between Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Having tried some of their food when I was in London, I was very impressed. Tesco is going for upscale, organic food, but at a price that is reasonable.

Another competitor, Safeway is entering the organic market with a new chain of restaurants called “Citrine Bistro”. It’s interesting that on the Citrine website, it doesn’t tell you that Safeway is behind the fast, healthy, world fusion food idea. This past weekend, I drove by its first location in downtown Redwood City, where I saw a brightly lit and inviting restaurant, modern and clean. I first heard about this through a coupon that was mailed to my home, $10 off Citrine. The menu includes organic ingrendients from Safeway’s organic products for entrees that are Asian, Italian, American and Mexican. I think this will be a threat to Whole Foods given their pricing.

This morning, I had the pleasure of checking out one of the Google cafeterias in Building 45 with my friend, Charles, who works there. I was delighted to see such a huge selection of organic food. Before I entered the building, I saw fresh crates of organic fruits and vegetable from Greenleaf (an organic distributor in the Bay Area) entering the kitchen. In the cafeteria, I chose some oatmeal with fresh blueberries and raspberries, and farmed organic, scrambled eggs with Morningstar veggie sausage patties. There was a lot more food displayed than what I have listed, but I have to commend Google for trying to source local, organic foods in the kitchen and providing food for free to employees.

For second and third place when it comes to corporate cafeterias, I’d have to say Genentech and Pixar are very good. They also both source organic fruits and veggies, and I’ve seen Niman Ranch meat at Genentech.

Few people seem to know about this place, but a wonderful little shop called Mission Pie, has been open in the Mission in San Francisco since January. Mission Pie sells pies made from an organic nonprofit farm (Pie Ranch) that are made by local Mission High school students. It’s a great double bottom line company that exposes sustainable agriculture and urban youth empowerment. I believe they have some great reviews from Yelp and Chowhound. Mission Pie is located at 25th and Mission St. in San Francisco.

It’s wedding/birthday season and my last weekend was packed with trips to both Sonoma and Napa. A big group of my high school friends celebrated two birthdays in Sonoma wine country. I couldn’t make it until the dinner which was held at El Dorado Kitchen. The drinks were very fresh and relaxing (see the mint mojito and pomegranate cocktail above).
To start, I had a Caesar salad with local, organic romaine lettuce, with cucumbers. The salad was also very fresh, but I think it had a little too much dressing for my taste.
Although we sat outside near the pool and patio, the interior (see above) of the restaurant was decorated in a relaxed, but modern California style.
For my main course, I tried a mushroom, pea, tomato bow tie pasta. This was a fantastic pasta dish. As a vegetarian, I often don’t expect much from pasta, but the mushrooms in this dish were unbelievably tasty.
At the end, I tried a rhubarb tart with ice cream served on the side. This was better than the other choice that the table had which was a chocolate brownie. I recommend trying this rhubarb tart, it wasn’t too sour nor was it too sweet. El Dorado’s service was prompt and courteous and all of our food came out at the same time piping hot. I’d definitely recommend stopping here if you are in Sonoma tasting wine. El Dorado is located in central Sonoma right on the square, 405 1st St W. There is also a hotel as part of the building which is nicely decorated.

I was in Hong Kong last week and many of my friends brought me to new places in Hong Kong that carried organic and healthy foods. One of them was a market, called ThreeSixty, that was a smaller version of Whole Foods in a major mall in downtown Central called the Landmark. The selection was very impressive for a place in Hong Kong, but prices were very high.
ThreeSixty even had a nice food court on their second level, with over seven local restaurants and food stands to choose from in a nice, shiny environment. They had everything from wheatgrass juice to Italian food to pan Asian food to an actual sushi boat restaurant in the back.My friends brought me to Life for dinner, an organic, vegetarian restaurant in the streets of Hong Kong’s SOHO district. Tucked in an ally near a major escalator, the restaurant was cozy and reminded me of something you would find in the Bay Area.
Inside, the place was very crowded, with a warm color scheme.

I ordered an Asian stirfly vegetable and tofu dish on top of quinoa. The taste was very strong, but perfectly complemented the plain tasting quinoa. We also tried a lentil burger (which I highly recommend), a pumpkin soup, and a masala chai tea. After the meal, we went for a quick massage at a place called “Happy Feet”– a perfect ending to the day in Hong Kong.

While spending a family trip in Taiwan and a quick stop in Hong Kong, I noticed a lot more healthier and organic places to eat and shop. In Taiwan there are small stores that import American USDA organic certified products and in Hong Kong, there is a big new grocery store, similar to Whole Foods, called 360, which has tons of organic and natural foods in the Central district. For dinner in Hong Kong, we went to a place called Life, which was a vegetarian, organic oriented restaurant. Pictures to be posted soon!

To celebrate a friend’s birthday, I decided to check out Out The Door, a sister restaurant to the famous Slanted Door in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. This place was much more casual than the Slanted Door and the prices are quite reasonable (with entrees in the $7-9 range), with a take out counter, a food retail shop and a restaurant all in one. Many people don’t know about this place since it opened less than a year ago, and it’s located on the ground floor of the new Westfield Mall in San Francisco, next to the BART station. Our waiters were excellent and checked on us frequently. The decor was warm and sleek at the same time.

We started with a vegetable bun (free, courtesy of a coupon from the Green Zebra guide), and then I decided to order rice noodles with bok choy, tofu, bean spouts and onions. The sauce was quite tasty and reminded me of how my mom would cook rice noodles (see picture above). We also ordered special drinks of the day which was fresh guava juice mixed with boba and mint, and we tried it without the boba (fewer calories!).

My friend Jenny ordered a grilled chicken over rice noodles with imperial rolls, cucumber and mint which she enjoyed quite a bit.
To end the meal, we celebrated with a panna cotta flavored with basil and mango sauce. Very unusual, and the waiter was kind enough to put a nice candle into it for Jenny’s birthday!
The restaurant had a lot of Slanted Door’s qualities–fresh, organic ingredients with an Asian flair and great service. But the best part was that there was no line to stand in (unlike its sister restaurant), and the prices were very reasonable. The entire meal with two drinks, two entrees, one appetizer and dessert came to $35. If you don’t mind eating in a mall (in fact, it doesn’t really feel like it once you’re inside the restaurant), this place is for you. Out The Door is located in the new Westfield Mall on 845 Market Street in San Francisco near the food court, next to the BART entrance.

Where can you find a great cup of coffee, and some of the finest chocolates around? Check out Coupa Cafe, a hangout for techies, Stanford students, and food connoisseurs. I had a meeting in Coupa this morning and as I was waiting, I noticed the sea of laptops everywhere. Wireless is free here, but better yet is the selection of food and coffee.