Can someone please explain to me why Austin is utterly overflowing with ridiculously good breakfast tacos and I can barely find expensive, passable versions anywhere else in the country. I mean, it’s not like San Francisco isn’t loaded with cheap and amazing Mexican joints and they certainly know how to put a great taco together. It’s a mystery that I don’t know if I’ll ever solve.
On the long drive between Paso Robles and San Francisco, there’s not a whole lot of viable places to stop at for a good meal on the road. The 101 is the most efficient route, but it’ll still take approximately three hours from start to finish. Before embarking on the drive back from the wonderfully quaint wine town of Paso Robles, we knew wanted to grab a quick meal close to town before really hitting the road.
A brief bit of online exploration led me to a place that showed potential for a quick meal. Just a 10-minute drive north of downtown Paso Robles, just off of the 101, there’s a dusty little nothing town called San Miguel. In this practically non-existent town, I read about a place with a 4-star Yelp rating that included many stories characterized by its local charm. We had high hopes that The County Diner, a lonely eatery in this desolate trapped-in-time town, would serve as a great place to get a quick and filling breakfast before we headed towards home.
I didn’t set out on this venture necessarily looking to have a full, sit-down brunch. In fact, it was coffee that drew us to this place called Dolce Amore on the cusp of Lower Pac Heights and Lower Nob Hill on this particular morning. We had pulled up Foursquare in search of a new or interesting place to get a quality cup and this cute cafe serving Illy was calling our name.
It’s all in the water – or so they say. Continuing on our quest to find real, authentic New York style bagels in San Francisco, we ventured with our ex-New Yorker friends to the Inner Richmond to give their recommended spot called House of Bagels a shot. Despite the place’s personal recommendation, I still approached the trip cautiously due to BuzzFeed’s SF bagel blog tongue lashing.
Amy and I were in need of a great breakfast stop while driving back from Monterey to San Francisco on Route 1. For a task as specific as this, I hopped on Chowhound to see if any helpful threads already covered this topic and sure enough there was one perfect for my needs. Through this thread, I learned about a very highly regarded shop called Gayle’s Bakery & Rosticceria located in Capitola just south of Santa Cruz. It was also only a two minute detour off of Route 1 so it seemed like a perfect fit for our breakfast situation.
It’s a time-honored Austin breakfast tradition unlike any other. And for some reason – despite it’s awesomeness – it just hasn’t made the jump to mainstream breakfast noshing in either of my home cities: NYC and San Francisco. What is this breakfast tradition I speak of? Why, Breakfast Tacos, of course. Now, get on it SF and NYC. I want breakfast tacos!
I first heard about Green Chile Kitchen on a web comment section arguing about who serves the best burrito in every single SF neighborhood. Numerous commenters were insistent that Green…
A few years back, I was living in the East Village and Alphabet City area and was truly disappointed and amazed to find that that section of the city was utterly and hopelessly bagel-less. What a travesty! I was forced to trek the ten blocks north all the way up to Gramercy to get a decent bagel. Obviously that doesn’t sound like a hell of a lot of distance these days compared to my current bagel trekking situation on the West Coast, but back then that seemed like an extraordinary hike for a simple bagel in New York.
What a year!! I did something like this last year too, but oh boy was 2014 a doozy. I started off living in NYC, then a started a new job that whisked me off the San Francisco and Silicon Valley for a few months before ultimately relocating to San Francisco permanently. And along the way, I squeezed in a couple of vacations too.
Sooooo, I did a LOT of epic eating this year. And truth be told, I found it particularly difficult to narrow down my list as concisely as last year’s, but I somehow managed. So, without further ado, I present the winners (and runner-ups) broken down by category. I tried to cluster similar dish types together, but really they are in no particular order. Let’s begin!
And if you wanna hear about the 2014’s Best Cocktails, read more here.
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Austin, Texas is loaded with plenty of epic eating. Even breakfast – dominated by massive egg-filled breakfast tacos – is out of control awesome. But, for the most part, breakfast is limited to fast-casual options. So, if you want something sit-down and just a bit more formal, you’ve got to look a little bit harder. While I was in town looking for a nice, relaxed breakfast, we got a recommendation to head to a nearby spot called Elizabeth St. Cafe to get our fix.