Sorry, I'm at about a 1:9 ratio of finished posts to draft posts. If I find the piece of information I'm looking for, I'll repost this. Otherwise, sorry, that was meant to remain in draft stage.

I might move to Berkeley.

Food first. We had lunch at the Chez Panisse Cafe, since it seemed like the thing to do. I know some people think Alice Waters's schtick is overrated or passe, but they should eat here first before being so hasty. I had my first cardoon (a relative of the thistle, apparently) which is a lot like what an artichoke heart dreams of being. I also had not-my-first goat cheese, but it accompanied what might have been the tastiest leaves of lettuce I can remember eating. It was hard for the second round of food to top that-- my spaghetti carbonara was very good, and the peas were fresh but crumbly. Her polenta was buttery and tasted like real corn, and the chanterelle mushrooms were dark and sweet (but a little too heavily sauced). The sour cherries in the crisp were also a revelation, but mysteriously stretched with some not-in-season apples.

And the bread! My relationship with my own bread is growing more dysfunctional. Now when I eat a truly delicious tangy-sweet loaf with a perfect crust I find it vaguely depressing, knowing how far I am from being able to imitate the feat. (Ex-co-blogger Raffi has provided a great deal of much-needed first aid to my loaves, but they still fail to retain their crunch more than 12 hours out of the oven.) So it wasn't perfect, but it was delicious. All expensive meals should be this good.

On the way back down Shattuck we stopped into some faceless grocery store for a few necessaries, but I quickly got lost amid the free samples of citrus fruit. Rows and rows of delicious cheeses, curious olives, and some funny-looking vegetable that I will only fully identify when I eat it tomorrow. I sort of wandered from aisle to aisle, mouth agape. This must be what refugees from the Iron Curtain felt like upon first arriving in Manhattan.

And books. At Blackhawk Books I picked up a heavy burden of used literature I had long been hunting for (Strange Pilgrims, Good Bones and Simple Murders, Lectures on Literature); at University Press Books I saw what might have been the best selection of legal books for its size ever. (And I say this not only because they are the first bookstore I have seen stock David Currie's Constitution in Congress). Jacob Levy once made fun of me for suggesting I couldn't live permanently in a place without bookstores as good as those in New York or Chicago. I may have uncovered a contender.

All of this getting wrapped up in books meant that we nearly missed our scheduled tour of the Scharffenberger Chocolate Factory, which was interesting but could have done with less lecturing and more staring at the loud creepy chocolate mish-mashing machines. I'm still not sure why they were quite so insistent about keeping us from wearing open-toed shoes (luckily they have spares on hand) when they were willing to let several dozen people mill confusedly around some very dangerous machinery. While our tour guide was quite enthusiastic, she was also "punchy" (as she described herself) by the end of the day; I still have not decided whether she was high, or simply Californian.

After returning to San Francisco I sampled something called "spicy koppa", but hopefully that will be a story for another day when I return to the source.