(do be careful...)

Basically, we walked, ate, walked, sat, walked, ate, walked, sat, walked, sat, ate, walked, and ate today. Stops included:

Breakfast at Tartine. It's a bakery, but fresh bread is unavailable anytime on Mondays or Tuesdays or before 4 any other day. You would think that this spelled doom, but actually the place is great. The coffee was strong and fresh; the pain aux olives (which is to bread what quiche is to pie) full of tasty gourmet meat and olives was salty and enlightening; the gruyere gougere was simple and mademe feel inadequate about my attempts to bake popovers. Deciding that coffee and savories were not going to be enough to sustain us through the walking, sitting, and eating we had planned for the rest of the day, we went back for bread pudding (full of tangy local goodies and the mysteriously ubiquitous tasteless apple) and pain aux chocolate. This took about twenty minutes of dithering to do, though, and I still wonder if the frangipane croissants or the morning bun were wrongly neglected. (There were also cakes, but why be extravagant?)

Oh, and there were also the first delicious-looking croque monsieurs I have ever seen, involving asparagus and fromage blanc, but I forbore.

Eventually, we made it to the ferry plaza farmer's market and related shops, where we filled up on free samples. Mediocre olive oils, too-sweet granolas, unpleasantly gamey honeys, too-sweet balsamic vinegar were all disappointments. The grassy young olive oil, and the loads of dried unsulfured fruits (white peaches taste better sulfured; bing cherries taste better un-) were successes.

And the cheese. I have been looking for real fromage blanc since one honeyed dessert in Paris in 2001, and the Cowgirl Creamery has the real stuff. We also acquired a sort of sampler's array of fresh soft cheeses (cottage, ricotta, marscapone, and something called crescenza that tastes remarkably like really really good butter) but haven't tried them all yet. Apparently they have a specialty crottin, too, but luckily we left before I could figure out which of the half-dozen crottins available it was.

The all-important dinner was at the local Dosa, which serves slightly trendy South Indian food. Dosas are hard to find in New Haven (and we were hungry from, inter alia, a half-hour wait) so we feasted. Normally, inexpensive Indian food falls flat, but this spice blend was less ham-handedly chosen. The tiny green chiles cooked into my onion rava didn't hurt either. These were the best part of the meal, but beforehand we had some sort of lentil donut bathed in spicy yogurt, and a pair of cocktails made with soju, a sort of korean barley vodka that I had expected to be tasteless but had a surprising tang. My only major complaint is that the menu has both a cheddar cheese dosa and a calamari appetizer, which surely exist only as traps for the unwary.

In addition to the eating, walking, and sitting, we played on the "widely reviled" Vaillancourt Fountain, which is a cool jumble of concrete blocks with stairs and water strewn about. [I thought it would have been cooler if it had been dripping with lava and included in the Dungeons and Dragons Red Box, but one can't have everything.] The rest of the Embarcadero looks disturbingly like downtown Baltimore but one can't have everything. And the bay smells nice.