We spent last week with friends in Maui. Just, wow.
Days were mostly spent recreating Corona commercials, snorkeling, and eating huge quantities of food. Check out the gallery for the full story.
Dan — 2010-09-16 14:30:48
Great photos, thanks for sharing! Perhaps I must take Johanna some time…
You read that right! It’s the return of restaurant mini-reviews here at overt.org. I have a huge backlog that has been a mental block for years now, not to mention the fact that I started these reviews as “Berekeley Food” and now I live in Oakland and eat in San Francisco quite a bit. So here we are again, with a bit of rebranding.
Hibiscus is a newish restaurant in downtown Oakland with a Caribbean/soul-food feel. It was started by Sarah Kirnon, former chef of The Front Porch in San Francisco. The Front Porch is a fun place, crowded, busy, and unpretentious but with deservedly legendary fried chicken. Hibiscus is definitely going for something more upscale, but the menu reminded me a lot of the same basic themes.
To start, we had a very fresh and tasty squid ceviche that was not as sour as a lot of ceviche tends to be, so the flavor of the peppers and onions in it really came out.
I was sorely tempted to just score the fried chicken at Hibiscus so I could compare it to its ancestral roots. Instead, I went on a limb and tried the pepperpot, which was a stew/braise with (among other things) oxtail, pigs feet, tripe, duck leg, and cassareep (cassawhatnow?). It looked something like this (I didn’t take any pics so I stole this one from Yelp):
The sauce was delicious. It was infused with scotch bonnet pepper oil and the cassareep turned out to have this really fun sweet/bitter thing going on. I actually kinda enjoyed the tripe, the oxtail was good but difficult to access, and the duck leg was the best thing in there. I couldn’t handle the pig’s foot. Just no meat on it anywhere to be found but plenty of fatty pig skin. Oh well.
Leslie got the fried chicken (photo also stolen):
It was outstanding. Nice and crisp on the outside, even the white meat remained tender and moist. It had clearly been brined for a while. I’d say it definitely stood up to its Front Porch forbears.
The prices were a bit high, I thought, for the food and location, but the ambiance was nice and I hope that more restaurants pop up in the area. There’s a chance we’d come back, but there’s so many more places to get to first.
Rock Band 3, due out this holiday, has a “Pro” mode that lets you play using an actual electric guitar, while being scored playing actual guitar tablature.
It’s like my dream come true! Back in college, I spent an unseemly amount of money on a Fretlight guitar after seeing one at the Experience Music Project. It’s an electric guitar with LEDs underneath each fret, which can light up to demonstrate fingerings. The trouble was that the software sucked. It showed scale patterns and chord progressions, but there was no validation that you were doing the right thing nor sense of progression.
Now I can channel my unreasonable urges to master video games into the skill of actually playing guitar. Oh, please, be as awesome as I think you are.
On the deck of our rental in Travis Heights with our Central market loot, the day after Matt and Amanda’s wedding.
Last weekend was the debut race for Doug’s 1986 300ZX Turbo: Sears Pointless 2010. Unbelievably, the car came together in time and ran all 16 hours over two days, green flag to checker. Doug has some pics on his page, and I’ve uploaded a few of the professional shots of our car to gallery. Here’s one of me dealing with some traffic:
We had a video camera in the car, which was unfortunately mounted to the roll cage, so it was pretty shaky on acceleration. If you can stand it, here’s a video of Tommy at the race start:
The whole weekend was a blast. I drove a total about about 30 minutes on Saturday and an hour on Sunday—and that was plenty. It was simultaneously amazingly fun and terrifying and stressful. I did rub another car once on each stint, but always came out clean—no black flags or spin-outs! I’ll get some more pictures up soon.
Marc — 2010-03-15 19:06:43
Whoa. We’re impressed. Susan and I watched the race start. This shows our age, but it looked like Steve McQueen in the move Bullitt (1968). Way to go!