Dolores Park

One of the great things about living in the yay area is that there is no shortage of delicious hearty veggie sandwiches. Like the Pesto Special that we just devoured at Dolores Park Cafe.

I'm not the biggest seitan fan (that rhymes!), but after having this yummy seitan sandwich, I might just change my mind.

Hokkaido, Foster City

All you can eat buffets usually suffer from two things: poor quality and that sick feeling when you know you've eaten too much. Hey but today's your lucky day because Hokkaido only offers good quality--I highly doubt that you can stop anyone from getting that feeling of being gluttonous, no matter how many stars a buffet place gets in yelp!

So after my little cousin's (now my godson) confirmation ritual, the Nebres fams head off to an all-you-can-gorge buffet at Hokkaido’s in Foster City. We've been here before and there was probably ten times as more people then there were last time; joint got popular quick!

This place was just full of food, decent food at that. To start off, I indulged in some savory sushi. Had I known that we can waste food and not get charged extra, I would have attempted to fill my plate to my gluttonous heart's content with just fish and that saucy stuff in sushi, so screw the vinegar rice. The Hamachi and Tuna sashimi were okay, but the salmon sashimi was by far the best. I haven't been to a lot of Asian buffets, but the previous that we went to before--sashimi was never on their menu.

Kuya Ryan (my brother) had some weird snail thing and it looked disgusting. I made a lot of gagging noises and I think everyone at the table would have had a better experience if I hadn't. Oh well, sucks for them.

Anyway, this is the place to go for decent buffet style food. Yay for Hokkaido.

Vancouver

Aaron and I recently went to Vancouver, B.C. for the Vancouver Marathon - my first marathon ever. Although running the race was the highlight of the trip, checking out the local eats came very close. In fact, during the last 10 miles of the race, the mental practice of focusing on our post-race meal (all-you-can eat sushi at Shabusen) got me to the finish line.

Round one.

The binging marathon was almost as physically challenging as the actual marathon. Seriously. That Sunday was all about seeing how many miles my legs could take; the next couple days were all about seeing how many pounds of food my stomach could take. It was awesome. Monday night the fam treated us to Cantonese dinner in Richmond, at Wah Wing. For those not familiar with Richmond, B.C., it is basically a mecca of asian folks, especially Chinese and Filipino. Which is why it's renowned for Chinese food. And it did live up to the hype.

Deep Fried Crab

After stuffing ourselves that night, we went for more chinese food the next morning - dim sum this time, at Golden Dynasty. We had these yummy greasy egg noodles, I don't know what they were called, but here's what they looked like:

Delicious greasiness.

Then we headed for a snack at Cupcakes. We went all out and got the sampler with every flavor of cupcake they had, in a mini size. But I have to say that aside from the decor and interestingly named flavors, the cupcakes themselves weren't all that, especially at around $3 a pop.

Aren't they precious?

Cupcakes was followed by a visit to Gastown in downtown Vancouver. I figured we should check out the famous clock monument there. But we were quickly distracted by the hot dog stand right next to it.

Hey Berkeley heads - notice anything familiar about this hot dog stand?

I was so excited when I found out that the hot dog stands downtown sold veggie dogs, that I had to have one. Biting into that dog smothered in special Russian mustard on a whole wheat bun was heavenly. Just heavenly.

On the way home we stopped by Costco (yes, they have Costco in Canada!) to pick up some Canadian treats to bring home (maple syrup, smoked salmon and salmon jerky). And that's when the best discovery of the day happened. After we paid for our goods we took a peek at the snack bar, and noticed that it was different from the Costco snack bars at home.

They don't sell soda!

They served teriyaki stir fry (cooked right in front of you), they called soda "pop", and they served fries with gravy! We found out that the latter was a typical Canadian junk food dish called Poutine, which is basically fries smothered in gravy, with cheese curds on top. We couldn't believe it (it sounded kind of gross) so we ordered it right away. Once you mix everything together, the cheese curds melt into the gravy, creating a gooey deliciousness.

Poutine. Tastes better than it looks, I promise.

It was a bit too salty for our taste, and I knew my stomach would not be happy later, but it was definitely worth it.And that was our Vancouver trip, in all its greasy, carb-filled glory. I can't wait to go back.