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Best Things To Do On a First Bay Area Visit For Parents With Teens
Wherever you go in the Bay Area you will have ample opportunity to hike, soak in some culture, beautiful scenery, eat well and find something for everyone’s interests. I made this list for all many families with teens who stay in my Airbnb / VRBO in Rockridge. Let me know if I’ve missed something important! -Susie Berkeley & Oakland Walk from my Airbnb to the UC Berkeley campus, down College Ave. and walk through campus. Lots of food, shops, cafes, and pretty houses along the way! Oakland Museum has really fun California history exhibits. There is a small, very authentic Chinatown nearby. Pizza at Zachary’s near Rockridge BART or Barney’s…
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Celebrating Sonoma’s Wine & Cheese Connector – Sheana Davis
You roll into Sonoma, bumping into the square to which most roads lead. You park just off the square and note the wooden cow with the hollow face, ready to poke your head in as a souvenir. This playful touch welcomes you to The Epicurean Connection, the perfect point of embarkation for a Sonoma tour. It’s uniquely Sonoma, adorned with art from locals with painted windows reflecting the season. You’ve entered happiness, a place where long time cheese monger / cheese maker / cheese lesson-giver Sheana Davis welcomes you… along with very friendly, very capable hometown kids, friends of Sheana’s daughter. In fact, this cheese shop / cafe reflects the…
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Best Food Shops in the Bay
Every year, (for 16 years if you can believe it!), I’ve visited all the best new food shops in the Bay and penned the “Bites by the Bay” column including my favorite picks for “Specialty Food” magazine. Locals know (as do the Fancy Food Show visitors), that we have a vibrant and influential culinary retail scene. Over the past few years, the shear number of new spots have been so numerous, it’s been brutal to pare down to nine or ten worthy contenders. Some of the notables spots I’ve featured over the years include Birite market (when it first opened in 1997), Tomales Bay Foods, the Ferry Building Marketplace, Blue…
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Temescal Food Tour in Oakland With Edible Excursions – A Photo Memoire
by Susie Wyshak Edible Excursions, a Bay Area food tour company has led many a foodie through the Ferry Building, the Mission District, and Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. Starting in March, 2013, they’ll add Oakland’s new food goldmine — the Temescal district — to their gustatory adventures. On a sneak peak tour, we embarked on nothing less than artisanal food carnage, starting at the Sunday Temescal Farmers’ Market. The $75 tour is like an amazing 8 or so course tasting menu, where you usually get to meet the owner. Your palate journeys from sweet to savory, back and forth, with coffee in between. While by the end, I felt as if…
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Behind the Wine, Within the Whiskey
I learned a lot about libations last weekend while visiting not one but two Elysian Fields of alcohol within a short stroll of each other on the scenic Alameda waterfront. First was the Rock Wall Wine Company, whose Open House on Saturday afternoon featured food booths, wine tasting and tours of the vast facility, which is located inside a 40,000-square-foot historic former military airplane hangar. It was inspiring to learn how grapes from the Napa Valley, Sonoma County and even nearby Contra Costa County are transformed into Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel and Petite Sirah a virtual stone’s throw from downtown Oakland. Let’s raise a glass to urban winemaking. My favorite wines…
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Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto Food History: A Video Tour
Berkeley, California is known as the birthplace of “California cuisine,” at least the kind using farm-direct, simple ingredients. Our friend Frieda DeLackner grew up in this luscious area and captured some of Berkeley’s unique food heritage on a fun short video, taking you on a tour through Chez Panisse to the Cheese Board Collective, famous for its wonderful 1 seasonal organic pizza flavor per day, its vast cheese selections and homemade pastries and bread. When you’re coming to the San Francisco Bay Area, we suggest watching the video and checking out our Berkeley food tour guide (which takes you to some fantastic food crafters’ shops). A Q&A With the Gourmet…
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Wild Food Walks with ForageSF
by Celeste Noche, Epicuring In a region as metropolitan as the Bay Area, it’s easy to think that our only resources for produce are markets, farms, and gardens. ForageSF has set out to correct this misconception by leading educational Wild Food Walks and working to “rediscover a forgotten food source.” While foraging is only legal by permission on private land, these Wild Food Walks offer more than a morning of searching for plants. This past Sunday, I joined Kevin Feinstein as he led a group of 16 people through Golden Gate Park. Having grown up in the Bay Area myself, I never imagined that edible plants were in such abundance…
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10 Liquor Factoids Absorbed at St. George Spirits
Post-Libation Thoughts from Susie: How often can cocktail conversation trivia actually revolve around cocktails? Not very. During our Epicuring Spooky Spirits event at St. George Spirits at Hangar 1 in Alameda, we not only enjoyed several creative libations such as The Root of All Evil – a root beer / absinthe concoction – we laughed and learned several important bits of information while touring the distillery: Bourbon only comes from the United States. Anything bourbon-like made elsewhere can’t be called bourbon. Consider it our “champagne.” California liquor manufacturers cannot directly sell their booze to the public. They have to sell it to a distributor then buy it back from the…
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Crush: See You in Wine Country this October!
By Emily Shartin, Epicuring It may have been delayed a couple weeks this year, but this year’s grape harvest (“crush” as it’s known locally) is now in full swing. Having just moved to Napa from the east coast, I’m enjoying my first up-close-and-personal look at this bustling season — the beautiful rows of leafy green vines, the workers in the vineyards, the trucks full of fruit on the roads, and the pervasive aroma of fresh grapes. As you can imagine, this is a great time to visit the Napa and Sonoma Valleys and see for yourself how the place comes alive. You can also check out some unique events at…
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Great Foodie Father’s Day Ideas
Father’s Day is on Sunday and we’ve got lots of last minute ideas and gifts for your pops. Why not take him Epicuring? Hit the U-Pick Farms in Brentwood –take a picnic, and spend a leisurely morning picking and eating cherries.What’s your favorite–bing or rainer? Take a Drive on the Marin Cheese Trail. Bring some bread and thou. Tour the Private Urban Farms in Oakland-Berkeley with the Center for Urban Homesteading. On Saturday, take the whole family to Strawberry Family Day at Red Hill Ranch in Petaluma. On a budget? Take him to the Ferry Building on Saturday for a free class from CUESA, and grab a delicious burger from…
