STRAW ~ Carnival Fare

https://www.strawsf.com/


Place: STRAW ~ Carnival Fare

Location: 203 Octavia Boulevard 
(near the corner of Page Street)

Hours: "Brunch" is featured under the Big Top Saturday & Sunday at 10:00am 

Meal: Seasonal Salad ~ roasted beets, mixed greens (aka your basic rabbit-food-stuff), goat cheese crumbles, candied pecans, honey dijon-apple cider vinaigrette, with two over-medium eggs laid (well, placed) on top; and a glassa (Mason jara, actually) Strawberry-Basil Lemonade

(Just a coupla "Carney"-related songs for today's breakfast destination, Art. [I am just sad that I could only include one P3 song, though.])


Because this weekend is the 40th Anniversary Carnaval San Francisco, I thought it fitting to head back to STRAW ~ Carnival Fare (see last 'blog-entry from Saturday, June 17th, 2017)... nah, actually, I was already planning on going back to this particular restaurant this weekend, anyway, and saw somewhere that San Francisco's Carnaval  just happened to be this weekend also.

I was lucky enough this morning and parked just around the corner (legally, even) on Page Street.

Once again, I sat outside in one of the four two-seater sidewalk tables: 
1) 'cause it was nice enough this morning to do so,
and
b) 'cause I could (I was the second person/group waiting in line).

STRAW does not really have that many items from which to choose on their "Brunch" menu, and by now I have had each at least once. My back-up plan (in case I did not like the sound of the seasonal ingredients for the salad) was going to be a re-do of Hanky Panky ~ cornmeal Belgian waffle, two fried eggs, maple-glazed bacon (which would have been 86-ed again, of course), Cheddar & Jack potato croquettes.

(not really such another) Strange Coffee Interlude

This morning I made sure to get over to Hayes Valley about an hour before STRAW opened to get me another cuppa at Ritual Coffee (this time at their Quonset hut[1]-kinda shop across the street from Patricia's Green[2]). I just got what they were offering as their standard prepared Coffee, which happened to be La Soledad (another Guatemalan bean). Now,  this was a good cuppa (as are alla their cuppas, and their Ethiopian roasts/blends are usually phenomenal, but they did not have any of those offered this morning), but I did not like it quite as much as yesterday's cuppa. While I was enjoying my cuppa, I saw several pupsters (with their human tag-a-longs) in the park and met one really cute little feisty girl (her humans told me that she was a Cairn Terrier-Schnauzer mix[3]... possibly... ).

https://ritual.myshopify.com/collections/coffee-beans/products/soledad-guatemala

So, this was a salad with a coupla eggs on top. Not much to describe there. I would have rather had my eggs to have been poached, but I was told they do not prepare any poached eggs (no room in their kitchen in which to prepare them or something). The honey dijon-apple cider vinaigrette was really very good. One thing I might have done differently if I were making this salad myself (yeah, right), I think that pistachio seeds[4] in it would have been a much better flavour-combination and a bit more original (everyone always does salads with either beet-walnut or beet-pecan variations).

STRAW only has Crystal® Louisiana's Pure Hot Sauce for use as a condimentary supplement, which they have transferred into cruet-shaker-pourer things on each table (at least that was what they had in them the last time I ate there; I really did not bother to ask which hot sauce it might still be today). I just used some of my own Punch Drunk™ Chocolate Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce (Thanks, Sean!) on top of the eggs. Surprisingly, this hot sauce mingled (mangled?) very nicely with their vinaigrette, too.


Glen Bacon Scale Rating:
Ritual Coffee - La Soledad ~ 6.5;
Seasonal Salad ~ 6.4 
(I gave this an additional 0.2 GBS points each for the roasted beets, goat cheese, and very tasty vinaigrette; it was just a salad, after all)

___________________

1. a) How many of you were aware that these prefab-buildings were named after a U.S. Naval Station where they were first designed and built? 

http://varnumcontinentals.org/2016/04/the-quonset-hut-a-rhode-island-original/

b) Stupid, useless cunning linguist pointer of the day:

The place name/word "Quonset" is from a southern New England Algonquian language and perhaps means "small, long place".

2. This smallish local park (only two blocks long and about a quarter-block wide) is named Patricia's Green for Patricia Walkup, a local activist who volunteered her time for many years to fight neighborhood crime, and co-led a campaign to tear down the remaining part of the Central Freeway that once ran through Hayes Valley.

http://sfrecpark.org/destination/patricias-green-in-hayes-valley/patricias-green-in-hayes-valley-picnic-area/

3. Which got me to a-thinkin'... if a Cocker Spaniel-Poodle mix-breed is called a "Cockapoo", a Pekingese-Poodle hybrid is a "Peekapoo", and a Labrador Retriever-Poodle crossbreed is a "Labradoodle", what the heck would the AKC call this little muttster? I threw out "Cairauzer" and "Schnairn" to her human escorts, but they did not seem to cotton to (nor polyester to) any of my intelligent suggestions. (I was gonna say they "poo-poo-ed" my ideas, but that silly joke would have only made sense if this little girl had any Poodle in her.)

4. As I have mentioned many times before, you would have to be nuts to think that pistachios are true botanical nuts. They are actually the seeds of the plant. 

And here is an extra freebie pseudo-horticultural pointer of the day: the pistachio tree is a member of the cashew family (and cashew "nuts" are not botanical nuts none neither).