San Francisco and Santa Rosa, fun times!

We had a fun weekend in the bay area, starting with a night in San Francisco at our favourite cheap and cheerful hotel, the Metro. We strolled over to Magnolia Pub for lots of beers, and the best fish and chips I've had in a long time. They also had excellent sausages, saurkraut and crispy pork skin. Not great for veggies, the veggie rice dish was a little bland.

After a heavy beer night, the best thing to do was find a good brekkie. We wandered down to the bean bag cafe and I indulged in a totally delicious nutella and banana crepe, everyone else had hearty omelettes and scrambles which also looked and tasted great. I dont normally go out for breakfast much but this was a total winner.

We then started on our way to wine country and stopped off at Ubuntu for lunch. It was a lovely restaurant, but the meat eaters in the group found it totally over the top and really weren't into the concept of the restaurant. Its easy to win them over with good food, but the insanely over the top attitude of the place did put them off. We started with olives with carrot-top pesto

A wonderful green bean salad with bright colors

Delicious little cutlets with 'nasty bits' of veggies, probably my favourite dish!!

An excellent pizza, while some people say you cant go wrong with pizza, this was lovely

We really over-ordered on this to the waiters recommendation, we probably only needed about 3 dishes between 2. Everything comes out when its ready, so tapas style is the way to go. Another observation was that the plates were insanely large, so it was kind of hard to fit them on the table!

Then we made our way to Santa Rosa, which was by and large a bit of a letdown, foodie wise, apart from a really wonderful Ethiopian meal at Abyssinia. This is one of the best cuisines for a mix of veggies and meat lovers, they had wonderful veggie curries, and slow braised meat stews with the injera and everyone was very happy. I enjoyed the sweet honey wine, and my companions enjoyed the stout.