Annual Holiday SF Day with Patty!

Without a doubt, one of Emily’s and my favorite parts of the holiday season is our annual San Francisco outing with Patty. It always starts with high tea and ends with a spectacular dinner and usually includes a visit to Union Square, and oftentimes there is some surprise event in between. And this year she pretty much outdid herself!

We started, as we have for the last several years, with a gloriously traditional tea at Lovejoy’s.

Then we braved the hunt for parking (and the COLD) and headed to the surprise event of the day—a Sound of Music sing-a-long at the historic Castro Theater. It was so much FUN! We all sang our hears out with a thousand other voices, waved our edelweiss and curtain fabric, hissed at the Baroness, and pulled poppers at the wedding. It was AWESOME!

After the movie we wandered the Castro for a bit. Emily saw rice crispy treats that could make a grown man blush; we found a cool variety shop that sold virtually anything you could possibly imagine from Victorian architectural ceiling medallions to toilet seats to shampoo and office supplies; a Starbucks with a community bulletin board that was very, um,  different from anything we’d see at our local Starbucks; and a florist that sold the most unusual roses I’d ever seen!

We wandered next into Union Square to buy Emily her first grown-up wool coat—a worldly girl of the city needs something other than a middle school sweatshirt to wear to dinner!

And finally we ended up at the unparalleled Epic Roasthouse for what was truly one of the most amazing meals I have ever had (amidst glorious views of the “new” Bay Bridge, to boot!). We started with an amazing shrimp cocktail and roasted cauliflower soup (and I had what I think might have been my favorite cosmo ever—spiced pear). Then there was steak, of course, but paired with scrumptious side dishes like potatoes au gratin, broccolini, and roasted cauliflower. And for dessert I had champagne and blood orange sorbet, Emily had vanilla gelato, and Patty had the Epic Brownie Sundae.

After dinner we wandered around the Embarcadero a bit because despite the bitter cold; it was simply too beautiful to leave yet. It was truly a spectacular day!