I’ve just got back from a lunch at Waterbar on Embarcadero in San Francisco with six other bloggers. We were hosted by Patrice Lamothe of a new social media company called Pearltrees. I greatly enjoyed the lunch and found the Pearltrees concept very interesting.
Waterbar
I eat out a lot but I rarely write about restaurants on Roaming Tales. The main reason is that I like to use a lot of photography in my posts and I don’t enjoy taking photographs of food when I’m dining out. I know a lot of food bloggers have no qualms about it but it’s just not me. Perhaps I could illustrate reviews with photos of the exterior of the restaurant instead.
I had heard of Waterbar but this was my first time eating there. It’s a seafood restaurant and while I love fish, my husband is vegetarian. Having lived in the city for only a year I had not had the occasion to go there without him before now.
The restaurant is located on the bay on the stretch of Embarcadero between the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge. On the MUNI, it’s the first stop after Embarcadero toward the Ball Park. It has an outdoor area, which would be lovely on a sunny day or perhaps at night with the big outdoor heaters. I was glad we were sitting inside today as while it was warm, it was also quite windy.
Although our host Patrice is French, we were very Californian in our beverage choices and stuck to iced tea or water. I must admit that I enjoy wine with lunch but I’m always happy to go with the flow on such occasions and I always wait for someone else to suggest wine. It’s probably just as well since I’m headed to the MediaBistro party tonight and I don’t want to be tanked before I even get there!
Before the meal we were served a green soup with crab in tiny teacups. I didn’t catch the description but it tasted like asparagus. It was light and sweet and fresh with a little morsel of crab meat at the base.
For starter we had a choice of cornmeal crusted smelts with endive, radish and green goddess (I think the ‘green goddess’ was the sauce) or baby artichoke salad with fava beans, sweet pea and grana padano. I went with the artichoke salad, which also had a few baby carrots. I am a great fan of both artichoke and fava beans (which I know as broad beans) so I was happy with this choice in terms of taste. My only quibble was that they used too much oil, which made it difficult to eat without dripping oil on myself or dropping the very slippery peas. After this course, I had to duck to the bathroom to sponge off an oil spill on my new silk shirt. (If only the BP oil spill could be cleaned up so readily!).
For main course, the choice was:
Alaskan halibut with roasted beets, sugar snap peas and orange (hook & line caught by Robert Mosher aboard the “Patience”)
or Whitefish with broccoli rabe, roasted cherry tomato vinaigrette (hook & line caught by Capt John Schlappi aboard the “Mishomis” on Lake Superior).
I went with the halibut, as did everyone around the table bar one. I had plate envy when the solo whitefish came out – it looked really good. My halibut was okay but I think I had the tail piece as I could see bigger, juicier pieces around the table. The skin was lovely and crisp but the flesh was a tad dry. I loved the roasted beets and orange, but there were no sugar snap peas – I think there was fennel instead, though I can’t recall.
Dessert was a choice between black and white ice cream cake with dulce de leche creme fraiche and bananas or strawberry rhubarb crumble with vanilla ice cream. They took the dessert orders at the start of the meal in order not to interrupt us while we were doing the demo. I thought I wanted the crumble as I love rhubarb but I ended up changing my order after the main course to the ice cream cake. It was fantastic – chocolate cake layered with vanilla ice cream accompanied with the rich taste of roasted bananas and caramel. This was definitely the best part of the meal for me. Mmm.
Pearltrees and the other bloggers
I enjoyed the company. We didn’t spend the whole time talking about Pearltrees – we had a wide-ranging conversation from cupcakes versus macarons to the best food cities in the US. We went around the table to talk a little about our blogs, which was interesting. Some were more cooking focused and others more about restaurants and wine. I was most flattered that Lily Ko, who runs a fashion site as well as a food blog, wanted to take a picture of me in my new Missoni skirt. I’ll share the link when that post goes up!
Patrice demonstrated Pearltrees for us over dessert. It’s a way to curate your favourite web content but the links are more accessible on a typical bookmarking or social media site. You can create visual “pearl trees” to map the web. If you embed it in a blog post, the embedded pearl tree will update when you update the pearl tree on the main site. It’s all search engine transparent so the links count for SEO. It’s only been going since December last year and I think it could prove really interesting, especially for bloggers.
I’ve played around with it this afternoon and here’s a pearl tree I’ve created of the lunch, with links to Waterbar and everyone who attended. Check it out below!
Photo credit
“Waterbar” by Silly Jilly on Flickr. Licensed for commercial use under Creative Commons.
Tours of San Francisco with Urban Adventures
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