San Diego

NANOG was meeting in San Diego this past week. Normally, in an attempt to reduce my travel, I don't go to NANOG, because there are several other folks from my company that go, and I can catch the sessions that I think look interesting via streaming video. However, this time there was another meeting happening directly after NANOG such that I figured if I was going to fly out to San Diego anyway, I should just go for the week. This was my first trip to San Diego. Generally it was a pretty good trip. A couple of brief impressions about San Diego. First of all, the weather was lovely! It was in the 70s most of the week, and actually hit 75 the last night I was there. One day of rain, the rest were all sunny. This was a good thing, because San Diego is a pretty walkable city, at least the area where I was. I did have to take a cab to and from the airport, but that was mainly because getting away from the airport involved a freeway with no sidewalk, not distance - it was something like 2.5 miles, which would have been quite doable if it had been safe to do so.

The conference was located at the Westin in Gaslamp Quarter. There were no rooms left in the block by the time I booked, so I ended up staying at the Sheraton Suites at Symphony Hall. It's about .5 mile from the Westin. It was a servicable hotel, but as a recent Starwood convert (previous employer had corporate contracts with Hilton), I have noticed one thing - both of the Sheratons that I have used have been overpriced by comparison with their competitors, have been a bit dumpy (in need of a remodel), and have had internet service that was borderline useless that they still insist on charging you $9.95 a day for. I like Aloft and Westin, but I think I'm going to start avoiding Sheratons where I have an option.

Anyway, there are a lot of dining options in the Gaslamp Quarter area, so when we'd break for lunch, I pretty much just pulled up Yelp and looked for something interesting each day. Here's the short rundown of the places I tried:
Hodad's - this is a burger joint that was featured on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, and the episode featuring them was rerunning about a week or two before I left on this trip, so it was in the front of my mind. I didn't go to the original (the one actually featured on DDD), but the burger and fries were still good, and I had a tasty local copper ale to wash it down. I got their Blue Jay Burger, which is a Bacon Cheeseburger with Blue Cheese cooked into the patty, topped with grilled onions. Those flavors worked really well together.

Bite M.E - This is a cutely named Mediterranean food place. I sat outside, and had a really good falafel plus some pickled vegetables. I've had plenty of kebab and the like, but I'd actually never tried falafel. Also, the pickled vegetables included carrots and celery, which is the first time that I've had either of them pickled. I've never met pickles I didn't like, so of course I enjoyed it.

Micho's - This is sort of a strange setup, because it's actually co-located with a bar called the Stage Bar, but
it came highly regarded. I had a fish taco and a carnitas taco, both were excellent, and quite cheap. I think that the whole meal including drink was less than $10. Additionally, they were using the bar's sound system to play XM 80s on 8, and it was having an exceptional day as far as music goes. I spent a lot of the time I was waiting for food singing along to the music.

Bandar - This was a Persian restaurant that came well-recommended from some colleagues. I had a beef and chicken kabob, and could barely finish it the portions were so huge. It was well spiced and tender, and I had a tasty yogurt sauce that was made with scallions (instead of the normal cucumber) plus flatbread on the side.

Lucy's Taco Shop - Breakfast was provided during the conference, so Thursday was the only day I needed to grab breakfast before my meeting. This place was right around the corner from the hotel where the meeting was being held, and so I grabbed a breakfast burrito from here. It came with a nice spicy salsa roja, and was quite tasty.

Karl Strauss Brewery Restaurant - Several of the social events that happened in the evening featured Karl Strauss Brewery products as their local feature, I tried their Amber Lager, as well as their Red Trolley Ale, and enjoyed both quite a lot - here is a microbrewery that doesn't over-hop everything for a change! When I saw on Yelp that the restaurant happened to be around the corner from where I was for my meeting, I knew that was the place for lunch. Beer, of course, featured heavily on the food menu, and I had a hamburger with beer-braised bacon and onions. On a whim, I tried their Oatmeal Stout, even though I am not normally a big fan of stouts, but this one was excellent. Very roasty and malty instead of hoppy, and it went really well with the burger. They also gave us a sample of their Anniversary brew, which tasted like it had a very high alcohol content and was aged in bourbon or whiskey barrels. Good stuff, but not something you'd want to drink a lot of in one sitting. A note to some of my friends who brew their own, I saw several of their kegs had a sticker with the slogan, "make beer, not war!" and if they sold them, I would have purchased several for you, but alas, the wait staff admitted that "we don't sell them because we suck." So there you go.

Dinner the first two nights was part of the conference's social event. The second night was a private event at the USS Midway, which was very cool. I would have liked to be able to see it during the day, but even at night it was really interesting.

Three nights there was proper dinner. First, one night a vendor took a few of us out to Nobu for sushi. I love sushi, but this was especially good. They had a lot of what they called "new-style" stuff that was not your standard sushi and sashimi. Lots of high quality fish, lots of good flavors. I don't even remember a lot of the things we tried, because someone else was doing most of the ordering, but I didn't have anything that wasn't tasty.

Stouts - I was on my own for dinner Wednesday night, as a lot of folks had already left town, and the conference ended mid-day, so I spent the afternoon working in my hotel room, and surfaced long enough to grab some dinner. This place looked good because it specialized in Irish Pub food. Turns out that it was the local hockey hangout, so while it's an Irish bar (and therefore serves what you'd expect at such a place) it also is the local Canadian expat hangout, and therefore had different hockey games on every screen, serves several Canadian beers, and poutine. I was trying to behave myself as far as dinner was concerned, so I skipped the poutine and ordered a reuben sandwich. That may have been a mistake. The corned beef (which is supposedly made onsite) was dry and flavorless, the saurkraut was timid, and while it was a decent rye bread, the bread was over-buttered and greasy, so it was a bit unrewarding. I don't know if their other food is better or not. They did have a good selection of beer, which helped, but I've been craving a good reuben ever since. Any recommendations?

Cafe Chloe - This was dinner on Thursday night. A friend from college had made some recommendations when I told him I would be in San Diego, and this was the one that he said was a must. Conveniently, it was nearby (most of the other places that he recommended were on North Side, which would have required a cab ride), and I'm very glad I took his recommendation. This is un-fussy French food. It was still almost 70 degrees out, so we had dinner outside  on their patio. A cheese and olive plate, braised short ribs with brussels sprouts, and a good bottle of red. I got to try my colleague's mussels, which were cooked in a Belgian ale cream sauce. Not good for your health, but damn good for your mental health.

A few other things that I noticed about San Diego. First, it seemed odd to me that there weren't more motorcycles. This is a place where year-round riding is definitely possible, and since it's California, you can lane-split, meaning that navigating the traffic would be easier. Yet, I only saw one or two motorcycles each day. I see more on my commute when the weather cooperates here. Second, San Diego seems to have a pretty significant homeless population, a lot of whom seem to have mental health problems. I don't know if it was the area where I was in the city, or the temperate climate, or a combination of a bunch of things, but there were a lot of folks sleeping on the street, and I saw several buildings being rehabilitated as second-chance housing. The interesting thing is that it'd be in clusters - you'd walk for several blocks and not see anyone, then you'd walk two blocks and see 10 people.