Citizen Cake

Last weekend I accompanied Jenny up to San Francisco to attend a fundraiser for the City of Hope that Jenny's company participates in yearly.

The City of Hope is a research and treatment institution dedicated to the prevention and cure of cancer and other life-threatening illness. The fundraiser was kind of what you would expect out of a big corporate production. It did what it needed to do, which was raise money, but other then that not really worth describing here. We had fun though.

So although we had minimal time to route around the city, we managed to hit one or two places worth mentioning.

Before leaving on our trip, a friend of mine had mentioned a cafe that she had heard about and that sounded good for a brunch type of destination. I promptly forgot the name as soon as we got on the plane. Cake....somethin....some kinda play on words....Jenny would shout out the obvious "Let Them Eat Cake! They Can Have Their Cake and..." No no no, something funkier...When we got to our hotel, Jenny was flipping through a magazine and yelped out "Citizen Cake!" Yeah that’s it, I replied. So the next day we hoofed our way down through the tenderloin (pretty, not really), past the Asian museum, Opera house, and whatnot to what’s known as the Hayes Valley district. Citizen Cake is on Grove Street.

So we sat down at our table and rubber necked around gawking at other people’s plates. We saw a blueberry laden something or other that we quickly calculated was the Dutch Baby Soufflé Pancake. Yeah, we'll get that. We decided we needed something Eggy to go along with it. Since Jenny doesn't eat poached or fried eggs our selection was limited. A quiche was decided on. Oh, and a fruit plate...to make it all seem sort of healthy.

Everything was delish, although the quiche was quite tiny for the price. Yeah, the prices are a bit steep for breakfast. 9 bucks for the quiche. The fruit was exceptional though. All ripe and sweet, it included figs, raspberries, a peach cut up into a rose and more. We were happy and satiated.

After our meal, we checked out the baked goods. Oh man, it all looked great. Funky combos like green tea cheesecake, sweet corn and blackberry cheesecake. Standards like chocolate cake, scones, and ginger snaps all in exquisite form. It was tough but we avoided buying anything for we didn't feel like lugging it back to the hotel and wanted to keep our appetite for the dinner later that night. Bad move. I regret not having tried at least one of the ginger snap sandwiches.

Upon exiting the cafe we stumbled upon a shop just a few doors down called MAC. No, not a computer store...no, not a cosmetics store...A clothing store. Despite the poor choice in name ( it stands for Modern Appealing Clothing....clever), the store had a very unique selection of clothing as well as too incredibly large friendly dogs. Many of the labels offered here I had never seen before. A decent men’s selection of fall and winter clothing that would probably do well up north, but a bit weighty for LA. A bit weighty in price as well with few items for men below 80 bucks. But I guess that’s beginning to be the norm these days. I can't find a pair of decent jeans for under 80 bucks these days. I met up with Jenny in the women’s section and the owner began to tell us about one line of clothing that she was checking out. All the fabrics have a narrative them to them based on the story of Rapunzel. One had abstract locks of hair on the shoulders, another elements of fire and such. And it all actually worked. Pretty cool, but not worth shelling out the 500 bucks. So we thanked her for her time and left. If you've got the money to drop on some one of a kind clothing, check it out. If you don't, you can still just check it out.

Citizen Cake is at 399 Grove Street
MAC is at 387 Grove St
in San Francisco.

The image shown here is a random one taken on our walk to the cafe. I carelessly forgot to take any images of the places mentioned here. But whats up with the blindfolded woman with a rolling pin?