Open (Holiday) Season

I was about to go grocery shopping — the jacket was on, I was writing up my list — when I thought about it, and realized that I'm going to be spending probably four of the next seven days down in San Jose being fed by family.

So screw it. Empty larder be damned, I'm ordering Indian food for dinner.

After a crazy November heat wave (it was in the mid- to upper-70s here), we're finally getting winter weather. The temperature dropped practically overnight. It started misting my last hour at work this evening, and went into full-on rain as I was walking home along Market Street.

Last night I had a "date" with a new friend (he's gay, Mom, so don't get your hopes up); we joined a couple friends of his for the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at the SFMOMA, and then dinner and drinks at Farmer Brown.

The exhibit: fantastic. Go see it if you can; Cartier-Bresson's got a crazy-extensive body of work, and SFMOMA's done a good job with it, a lot of places including the photographer's original captions with the photo. The man had an amazing eye and interesting take on the history he was able to witness and capture.

The dinner: if you're on a diet, any kind of diet, you have to plan a date to cheat on it for this place's fried chicken. Now, I ordered the fried catfish — which was damn good — but I snagged a bite of my friend's chicken and it melted in my mouth. It was all I could do to resist swapping plates with him when he wasn't looking. We also got an appetizer of fried (sense a theme here?) okra, and I frickin' loved it. Just skip the apple turnover on the dessert menu — it sounded good, but ended up pretty mediocre, considering the bliss-of-palate that had come before. We also could have done without the crappy wannabe-clubbin' music — I mean, seriously, the concept of the restaurant was fucking hipster (organic, local southern-style food), so why pretend to be otherwise with the house music? Still, worth dealing with that and the waiting list for a table* to get to that chicken. I hear that they have a weekend brunch that also features fried chicken ... and waffles. Holy crap sounds good.

* Note: we only waited about 20 minutes or so, but we got lucky since the party before us on the list decided to cut out instead of waiting all that time. So it was supposed to be a 45-minute wait on a Thursday night; not horrible for SF, but still kind of long.