5/3/2008

4/5 stars

I walked in, and I COULD BREATHE AGAIN! ahhhh, moisture…. Desert-natives may be uncomfortable in such a pleasant atmosphere.

If you like pitcher plants, and we love them, then you will love this place. Huge, small, pretty, and not so pretty. We never could tell which orchid was the vanilla, but we spotted other ingredients we use all the time. The water garden at one end is gorgeous. Too bad the huge lily pads are gone. And there's one coconut on display that, well, I can't describe properly in an all-ages forum.

It's a lot of fun craning over and back and spotting new things every time you look at the same spot. Really inexpensive for SF. The downside is finding parking in Golden Gate Park if you drive.

Yelp tags: Botanical Gardens Museums

5/3/2008

4/5 stars

This is a review of the pastisserie, not the restaurant… After eating at the pastisserie, we may well go back to try the restaurant.

Delicious. The cupcakes had wonderful flavors well beyond what you expect. The key lime cupcake actually captured most of the essence of a key lime pie in the cupcake! The filling was pretty good (every Florida native recognizes one "true" key lime filling, and each of us recognizes a different one, soo…), and the cake itself really tasted of the border between the pie filling and the graham cracker crust. The chocolate chip cupcake actually had the extra brown sugary flavor of a good chocolate chip cookie. Neat. The vanilla cupcake we had was a little dry; it may have been sitting out too long. Still tasted great.

Then there were the fruit geles and cookies we had. Wonderful. The geles were high-quality, definitely made with pectin. And the cookies had that great crunch on the outside, were moist inside, yet were still thin… And the fondant sandwiched between them certainly brightened the cookies and really made the flavors come together.

My espresso (on an Elektra) was very well prepared and came out rich and smooth. That's rare enough in itself.

The staff was wonderful when we were there. The pastisserie was full, so they guided us over to the restaurant to sit. We accidentally sat in the dining area during the pre-dinner cleaning, and they were very gracious about moving us over to the bar area. We certainly are interested in the restaurant side now. Alas, their web site requires Flash that doesn't work with swfdec…

Yelp tags: Bakeries American (Traditional) Desserts

5/8/2008

4/5 stars

Gorgeous theatre, microscopic seats. But that's to be expected for the age. Easy parking nearby, even BART-able. And a wonderful version of a Midsummer Night's Dream…

Yelp tags: Performing Arts