San Francisco: 36 Hours, 3600 Calories

We food geeks love to skip town for a little culinary adventure. That's why we adore people who make that a possibility, like my sweetie pie husband Brian who swept me off to San Francisco for the weekend with one quest: TO EAT.

Ever since Taco Bell coined the concept of "The Fourth Meal," I've made it my mission to approach out-of-town fooding with a series of broad, well-paced, and frequent meals. For this trip, we'd start with dim sum for breakfast, followed by dessert, then a lunch/dinner, then another snack, then a late dinner. Five meals, five things to blog, YIPPEE!, right!?!

Unfortunately, my blogging eyes were bigger than my stomach, and by the time we were approaching our 10:30PM fifth meal at Delfina, I was reeling from too much bread, too much dim sum, too much gelato, too much... everything. So we had to call it a night and ended up bedridden at the hotel, me massaging my aching belly. Be warned - eating can be hazardous to your health.

Saturday morning started out innocently enough with dim sum at Gold Mountain. I was lucky that Jeni called that morning to inquire about the location of the Koreatown Pinkberry (yes, we foodbloggers are obsessed), because I was able to pick her brain about some places to visit in Chinatown. "I'm looking for a dim sum emporium," I inquired, and she kindly pointed me to Gold Mountain.

Gold Mountain definitely meets the definition of dim sum emporium: it's big, it's loud, it's crowded, and it's good. They have a ton of stuff, lots of variety, and many things you don't find at your regular Chinatown dim sum. However, during this visit, I started to confront the awful truth that...

I don't think I really like dim sum.

I've tried, really, I have. After about 20+ visits to Empress Pavillion in LA's Chinatown, trips to just about every dim sum place in NYC's Chinatown, and now this, I just... I just... I think I like different things for breakfast. Why can't dim sum be a bar food?

My personal self-confrontations aside, Gold Mountain delivered. They had a ton of different dishes and I was curious to try many of them, but because we were on meal #1 of 5, we decided to go slow and not accept everything that passed our table. Which was wise, because everything that passed our table involved shrimp in some form or another.


Don't get me wrong, I'm cool with shrimp. But it can get old after three dishes in a row. After the 15th waitress passed by with yet another iteration of shrimp, we were relieved when they started to bring out some other meat. Even though it was unidentifiable meat. What's that? Well, it wasn't pork, it wasn't shrimp, and it didn't really taste like chicken either. It was "other," hidden inside a greasy dumpling.


Fortunately, we did get to sample the sesame balls at the end, which are my favorite dim sum offering. Despite the fact that they became a greasy lead weight in my stomach later on, they sure tasted good. Hot, sweet, sticky, and oh-so-sesame-y. More sesame seeds per square centimeter than any other sesame ball I've had... EVER. Guaranteed.

Budget-wise, we were off to a good start. Is it possible to incur more than $15/person at dim sum? I've never had a check above $30, and this was my second lowest check on record. The lowest was $13 at Empress Pavillion, when they decided to stop serving non-Chinese people around 12:30PM.


So what's the ideal dessert after shrimp and mystery meat dumplings? Why, durian and Budweiser gelato, of course...