The Open Banana: San Francisco Part 5: Gracias Madre & all the rest...

Seeing my enthusiasm for American-Mexican cuisine, my vegetarian host suggested we check out Gracias Madre, which is a vegan Mexican restaurant. I have to admit, I have a HUGE interest in vegetarian Mexican food and I think there should be more of it. Aside from the omission of cheese, this place fit the bill of my dreams. Instead of cheese, it offered a "cashew cheese" which was more of a sticky white sauce but it tasted fine. Cheese is on a bit of a pedestal in my world, not being a vegan or envying them, so the omission was annoying. But that would be my only complaint about this place. I will say it straight out: this was the best meal I had in San Francisco!

Yeah, it doesn't look like much. But we were in flavour heaven and bursting at the seems by the finale. Who knew vegan food could be so filling? Who knew Mexican food could be so unphotogenic? Well, we already knew that... but buried under lettuce and sauce, and hidden in tortilla wrapping and corn husks there is a very awesome meal here! We wanted to try a bunch of different things, so we ordered guacamole, which came with 4 lovely corn tortillas, refried black beans, "nacho cheese" (chipotle cashew cream) and we compiled these into custom tacos, using table side salsa and lettuce from the other dishes to even them out. We also ordered the gorditas, which were grilled potato-masa cakes topped with salsa verde, avocado and cashew cream. These were good, but certainly not our favourite part of the meal. That was probably the a la carte tamale. San Francisco has made me love tamales! We also really enjoyed the empanada, a type of pastry, which in this case was filled with plantains and sitting in a bed of mole sauce. The mole sauce was yummy and we snuck it onto our tacos. My friend thought the plantain was a little sweet, but I thought it was a really nice contrast of taste with the rest of our meal. We both agreed that the savoury mole sauce balanced out the sweetness. This feast we both shared and washed down with a couple mojitos. I will definitely come back to this place on my next visit to San Francisco.

... And just a quick note on a few other interesting things I ate. The San Francisco Street Food Festival just happened to coincide with my visit, so even though I was already full of cioppino, I made sure I still had room for a taco. Below is my friend's tofu pad thai taco. Fusion is hip. Food trucks are hip. Accommodating vegetarians is totally hip.

I broke my vegetarian affair to try the bahn mi taco, which utilized braised pork belly. It wasn't the meat I was craving, but the novelty of combining two of my favourite sandwich-like entities: the taco and the bahn mi (Vietnamese sub). The braised pork belly was topped with pickled daikon, cilantro and sriracha mayo and it was a delight to eat. I wish I had set aside a whole day for the street food fest to gorge myself. Then again, the lines were long and the portions were small. It was very crowded, and pushing through the beer garden to finally get my hands on a beer kinda felt like scoring a touchdown.

This last picture is Boston Clam Chowder in a bread bowl. I saw this available all over San Francisco, and was puzzled as to why it was so prevalent despite being a New England specialty. It occurred to me that it is the bread bowl which is novel, since San Francisco specializes in sour dough bread. As far as I can tell, Boston style chowder isn't any different from Maritime chowder except in the Maritimes you are more likely to see fish or seafood chowder, rather than specifically clams. Also, New England style chowder comes with a packet of oyster crackers to put on top. I consumed this particular chowder at Stagnaro Brothers out on the pier at Santa Cruz (an hour or so outside San Francisco). This place was recommended to me by my friend, whose friend recommended it to her. It was just okay, and I don't even think the bread bowl was the local sour dough bread! So much for trusting the opinions of friends of friends. But I thought I'd share it with you anyway.