Down the Rabbit Hole

Brix Restaurant and Gardens is found in Yountville, a few miles north of Bouchon Bistro  (which was the last family outing before COVID-19 shut the whole world down and before I gave birth). This time, Val was able to join and we have our toddler in tow! I have to say that the wee one is developing a good taste in food with all the exposure to great dining experiences at such a young age. Brix happens to have been awarded L'Assiette Michelin for its good food. And I can attest to that: the forest mushroom risotto was so delicious that even our son wanted to eat more! Mommy had shrimp and grits; Daddy ate a fried chicken sandwich, and Val took wood-grilled steak frites.  The biggest draw for us though is the sprawling garden of vegetables and herbs. After lunch, we toured the gardens (except for Val; he had to take a phone call) and enjoyed the view of the Mayacamas Mountains and the Kelleher Family Vineyard. Overall, a nice dining experience for all of us after being cooped ...

  The baby is now a toddler! He understands object permanence  and protests loudly when I have to leave the house. When I was reading about object permanence in The Wonder Weeks , I thought that separation anxiety would only last two weeks. Eight months later, my son still protests when I leave for the restroom or to go upstairs but, thankfully, the waterworks only get turned on when my son realises that I'm going out of the house (for errands).  In one of his crying episodes, Val was already at a loss because the poor little one wouldn't stop crying. Nothing could console him... until they hung out by the couch and looked out of the window. My son's fascination with cars calmed him down (and he started pointing at them, saying "Ca! Ca!"). When I finally returned, he became very excited because he recognised the C230 driving up the street and parking by the driveway. Unlike Godot, Mama always returns, my young Padawan learner. 

In 2020, I first wrote about my interest in eating in restaurants that have been judged against the Michelin star rating system. One-star restaurants, like Bouchon Bistro , are known for high-quality food and are worth dining in if I'm in the area. Two-star restaurants, on the other hand, have excellent food and are good enough for me to make a pitstop at. Three-star restaurants, the crème de la crème among the restaurants judged by Michelin inspectors, are definitely worth making the trip for. Getting the star rating is a big achievement for restaurants and I get the impression that chefs go out of their way to make it hard for diners to visit them (if they are worth the detour, right?). Many of them are also expensive! A trip to any of the two- or three-starred restaurants can easily set anyone back by USD ~300.  And thus I wondered if I'd ever get a chance to eat at another Michelin-rated restaurant... until I learned more about the other Michelin restaurant rating categorie...

Whenever I take videos while my son and I are walking, I find myself wishing for a means to stabilise the videos that I'm taking, particularly the videos in which I use the front-facing built-in camera on my cellphone. Finally, I got convinced to buy a gimbal stabiliser when Val flew in because I'd like to have our family videos be fairly motion-stable. And so after a few days of waiting, my Amazon order finally arrived: a Gudsen Moza Mini S. It has three axes for stabilisation: pan (aka yaw, horizontal motion), tilt (aka pitch; vertical motion), and roll (backwards and forwards motion). What I didn't realise is that this stabiliser is not as straightforward as a regular selfie stick or monopod. Instead, I had to learn how to balance the mobile phone onto the phone holder (located at the pitch axis). And the gimbal stabiliser is heavier than it looks. Anyway, once the wee one took his nap, I went outdoors to video flowers growing in our backyard. One flower had a bee in i...

The original plan was to visit the Presidio in San Francisco. Since Anna wanted to drive, I thought that it would be less intimidating for her if we came into the City via the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge rather than via the Bay Bridge (the road bottlenecks right after the toll gate going towards the bridge). Given that route, I decided to throw into our itinerary a stop at the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito, which is found very near the Golden Gate Bridge. This way, we'd be able to see the famous San Francisco summer fog and decide whether we'd like to traverse the Golden Gate Bridge in extremely foggy conditions. I was quite happy with that decision because even I balked at the sight of the clouds (I'm contesting the use of the word "fog" to describe the thing that covers the bridge) sitting on the Golden Gate Bridge. And so once both cars were parked at the Museum, we stopped to marvel at the fog and then proceeded to see what the museum had to offer. No...

When we visited the City Centre Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, I saw a giant billboard for Slanted Door, a restaurant that I used to see at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I never got to dine there because I normally only caught the BART at the Embarcadero Station; or if I were on a touristy trip out into the City, I'd typically browse the shops at the Ferry Building Marketplace and then eat somewhere near Pier 39 . Anyway, with that huge invitation, I suggested to the rest of the family that we can eat there. It's supposed to be a really good take on modern Vietnamese cuisine. A quick search online showed that the Ferry Building branch has been awarded a L'Assiette Michelin  and the chef has been given other awards as well.  Slanted Door, I can say, definitely elevates Vietnamese fare from my usual order of  pho ga  (that I usually get at Kevin's ). In fact, there's not a single pho variant on the restaurant's dinner menu! Our server suggested that we try Sla...

After a year of staying mostly at home, with the state poised to open on June 15th, and with the whole family fully immunised with either Moderna or Pfizer, we all thought that we're pretty much in the clear to go outdoors (aka shopping malls). Since Anna suggested that we visit this newly opened mall called City Centre at Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, we decided to see what it's about. The biggest draw for us was the fake grass area in the middle of the mall's open space. We could put the wee one on the lawn and let him practice walking without worrying about animal poop and mud. However, we didn't realise how crowded the lawn could be because we had thought that it was bigger than it actually was. The wee one has never been in a big crowd before, thanks to COVID-19 keeping him from seeing other people (including fellow babies). Naturally, he was overwhelmed by the number of people surrounding him. So when I first placed him on the grass, he refused to go anywhere. He jus...

Lunch with Tita Ising and Tito Sibing at Mall of Asia (2015) Before I migrated to California, I used to spend some time with Tita Ising and Tito Sibing every once in a while. We used to watch movies in the cinema, eat in restaurants, and go on Maundy Thursday visita iglesia . I have fond memories of going with them to the different churches; both of them wanting to give me directions while I drove (which led to a lot of confusion for me and bickering for them) to the churches we were visiting. They also took me along to Monte Maria  (with Lola Bats) to see the spot in Batangas City that a popular priest claimed to be holy. On one of their wedding anniversaries, they brought me to the house where they first met (during a fiesta), which is located in Taal, Batangas and we always made a pit stop at Our Lady of Caysasay Parish.  Aside from going to different churches, we also had a great time eating out. The stories flowed continuously from lunch to dinner to desserts (normally at...