Saturday
Woke up and went across the street to the 24 Hr Fitness. Didn’t do too much, just trying to keep the gym progress going (woohoo, I managed to push 175 on the bench!) and burn off some calories in preparation for the chocolate festival. There was one problem at the gym though… apparently some people don’t think they need to wash their gym clothes. I mean, WTF we knew it wasn’t BO, but there was seriously some nastiness going on with this one guy. And no matter where we went, there he was… aiya.
Anyway, we spent a good hour and a half, and then headed back to the hotel and prepped for our afternoon of chocolatey goodness. Left the hotel at about 12:30, and proceeded to get lost (no thanks to the hotel front desk lady!!! argh) trying to find the bus stop that headed in the direction we wanted to go. After about 20 minutes of wandering around, we came across a bus depot (yes, handy indeed) and asked a nice bus driver who pointed us in the right direction.
The chocolate festival was… much smaller than it looks on Food Network. There were probably about 80 “booths” available (most vendors took up either 2 or 4 spots, so there weren’t as many as you would think), all with various chocolate-based samples to try out. Before gorging on sugar, we all decided it was best if we ate an actual lunch. Alas most of the restaurants in Ghirardelli Square were packed, so we ended up blowing a bunch of money on ripoff fair food. In this case it was Asian chicken skewers with either fried rice or chow mein. Not too shabby for fair food – it was expensive, but they certainly piled on the food.
After lunch, we headed over to the main stage, where the Earthquake (8 scoops of ice cream, three different toppings, and whip cream) eating contest was about to start. We picked a random older asian guy to root for and started a *clap, clap, clapclapclap* chant, which got a lot of the nearby crowd on his side as well. It was all for naught though, the returning champ that they showed on last year’s Food Network coverage defended his crown. Our guy did manage a close second, however.
We started on the journey into the vendor samples. Ice cream sundaes from Ghirardelli, chocolate jalapeno gelato, chocolate beer, chocolate martinis, and chocolate malts were amongst the choices. I don’t think anyone managed to spend all the pre-paid samples from their tickets, so most of us went ahead and blew our remaining tickets on Ghirardelli chocolate samples…
Chocolated out, we headed back to the hotel and rested for a while (watching the US Open, mostly) since we were pretty pooped and had to wait for our dinner reservations. We hit the House of Prime Rib. Can’t really explain too much except to say that it’s pretty much exactly like Lawry’s. Except I really like Lawry’s salad better, and enjoyed the Creamed Corn at the House of Prime Rib.
What’s another night out on a Foodie trip without ICE CREAM? Following dinner we headed to Mitchell’s, which is apparently a filipino-owned ice cream shop. Holy crap people were parking/double parking like there was no tomorrow. Double parallel parking with hazard lights on? No Problem! And police drove by without a care, so I guess it’s a generally accepted practice. Ice cream wasn’t too bad either. Lots of asian flavors available, like halo halo and jackfruit, etc.
After dessert we drove up to Coit Tower. I had told the crew that the city view was really nice at night. Er, I guess I had an obsolete memory because they had allowed all the bushes surrounding the view points to overgrow! What’s the point of those pay binocular things if all you are going to see is the bushes?!?!?!
There went another day, already!
) and a big USC blowout victory. All in all a great time.