It might seem strange to have an entire post about food, but it really is a challenge for me to eat healthily here. Since I was finally staying at a place that had a fridge and an actual place to store food, I was excited to move my diet away from having my sister’s vegan chocolate chip cookies for breakfast (which I had been doing since I got to the Union Hotel). Generally, I mostly only bought food in cafes so I’d be allowed to work in them, but those options also were not particularly healthy.

Lunch

This might not sound very exciting but considering how expensive the city is and the food, I was actually really thrilled to have free breakfast and lunch at the office. Although, I’m not quite sure if it was intended as free breakfast and lunch. Either way, lunch was probably kind of the highlight of my workday. I spent it outside most days with (very random) colleagues every day.

On Tuesday, I went out with Aidan, a colleague of mine that also went to an international school (so I could bond with him pretty well), to Drake’s, the other brewery next door. I had falafel (Americanised though, so not really up to my spoiled European standards), tater tots, and a tiny beer (which I expected to be larger for that price). It was a bit of an overkill lunch, but I really wanted to share this because TATER TOTS are AWESOME.

To the friends that know me, I love the tiny fries because they’re so crunchy. Tater tots pretty much have the ultimate level of crunchiness, and they’re weird little hoop-like things so also nice and chewy.

There were bagels at the office every day this week, and I’ve learned that I should always go for the bagel if possible. On Thursday they ran out of bagels, so I made toast with avocado (yes we even had free avocados) and cucumber, but American supermarket bread is absolutely disgusting. I’d heard from others that Americans can’t make bread, and this was definitely confirming that stereotype. Bagels it is from now on!

Also, just FYI: not every office offers free food and lunch to employees. At Apple people have to pay for their own food (they probably earn twice as much though), but at Google people get an unlimited amount of food.

Dinner

The one night that week I wasn’t living on scrambled eggs with a side of mixed vegetables with onions and garlic, I was out for dinner with Gijs in the Mission. We met up pretty late and were lucky to stumble on this great Italian place within minutes of our walk, right by 24th St and Mission, which was still packed at around 8 - 8:30 pm (this is highly uncommon in SF as far as I have seen).

The funny part was, we did kind of accidentally end up sitting by the bar, and when we decided we were too stingy to order a drink they asked for our ID. They were being a bit dicky about it because officially our Dutch driver’s licenses were not valid, but luckily they let us stay. Then it turned out they misheard our order and we were feeling a bit guilty about telling them because we felt like the Dutch cheapos sitting at the bar that didn’t even order a non-alcoholic beverage. By the way, water is free everywhere in restaurants here and gets put on your table as soon as you sit down, I think Dutch hospitality can definitely learn from the US in this aspect).

At last, we were worried that we were pushing our luck ordering tiramisu, which contains rum (or some other alcohol), because we didn’t have our IDs. Anyways, perhaps a dumb story, but it just felt kind of typical to be the stingy Dutch people sitting at a fairly fancy restaurant. I would nonetheless definitely recommend them if you’re in the neighbourhood, the pizza’s were great: Beretta.