San Francisco: Cafe Tiramisu

I'm in San Francisco again, for yet another extended stay. This time I'm staying right in between Union Square and Chinatown. Even though I can't afford to buy anything right now, this is a great location :) Hey, window shopping is free :) But the other reason I like this area is the many dining options. There are several restaurants on every single street for the few blocks around me. Honestly, it's quite overwhelming! I wish I could try them all...

One place that I did try is Cafe Tiramisu. It's an Italian restaurant that specializes in seafood, which combines two things I love. I went there with several people from IBM who are here for training. Some of them are staying at the same hotel as me and invited me to go with them :) So we ended up being a big group. This worked out great because the menu looked amazing and there were sooo many things I wanted to try. But being in a big group, we ordered everything family-style :)

We started by sharing the grilled calamari and the mussels in spicy chile sauce for appetizers. The mussels were pretty similar to what you can get at any good restaurant. Don't get me wrong, though, they were delicious, just nothing too special. However, I loooved the calamari. I have to admit that this was the first time I had grilled calamari; I've always had them battered and fried or poached in soups/stews. The grilling preserved their real taste and softened the texture just a little bit. Plus, they looked so pretty with their tentacles still on :) I think that was my favorite thing abut the dish...

For entrees we ordered the pumpkin and ricotta gnocchi, Dungenese crab tortellini, pappardelle with Bolognese sauce, and the oricciette with pork ragout. Again, all the dishes were delicious. All the pastas were hand-made and fresh. The tortellini contained huge chunks of crabmeat and came in a nice creamy sauce. I'm usually not a fan of Bolognese-style meat sauces, but I loved the one here. The pork ragout was also amazing. But my favorite dish were the pumpkin gnocchi. Honestly, I didn't expect to detect much pumpkin flavor, but I was very pleasantly surprised. And even better, the gnocchi were still savory and not sweet. I guess the addition of ricotta was able to cancel out the sweetness of the pumpkin. I definitely had several helpings from that plate :)

And we couldn't go to a place called Cafe Tiramisu without ordering tiramisu! It was delicious, but again similar to most other tiramisus I've had. We also got the bomboloni, Tuscan-style donuts. I can't believe I spent a whole week in Tuscany and never heard about them! They were really delicious. They were filled with cream inside and came with a chocolate sauce for dipping. They reminded me of beignets in terms of texture, of Boston Creme donuts because of the sauce, and of churros because of the chocolate sauce. Well, combine all of these goodies and you have a great finish to a great meal :)