Source Restaurant and the Tour de America

***We interrupt this program of smelly, frazzled running posts to again talk about food and restaurants and San Francisco life!***

Nope this isn’t a race recap… my bad! I’m waiting on a few pictures and trust me, you’ll know when it’s up.

Last Friday Night (cue bad-but-catchy Katy Perry song here) I went to my second GrubWithUs dinner. I talked about the first one in another post—essentially, you buy a dinner online, all tax and tip and food included, and you show up and eat with eight random people. Pretty cool, huh? Well, going marathon weekend was not ideal, but I jumped at the chance because it was at one of the restaurants I’ve been dying to try: Source, which is a really cool and cultishly popular new vegetarian (and mostly vegan) restaurant in SF. Finally, a menu where I could actually eat everything!

I had to share some of this stuff on the blog—not great pictures, but you’ll get the gist.

I printed out my meal ticket so I’d know what we were eating, which ended up being helpful.

The first thing that happened is that the owner came out and told us all the thing that makes Source a complete dining experience. Here are some examples:

• The water is filtered four times.
• The negativity is removed from the air.
• “There are two iPods playing: the one you can hear, and one that you can’t.”

This kind of thing can seem very hokey to me, but it was clear that he was very passionate about the experience so we all decided to roll with it! There was some mood lighting and fountains going on in there as well, and they don’t serve booze, but elixirs—fermented tea type of beverages with different interesting add-ins such as Dragon Power.

They make a variety of faux meat products, named, quite interestingly, “moo,” “quack,” and “cluck.” Think about it. The first appetizer was the Peking Quack Spring Roll with some sort of miso sauce. These were very tasty, but then again, most fried things are, and the sauce was the best part (as is normal with spring rolls—meaty or not!)

Followed by Baked Vegan Spinach Fondue, which was delicious.

The third app was Live Lettuce Tacos, with some sort of mix of raw almonds and garbanzos, some sauce and red peppers. This one I would not recommend. Definitely not BAD, but didn’t have much flavor and the “taco filling” looks like canned cat food, so I didn’t dig it.

After we were pretty full on appetizers (there were eight of us, and we got two of each of the plates above for the table, which was a good amount of food), the entrees started coming. First was this truffle macaroni and cheese. I love mac and cheese like nobody’s business and this one was AWESOME. Definitely not vegan, but awesome. I had leftovers the next night as pre-marathon fuel and it tasted even better, if that’s possible.

The next dish is by far the ugliest looking (the picture DOES do it justice… mashed potato pie “piping” and all) but the Shepherd’s Pie actually got the ravest reviews from our table! Perhaps because it was made with “moo” which was by far the most realistic tasting fake meat, but beyond that, this dish was deceptively flavorful. I tend to avoid meat-and-potatoes type of dishes fearing blandness but this tastes great if you can get past the appearance.

We also got a tofu, veggie and noodle type of dish called Dan Dan. This was definitely the weakest entrée—the others were all quite good, but this one just didn’t really taste like anything, which is the worst thing that can happen if you ask me!

4 out of 4 was the Jamaican Jerk Cluck. I thought this was pretty good flavor, could use a little more spicy (coming from me) BUT does come with really good siracha sauce which helps a lot. others mentioned it was the least realistic texture which I agreed with but to be honest I’m starting to forget that level of intimate details when it comes to eating meat.

Now that we are all stuffed to the gills… VEGAN DESSERTS! We got a ton of different options, from a masshmallow treat to a hostess-like cream-filled chocolate cake to snowballs, covered in yummy vegan frosting.

I am really, really glad I came here because the menu is INSANE with options and confusion and everything (I suffer from chronic menu indecision) but having a set multi-course menu made it way easier to sample a variety of dishes.

Some dishes were more delicious than others, of course, but overall this was a really cool place, really great variety of veg options and what seems to be a real live meeting about. I’ll be back to try the pizzas.

…But not anytime soon. I just found out I leave tmrw (wakeup in less than 6 hours!) to fly to Oregon.

Then back to SF but I have to stay in the airport and get right back on…

A flight to Boston.

Then New York.

Then Kentucky.

Then North Carolina.

Then home 10 days from now,

My carry on is  a little FULL! But I’m going to try to enjoy my Tour De America over the upcoming 2 weeks and see anything cool I can and blog about it. Standard stuff.

Time for BED.

love, court

Any cool vegetarian or vegan restaurants in your area> Have you gone? Would you?