Travel Dining

99.9% of the time when we read about something interesting to see or buy on the web, the only option available to us is to catalog that thing away in our minds with the ultra slim possibility that we remember that we read about that thing some time long ago. I find this particularly true for me when I read about a restaurant or watch various chefs do their thing on Top Chef. I think it would be very nice to eat most of the food that they are creating, but I will likely never be wherever they are, and in the instance I am where they are, I will not remember that I ever cared in the first place.

That is why I found it pretty neat when I read this post in Slashfood about the former Google executive chef and chef to the Grateful Dead, Charlie Ayers. He left Google several years ago with probably billions of dollars in stock options and just recently reemerged with a restaurant called Calafia right across the street from Stanford University. Hey, that's only about 5 miles from where I'm staying right now, so I hopped in the mustard yellow Ford Focus (peculiarly, parked next to the exact same mustard yellow Ford Focus), drove 5 miles down Camino Real, and found myself dining moments later at Calafia. The best part of this is that I typically agonize for 45 minutes or so when traveling for work about where I should eat on any given evening, and by the time I decide, it's well past dinner time, and I feel guilty that I could have just had an apple and made it to bed but instead I eat a large pizza. On the way home some guy who looked like Tiger Woods was following me, but I don't think it was Tiger Woods because he was driving an old Toyota Corolla, and he wasn't in the process of sleeping with one of ten women who isn't his wife.

Despite my normal focus on Michigan, I would like to strongly recommend the restaurant Califia in the event you accidentally find yourself in the downtown Palo Alto area. I had a turkey meatloaf with swiss chard and ginger yams, and man that was a delicious plate of food. There's not much in life better than a plate of meatloaf and potatoes, and this one certainly ranks up there. I returned home, quite full, and parked my rental car back next to the identical mustard Ford Focus.