Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

A local pizzeria, A Slice of New York, has had a sign out for months that they're closing soon. Now they have a sign showing a date: Next Saturday.



This restaurant has been circling the drain for several years. The pandemic was tough on many restaurants, but this one did the WTF coming out of the pandemic of reducing their hours in late 2023 to just one and two-half days a week. At the time I mused they wouldn't make it a year by cutting their own revenue so badly. Somehow they held on for 18 months. (I wonder if the landlord had given them a sweetheart deal and it took them this long to raise the rent to market rates. Or for an eviction to work its way through the courts.)

I have mixed feelings about seeing this pizzeria go under. I used to love this pizzeria. When their pizza's good, it's great. But for the past few years now, more often than not their pizza has been left sitting out too long. It's usually dried out and sad looking. Half the time I've gone in there recently I've turned around and walked out after seeing the choices. It's become an in-joke between Hawk and me; I've got to have a "Plan B" for where else to eat any time I try to go to this pizzeria.

Italy Travelog #27
Chia, Sardinia - Friday, 30 May 2025, 8:30pm

This evening we sat for an elegant dinner at one of the resort's restaurants. We weren't planning on it originally, but after the oopsie at breakfast this morning the restaurant manager offered to comp us dinner.



At 7pm, the earlier reservation available as that's when the restaurant opens for dinner— restaurants in Italy generally only start serving dinner at 7 or even 7:30pm— the weather was still warm, so we opted to sit out on the terrazza. The view was lovely. Though we still had to stand up and crane our necks to see the beach in the distance. 😅

Hawk ordered a dish of spaghetti while I ordered grilled duck. We shared an appetizer of hummus— "Just one?" the waitress asked, bordering on snidely— and a side dish of roasted potatoes.



The duck arrived artfully prepared on a plate with some kind of stacked scalloped potato and either kale or spinach or something else similar. It tasted kind of like kale in that it tasted like spinach but not as good. 😅 And it was served with a chocolate sauce. Yes, that's chocolate sauce you can see on my plate in the photo above. It's a strange choice on the part of the chef, IMO. While it didn't go poorly with the duck it also didn't strike me as, "OMG, why haven't I ever had this pairing before?"

Dessert was a case of "WTF?" customer service. Every item on the dessert menu seemed to have chocolate in it. Hawk, who can't eat chocolate (it gives her stomach problems), asked if any of the desserts could be prepared without chocolate. The waitress initially said no but then, apparently because she wasn't sure about what Hawk was asking given language differences, brought out her manager. The manager was kind of combative about what was in the food, so Hawk said No to dessert. Forcefully.

The manager then, showing that she actually was combative, brought out a dessert anyway and starting pointing out things about it. The manager and the waitress both had agitated tones of voice and body language that conveyed, "We can't believe you're so rude as to not want our dessert." Hawk practically shouted at them, "I said No three times already!"

The total was €99, all comped. Although that's more than we almost ever spend on ourselves for dinner, these are resort prices. We left only modestly full. If we'd eaten our fill the bill would've been at least €150, and if we'd had two glasses of wine apiece (instead of just me and just one glass) it would've been over 200. Of course, even if dinner wasn't comped by the restaurant it would've been at least partly covered by my company's club stipend.

Alas, our reason for eating cheap at this pricey restaurant wasn't being cheap. It was that there was only 1 entree on the menu that Hawk could eat. Then there was the WTF antagonism from the staff about dessert. That left Hawk seething and made me uninterested in ordering anything for dessert myself, even a second glass of wine. We're past the point in life where we'll eat more food just because it's free.

Italy Travelog #23
Chia, Sardinia - Thursday, 29 May 2025, 8pm

Eating dinner surprising takes a lot of planning in Italy. Especially as an American with American habits. Restaurants virtually all close after lunch and don't open again until dinner. And dinner is late. A few restaurants start at 7pm. Many don't reopen for dinner until 7:30. And you often need reservations. Especially for dinner, as most casual restaurants, the kind where reservations aren't required, don't even serve dinner. They close after lunch. So if you want dinner out, you've got to plan ahead and wait.

It's extra hard out here in Chia on the island of Sardinia where there aren't even that many restaurants. Other than the few onsite at the hotel, which are all expensive and have tiny menus— each has, like, one thing Hawk could eat— there's one other restaurant nearby. It's spendy and also has, like, one thing Hawk could eat. After that the next nearest place is a taxi ride away. Except there are no taxis here. And a private car costs €45. Each way. Even just to go a few miles.

We ended up buying a few things at the small grocery store a few minutes' walk from the resort and enjoying a picnic dinner on our patio. Oh, but we had to go quickly, because the grocery closes at 7pm.



The photo shows the two kinds of sliced meat I bought, sliced cheese, bread, and wine. The cheese is pecorino sardo, a local style of pecorino. The bread is focaccia. And the wine is Cannonau, a locally grown grape that is actually an ancient clone of Grenache/Garnacha. Most of it was pretty tasty. One of the two types of meat was overly dry.

On our way out to the store, when we were discussing the limited dining-out options with the hotel concierge, I remarked that waiting until 7:30 for restaurant seating was unusual to me because most Americans eat dinner earlier. She explained that Italians normally eat dinner as late as 9:30. To them, she explained, 7:30 dinner is early because people who work in stores only close up at 7. They have to go home and start dinner or go back out to eat.

It's an interesting explanation that points to a cultural difference. In the US we think of the service industry as there to serve us. In Italy it's more recognized that the service industry is "us"; that it's normal people working jobs in retail, and they need to live their lives, too.

Italy Travelog #19½
Chia, Sardinia - Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 2pm

Oops, this blog got lost in my backlog. I'll post it now, slightly out of order. Wednesday after our cave tour at Grotto Is Zuddas we were taken to a restaurant a few miles from the hotel where we were promised cibo tipico, typical (local) food. Local cuisine, according to two people I heard from earlier in the day and yesterday, surprisingly is not heavy on fish. That's surprising because Sardinia is an island so it's, well, surrounded by fish. But recall that historically, residents never settled close to the coast because of frequent raids by pirates and foreign powers. So it was a bit surprising when we sat down to a preselected menu that was all fish.

The all-fish thing was even more surprising because two people in our group of 8 had specified "no fish" on the planning form asking for dietary restrictions. Oh, and 1 needed gluten-free... and the menu was all fish and pasta.

Obviously something broke in the chain of communication from us to the organizer to the restaurant. But to make it worse, the restaurant had difficulty understanding why anything was wrong even when we communicated it repeatedly. I've read that food allergies are poorly understood/unappreciated in European countries relative to the US. I mean, there are still plenty of people in the US who think food allergies are bullshit but they seem to be a minority now, and restaurants pretty much all know how to handle dietary restrictions. It was morbidly interesting to see this play out in real life. The restaurants staff just didn't get it.

The first challenge we had to overcome was English-to-Italian. Only one staff member, the manager, acknowledged speaking any English. Next, the manager, when confronted with news the food allergies, initially was combative. He told us that the menu was already chosen and the food was already prepared.

We pushed back, noting that, "Hey, you're a restaurant, you must have other food you can serve us instead." After some discussion their counter-offer was pork chops instead of seafood. That worked for one of our no-seafood group members, but not Hawk— whose dietary restriction list began with "no pork, no seafood". Obviously they hadn't gotten that memo. Or they decided it was just bullshit from childish picky eaters who need to be taught the two options at the dinner table are "take it or leave it".

There was also the gluten-free issue to resolve. The restaurant did have gluten-free pasta, it turned out. Or at least a different-shaped pasta they said was gluten free. I'm skeptical about that because I watched the waiters scooping food from one plate to another and back again. If you know anything about food allergies, you know that transferring items from one plate to another with common utensils is a no-no. Upon seeing that I lost all trust in the restaurant's ability to take our needs seriously and advised anyone with allergies not to eat.

Somehow Hawk did have an allergic reaction. I think they served all of us half plates of gluten-free pasta. It was hard to tell what it really was. Regardless, something in the pasta or sauce triggered an allergic reaction for Hawk. Fortunately it was a mild one that she was able to treat by taking a Benadryl pill. But actually getting ill from the food at the table put the final nail in the coffin of having any enjoyment at the restaurant.

Italy Travelog #5
Rome - Saturday, 24 May 2025, 9pm

After we checked into our hotel just after 3pm there was plenty of time left in the day. For us it had already been a long day. 4pm Saturday is 7am Saturday in San Francisco. With the time changes we'd basically been up for most of 24+ hours, with only a nap of 2 or 3 hours on the cramped airplane flight for sleep. But even a little sleep is better than none, and the summer-y daylight in Rome helped us wake back up this afternoon.

We made reservations for dinner with the help of the hotel concierge and then walked out to the nearby plaza for a bit of shopping, about half a mile away.



A few things struck me about the convenience store in the plaza. One, it had fresh fruits and vegetables and meat and bread. ...Okay, it was more of a small grocery store than a convenience store, but for something the size of most US convenience stores it had more than just prepackaged crap, hotdog- and taquito rollers, and a beer cave. And two, while it didn't have a beer cave it had some surprisingly cheap wines. I could've bought a likely decent Italian table wine for the equivalent $2.35. Instead, though, I just bought a bottle of beer and some cookies for after dinner plus a can of soda for the next morning. It was definitely better to buy the soda for 0.95€ here than 8€ back at the Waldorf Astoria.

Speaking of the Waldorf, we went back with our bags of shopping before dinner. It would've been nice to combine the trips into a single outing, but restaurants around here don't even open for dinner until 7:30! We did our shopping at 6, and the little plaza certain wasn't interesting enough to hang out in for 90 minutes. I mean, we did look around since we had time. It's the kind of place you're done with in 5 minutes.

So, we chilled back at the hotel for an hour then walked back out, straight through the plaza again, to the restaurant the concierge had recommended, Da Luciano.

What sold Hawk on Da Luciano was— aside from the fact it was the first restaurant the concierge suggested that didn't involve the words "The menu is mostly fish" (since Hawk doesn't like fish)— was homemade pasta. Nonna makes all the pasta fresh in the morning. And to go with the pasta they have both fish and not-fish. 😅



The concierge also told us the white pizza on focaccia was a can't-miss. We didn't see a focaccia white pizza on the menu. ...Yes, I speak enough Italian— or at least enough pizza-Italian— to parse the words in Italian on the menu. So instead we took a flyer on a basic margherita pizza as an appetizer. OMG it was good! Hawk even liked it— and she hates most pizza.

The margherita pie was a good pick as an appetizer. It was light, sweet, and savory all at the same time. And the cracker thin crust— "It's on matzah!" Hawk quipped— was light and tasty. It left us plenty of room for our secondi.



Hawk ordered a plate of gnocchi. The potato pasta is her go-to pick in Italian cuisine. And hearing that it was homemade here was the key thing that go her excited to go. And Nonna's gnocchi did not disappoint. Hawk quickly pronounced it the best gnocchi she's ever had.



My secondi was veal saltimbocca. On the menu it's "Saltimbocca alla romana", but yeah, it's veal pounded thin and sauteed in a pan with ham (prosciutto) and a white wine based gravy. BTW, saltimbocca is a fun word. It means, literally, "jump into the mouth".

The saltimbocca was positively delicious. Yes, things were jumping in my mouth. 😂 I don't know if I can call it "the best I've ever tasted" like Hawk's gnocchi, though. I mean, I can, but that's a meaningless comparison as this is only the about the 3rd time ever that I've had saltimbocca as it's not common in US Italian restaurants... or the few times I've seen it on the menu it's been hideously expensive so I've tended to pick something else. This dish was I think 14€, so quite a bargain. And yes, of the 3 total meals of saltimbocca that I've had, this was at least tied for the best. 🤣

Now it's about 9pm and we're back at our hotel room. We're sitting on the balcony, having just enjoyed the sunset. I figure I'll go to bed by 10am as we'll have a busy day tomorrow touring in Rome.

Sunday we made a day trip out to Zim Zim Falls. It's a fairly tall waterfalls in a fairly remote corner of the Bay Area. It's in Napa County, but not the part you think of when you hear "Napa Valley". There are no wineries, tasting rooms, or hot-spring lodges nearby. It 's out in the wilderness.

We rolled out of our garage just before 9:30am, having slept in a bit and then waited to see if we were up for a big day outdoors. It seemed like we were, so we filled water in our packs, stuffed changes of clothes in a sack, and set out for the day.

Getting to Zim Zim always feels like a bit of adventure in and of itself. The past few times I've thought of the road trip as having two parts, but this weekend I've realized it's really three.

Part One is zooming along interstate highways up to Cordelia, California. If you're not a local you might be wondering, "Where?" It's the small town on the edge of the Bay Area where I-680 ends at I-80— or where 680 begins as it forks off from 80, depending on your perspective. For us it's also a typical spot for an early lunch break on this trip. There's a Del Taco here, and eating at Del Taco is one of our guilty pleasures. We only get to do it on road trips, though. This one 73 miles away is practically the closest one to us!

Part Two of the trip is driving country roads up through Solano and Napa Counties. There are wineries back here, unlike what I said in the first paragraph, above. But the wineries are in the southern part of the leg of this trip, in the Suisun Valley geographical area.

Part Three of the drive starts as we turn off of Route 128 onto Berryessa Knoxville Road. In the past I've thought of this as an extension of part 2, but then each time I've gotten frustrated at how long it takes. Sunday I measured it. It's 24 miles. And the last several of those miles are slow— actually slower and slower each year— because the road is in increasingly poor shape as it climbs above Lake Berryessa. Notably the road involves 3 water crossings to get to the trailhead for Zim Zim.



This weekend two were dry and the third had only an inch or so of water flowing across the road bed. But that wasn't the hard part of the drive. No, the part where I was thinking, This is probably the last year we drive here in our sports car convertible, was the crumbling road itself. The potholes are getting worse and worse.

Well, right around 12:30 we got to the trailhead. The drive had taken 3 hours, including our stop for brunch at Del Taco. Time to hike!

I mentioned recently that March 2025 has been a great month for over-achieving my New Year's resolution to try new restaurants in the area. Y'know, that New Year's resolution from... 2023. 🤣

About 10 days ago I was coming home from a client meeting in San Jose and was trying to figure out where to grab lunch. My Plan A had been to get lunch with the customer, or at least with my sales colleagues, but everyone else had places they wanted to get to quickly. And frankly I had to get back in reasonable time, too, as I had a string of afternoon meetings to join. I looked to see what restaurants were along my driving route. I was just about to settle for one of many familiar chain restaurants when I saw another option: a pizzeria that specialized in personal-sized pizzas. I love pizza— I mean, look, I have a tag for pizza, and my Apple News app offers me "Pizza" as a news topic— so I decided to give it a try.



While "Pizza California" sounds like it's another chain restaurant— and the well-branded exterior kind of looks like a chain restaurant, too— it's not a chain. It's a one-off pizzeria that's apparently been in San Jose's Berryessa neighborhod for almost 30 years. While that's not exactly my home turf I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this joint before!

Pizza California is vaguely similar to those Chipotle-style pizza chains that have popped up everywhere in the past 10 years. Y'know, the ones where you specify your pizza one topping at a time while a worker assembles it behind a plexiglass divider. Pizza California is like that except you don't walk down the assembly line watching your burrito pizza get made. You order at the cash register, and someone in the kitchen, out of sight, makes the pizza. Oh, and they have beer. A lot of beer. It was lunchtime, though, so I stuck with a Coke Zero Half-Caf from their Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.



The pizza came out about 10 minutes later looking pretty darn good. I got a combo pizza, a set of about 5 common toppings—or, as New Yorkers would call it, a garbage pie. One thing about a garb—combo pie is that with all those toppings it can be challenging to balance the cooking. Pizza California baked it right. The cheese was properly melted and the toppings were just slight crisped but not charred.

Would I go back? Yes... but I'm not sure when. The pizza was great, and I love being able to get a quality, custom-made pizza in personal size. Plus the selection of a dozen or so beers on tap makes it interesting for an evening visit. But the location is at the edge of how far I'd drive for a casual meal by myself. I'd totally swing by for lunch again next time I visit the customer whose office is nearby. But go out here just for the pizza? Not very often.

Wednesday this week was a busy day, work-wise. I was out and about on the Peninsula visiting a few customers. I met at one customer's offices just before 10am for a couple of meetings, took them out to lunch nearby, then drove up to Redwood City to meet another customer for a couple of meetings, then took them out to dinner. It turned out that both meals were at Greek restaurants!

Lunch in Santa Clara was at Opa!, a new-ish branch of a restaurant that's been around in Silicon Valley for a while. I don't remember if I've eaten at one of the their sister restaurants before. If I have, it's been years. Thus this counts for my Try New Restaurants New Year's resolution from 2023. 😂

Opa! feels like a high-concept chain restaurant. The decor is upscale and modern yet looks a bit too... pat... to be unique. It's not really a chain, though. There are only 3 of them. The menu is decently broad, spanning all the standards you'd expect to see at a mid-scale Greek restaurant, plus a few crossover dishes like the "Greek Philly Cheesesteak" that one of my colleagues ordered. It was huge, BTW, and he said it was great.

I ordered the Greek meatloaf, one of the house specialties. It was pretty good. I mean, how great can meatloaf be? It was moist, came covered— but not drenched— with a mild tomato sauce, and sat atop a serving of slightly too-creamy mashed potatoes and a few pieces of wilted spinach. The only reason I wouldn't order it again is because I'd like to try at least 3 or 4 other things on the menu before doubling back.

Also tasty looking was the grilled flank steak with feta cheese. That was my #2 choice, and one of my colleagues ordered it. He had no complaints about it, but my concern looking at his plate was that it was just a piece of meat with a small sprinkling of cheese. I guess if you're doing a carnivore diet that's perfect, but if you're looking for a square meal it's missing a few sides.

Speaking of sides, I also ordered a few appetizers to share. Saganaki was served alight, which thrilled all 5 of my colleagues, none of whom had ever seen it before. Opa! We also shared a plate of dolmas. They were disappointing. They were very fresh, but inside the freshly rolled grape leaves they were just rice.

Price-wise Opa! was on the spendy side of what Hawk and I usually do for meals out together. The tab for our group of six was about $240 all-in, so $40/head with tax and tip and non-alcoholic drinks. The qualify and presentation of the food seemed fair for the price, though, so I could see us going there together every once in a while.

Dinner in Palo Alto was at Evvia. Yes, it was Greek twice in one day. That happened because I picked the lunch spot while a colleague of mine picked dinner and apparently didn't notice the overlap. Or maybe he just really wanted Greek and was jealous because he couldn't attend lunch. 🤣

Evvia has been a well regarded restaurant in tony Palo Alto for a long time. I'm not a go-to-fancy-restaurants sort of person— except when the company's paying 🤣— so I'd never bothered to try it. But I was also curious to try it on OPM.

Evvia's dining room has a classy feel without being pretentious. We were seated outdoors on the covered patio where things felt a bit more casual. Heat lamps blazed away making it actually too hot despite cool evening air in the 50s.

The food at Evvia was all very good though not distinctive. Nothing made me say "Wow!" And the saganaki was not served alight. Disappointing. Maybe it's a fire code thing with the tented patio?

Surprisingly Evvia was not that spendy. I mean, it was more expensive than Opa!. And if you go deep in the extensive wine list you can add hundreds to your tab. But the braised lamb shank entrée I ordered was just $40. I didn't see the final bill (a sales VP paid) but I figure the average cost for a meal and shared appetizer and non-alcoholic drink would come to about $70pp all-in. Order heavy like the VP did, though, with lots of appetizers and two nice bottles of wine, and... well, I think the bill for 5 people topped a grand. 😳

I could see going back to Evvia with Hawk. It'd be in our splurge range though not a crazy splurge. As not-crazy-expensive as it is I wished I'd tried it on my own years ago.

I found an interesting thing when I went to light a candle the other day. The box of matches I kept nearby had just run out, so I rummaged around other places in the house where we keep matches and found this:



What's so interesting about a matchbook with a restaurant's name on it? I mean, aside from the fact that restaurants basically don't "do" customized matchbooks anymore. It used to be a thing years ago, back when more people smoked. Back when smokers could smoke in virtually every restaurant, everywhere. Restaurants would hand smokers a matchbook with the restaurant's name on so they could light up at their tables, then remember the restaurant by taking the matchbook home, sort of like a calling card. A calling card that makes fire.

What's interesting to me about this particular matchbook is that I've probably had it in my possession, through multiple house moves across multiple states, since about 1992. I know that because the Greek House restaurant in Ithaca, NY was one of my regular haunts in 1992-1993 when I lived a few blocks away. Yes, these matches are from another century!

And why would I have old matches when I've never smoked? Ah, it's because in that century past the apartment I rented had a stove that needed to be lit with a match. That's right, a gas stove without an automatic striker or even a pilot light!

How old is that? Well, since you asked.... I estimate the house I lived in was built in the 1910s. That comes from style of foundation the house was built on and the foundations of other houses in the neighborhood. (Haha, you asked an engineer "How old is that?" and now you get an engineer answer. 😏)  Some houses had stone foundations/footings, others had concrete. Building standards changed from one to the other in the US after 1910. Thus I estimate the neighborhood was built around that time, with my house being slightly newer than some because it had a concrete footing.

Now, the stove might not have dated to the 1910s, but I figure it wasn't newer than the 1940s. Pilot lights become common in gas stoves in the 1940s. For example, my grandmother owned a stove manufactured in 1941, and it had a built-in pilot light.

So, since my flatmates and I needed matches to use our stove, and we were poor college students, we grabbed free matchbooks at restaurants when we dined out so we could eat hot food at home. It was lucky for us, I guess, that smoking was still common.

BTW, the Greek House closed in 2006.

BTW², these 33 year old matches don't work well anymore. Unsurprising since they're cheap giveaways. Two fell apart as I tried striking them before the third lit.

Pasadena Trade Show Travelog #6
At the hotel - Sat, 8 Mar 2025, 6am

Yesterday was a long day kicking off the trade show in Pasadena. It wasn't that I stayed out late carousing; I was actually in bed, lights out, by 9:30. It wasn't even that the show itself was long. The afternoon vendor session was 4 hours, though I did spend 3 hours on setup ahead of that. And I had 3.5 hours of "regular" work with several meetings from my hotel room desk before even that. But what really made it an long day— annoyingly so— was that I woke up at 4am for no good reason. And today it's happening again.

No, I didn't wake up at 4am again. Thankfully. I managed to sleep in 'til 5:30 today. Woohoo? Yay I got 8 hours? I was hoping for more after a marathon day yesterday.

Today's schedule is more straightforward than yesterday's. There's no "cram in as much of a regular Friday of work as possible then go start this show at lunchtime". The show hours are 10-6, and that's all I intend to do work-wise today. It's a Saturday. But, dangit, I really wanted to sleep in 'til... oh, I dunno... the leisurely hour of 7am today?

As to what happened last night with that will-we-or-won't-we get dinner together cliffhanger I left off with.... Shawn and I met for dinner. We went to the Yard House a few blocks away. Well, it was a few blocks away for me and 1/2 block for him. We're at different hotels. At first I grumbled internally that's too faaaar as I was already beat and my feet were aching. But the brief walk was refreshing.

Dinner was exactly what I was hoping for: 1:1 with a new colleague, just shooting the shit about mostly not-work stuff, while downing a few pints of beer with some pub grub. We both were interested in calling it an early evening, so 3 rounds of drinks were plenty. Neither of us wanted to stay out late. (I have some colleagues who consider it a failing if they don't stay out 'til last call.) I was back at my room at 9pm, and lights-out in bed by 9:30.

Now today's another day. I'll see if two days of waking up stupid early has me running out of steam by the time the show day ends at 6pm.