The Subway restaurant we dined at, located on 1500 Fillmore St.
This month marks the third year-anniversary of when my best friend and I started what we called our San Franciso Exotic Food Crawl, in which we try an unfamiliar dish from a cuisine we've eaten before or a new dish from an "exotic" cuisine each time we dine out in San Francisco. "Exotic" meaning that we would not be dining on the usual suspects of ubiquitous cuisines like Chinese, Indian, Thai, American, Mexican, Italian and Japanese, not unless it was a unique dish we had never tried before.
This 2-year and ongoing food journey was completely unplanned and the genesis of it all came about rather organically. It all started when we were looking for someplace to get dinner after watching a movie in San Francisco. We were supposed to watch The Lone Ranger together, but couldn't get seats, so she ended up watching Monster University, a prequel to Monsters Inc., while I went to see World War Z because she was too chicken to watch a horror flick with me. You can check out my review of War War Z here and my review of The Lone Ranger, which we got to see a couple of days after we couldn't get seats, here.
For some reason my best friend wanted Japanese food, and like total idiots, we drove to Japantown, which is possibly the worst place in San Francisco you can go to to get authentic Japanese food. I finally had enough when I was looking through the menu of one restaurant and it featured sake on sake sushi. As in sake alcohol on sake the fish. Baffling and as far from authentic Japanese food you could get. We ended up driving to a Subway restaurant and my friend, who once worked in a Subway restaurant during her teenage years, ordered a footlong Italian BMT to be shared between the two of us. We sat down at a public park to have our food, and it dawned on us how pathetic and sad it was that we were having Subway sandwiches for dinner in a city known for its diverse cuisines.
There and then we decided that this would be the last time we ended up eating at a chain restaurant when we dined in San Francisco. And so the San Francisco Exotic Food Crawl was born.
It's one thing to determine such a thing, it's completely another thing trying to figure out how to even start. Where do we even begin? And inspiration landed on my lap through another friend.
Check out my next post to read about the first restaurant we hit on our San Francisco Exotic Food Crawl culinary journey.
