I spent a month there and had the opportunity to try several places, both old favorites and new adventures.

Zuni is worthwhile just because it’s a good cross between fairly fine dining and very SF. The roasted chicken is famous and it’s been around for decades (I first had it back in the 90s). what I’m talking about is a whole bird cooked to snappy-crisp-skinned, juicy perfection in the restaurant’s wood-fired oven, served atop a currant-studded bread salad plump with drippings and brightened with a bitter-fresh scattering of greens and vinaigrette. It takes an hour to prepare, so you’ll have ample time to sample their Coast oysters and a truly perfect Caesar Salad.

Foreign Cinema is experientially fun fine dining. They play old movies (I saw A League of Their Own) without sound on the wall and you sit in a covered-ish outdoor space. I was a guest, so I can’t speak to the value of the meal, but everything I tried was perfectly cooked. The menu changes regularly, but I give them extra high marks for offering (my favorite) PNW oysters. Truly, it was good, but I don’t know that I would go back if I were paying on my own.

A particularly specific SF meal is the Mission Style Burrito. I grew up on El Faro, which was literally just down the street from where we lived for awhile, but they’ve fallen on hard times. (Note: the one located in SoMa claiming to be the first, isn’t. My link, above, goes to the place I’m talking about.) Everyone raves about El Farolito (24th and Mission), and with good reason. The Mission burrito is a legend unto itself, a flour tortilla, loaded with rice, beans, meat of choice, salsas, guac and sour cream, wrapped tightly and encased in a sheath of foil. I’m told that if you don’t want rice in your burrito, try La Taqueria (order it “dorado” for an extra crisp-up on the griddle post-roll).

Dim Sum is a food I love, and I had the pleasure of enjoying it several times during my stay. There’s nothing like a dim sum feast on a Sunday, alongside multi-generational families stretching the brunch hour deep into the afternoon. Hong Kong Lounge has classic offerings, like pork buns and shu mai, and basically everything is available for takeaway, so no one will know just how many buns you ate in one sitting. Just down the street is Dragon Beaux, which a lot of places are recommending, but I felt the quality wasn’t as good as the prices. They do *fancy* dim sum, which I think is high appeal to the young and restless, but (again) the quality wasn’t up to the hype. I also recommend Good Luck Dim Sum, it was as good as Hong Kong Lounge, but only for takeaway. The place is *tiny* and the lines are very long.

Turkish-based Lokma is a fairly recent (2018) welcome offering in the Outer Richmond that is open all day. Their delicious spreads — muammara, baba ganoush, and tzatziki — arrive on warm pita and are perfectly seasoned. Their burger, a combination of beef and lamb, is juicy and delicious. I also recommend their chicken sandwich, which is a grilled thigh.

Crustacean or Thanh Long (they are sibling restaurants) for Garlic Noodles and lovely roasted crab with butter and herbs. No need to dip the crab in extra butter, it comes that way, rich and savory! I also loved the fried calamari with salt & pepper alongside a spicy mayonnaise sauce.

Pacific Cafe offers sustainably caught seafood in a neighborhood joint, beloved by locals. With a whole crab — sauteed with garlic and coming with bread and a salad — running about $38, it’s also a massive bargain for such high quality food.

Double Rainbow Ice Cream started in the Castro in 1976, producing some of the best ice cream in America. (I don’t just think that — they’ve won a ton of awards.) After a struggle to keep their place open in the Castro, they’ve recently returned with yummy offerings. (There are several stores around SF and in California, they are franchises.)

b.patisserie is amazing. I ordered a latte and one of their famous kouign amman pastries (pronounced: queen aman), which was buttery and crispy and utterly perfect. One of the best pastries I’ve had outside of Paris.

Tastebuds is a “soul food inspired” cafe offering massive portions at very good prices. Milkshakes and smoothies, fried chicken waffles and burgers, hearty scrambles and shrimp and grits . . . everything is perfectly prepared. Seriously, the fried chicken and waffles are a dream, with chicken served perfectly crackly on the outside, and buttermilk waffles offered up with butter and syrup like a dream. My dining companion had the green salad with steak and it was HUGE, easily enough for two meals. The steak was tender and perfectly medium-rare.

Total Tourist but Worth It

The Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista Cafe, for example, is a modern marvel of coffee, fresh cream and Irish whisky. It’s well worth a visit to watch the skilled bartenders seamlessly batch and craft a line of coffees with choreographic precision, made better by the fact that the just-sweet-enough (and just-spiked-enough) drinks are in fact, delicious. There’s no better cure for a damp winter (or summer’s day).

All of the beef at Harris Steakhouse. In a city seemingly committed to vegetable dishes, one of the best, and most beloved restaurants in the city has a never-changing menu and centers around beef. Really, really, good beef. One of the best Filet Mignon steaks I’ve ever eaten was here, more than 30 years ago; it was just as delicious on my recent trip. That level of consistency is worth celebrating.

Our first few posts here at The Ramble have been recounting the story of how Lisa and I came to our decision to move to Portugal, and we’ll get back to that in a little bit. However, in going back and telling those stories we’ve been neglecting to share the present with you, and recently the present has been plenty interesting. (If, that is, you find any of this interesting. YMMV.) We kicked around several pithy titles for this post, mostly along the lines of “the last 48 hours have been one heluva day.” Allow me to explain.

In the middle of all of our plans for getting ready for our transition, we scheduled (wisely, we told ourselves) a week of forced relaxation; a chance to recharge our batteries, to “sharpen our saws” as Stephen Covey would say. Lisa went to Maui with her sister, and John went to South Carolina to visit his parents. We will set aside any thoughts on the fairness or lack thereof regarding these arrangements and move on to the relevant bit. This past Sunday we each flew to San Francisco where we reunited with each other (and also with our luggage; a story for another time). The purpose for this diversion from home was a critically important step in the process of our move – the formal handing over of our applications and supporting documents for our D7 visas. Our what now?

As has been discussed in other posts, most countries have a variety of visas (the legal instruments that say a person from country A is allowed to be in country B) to cover the multitude of reasons that foreigners might have for wanting to visit their country. What Lisa and I are shooting for is a temporary residency visa in the country of Portugal. HOWEVER, the formal meeting at which you request this visa must occur in Portugal. To facilitate foreigners (e.g. us) being able to come to Portugal they are issued an interim visa – it says “these people aren’t just tourists, and they can stay as long as it takes for the residency meeting to happen.” This is a “D7” visa in Portugal’s system. By all accounts, the meeting that occurs in Portugal is far less rigorous than the D7 application process; if you get approved for your D7 the next step is (almost) a formality. We’ll talk about what goes into a D7 visa application in detail in future posts in this series; today, we’re just sharing the adventure surrounding the application meeting.

Our appointments were set for 9:30 AM on Monday, September 20th, at the VFS Global office in San Francisco. VFS Global has carved out an interesting little niche for itself in the immigration ecosystem. To simplify the lives of embassy employees throughout the world, VFS will “vet” the applications of prospective immigrants. They don’t make value judgements as to whether a visa should be approved. What they do is they make sure that the applicant has appropriately provided documents to satisfy each of the parts of the application. For example, some (but not all) of our requirements were to fill out an official application form, provide proof of sufficient funds to cover our expenses, and show that we have arranged housing for one year. So, our VFS agent made sure that our application was filled out properly (the right places were initialed, the right places were signed etc…), they looked over our documentation showing sufficient funds, and they looked over the lease for our apartment and the proof of wire transfers showing we had paid the deposit and 1st two months’ rent. (Y’all have an apartment?? We do! We’ll tell you all about that later.) There’s much more to it, but you get the idea. Our VFS agent doesn’t actually say “this looks like enough money”, they just make sure that we’ve shown something and that it looks to be in the ballpark of what the Portuguese embassy will be looking for.

So! Monday morning we get up bright and early (ok, 8 AM. You try dealing with a couple suffering from 3-4 hours of jetlag from two different directions trying to sleep at the same time :p), make ourselves presentable, and head out. We booked a room at the Hyatt, 3 blocks from the VFS office. We stroll down, find the place, make our way up to the 5th floor, and present documentation of our appointments – an initial step that they take very seriously. We’re a few minutes early, so we sit ourselves down to wait. The waiting room is like an upscale DMV – it’s still lit with flourescents, and the carpet is Industrial Chic, but it’s at least air conditioned, clean, and there’s only 8 or so people waiting so it doesn’t feel too crowded.

9:30 comes and goes, but we’re pretty sure we’ve figured out which of 7 cubbies is dealing with Portugal and they’re working with someone, so no biggie. 9:45, no problem. 10 AM, that person finishes up and the VFS employee calls out “next person for Norway?” Oopsie. Ok, we wait. 10:30, we’ve slipped from excitement, to anxiety, and are now drifting into boredom. Plus, just a hint of “is something wrong?” 10:45 or so, we finally decide to ask. I slip out to the security person staffing the front and ask her if something’s up with Portugal. She says we should be helped soon, but she’ll go and ask. A few minutes later, another staffer calls out some other country (I forget, but for example “next person for France?”) at which point Lisa very calmly stands up and says “is anybody doing Portugal?” Around 11, a very nice man named Duane (Dwayne? Didn’t see a nametag) kneels next to us and explains that the woman who was working Portugal today had an emergency and is out. Combined with some other staffing issue that was aluded to vaguely, this left nobody that could handle Portugal. Could we please call you tomorrow, he asks, to confirm an appointment with you for that day?

I mean… what was our option. “No, screw you?” Of course we’d do that, we had no choice. Except, we do have some other important things going on, like beginning the estate sale-like liquidation of our household on Wednesday (more on that process later, as well.) But, no, technically Tuesday is not a crisis. We spend some time arranging our flights and an extra night in the hotel, then spend an afternoon with Lisa’s mother who lives just outside of San Francisco. Fine. Dandy. We get back to the hotel and bunk down, ready to start fresh on Tuesday.

We’re up at 8 on Tuesday, not wanting to miss the call. We decide that if we don’t hear anything by 10 or so we’ll just go down and start making very polite nuisances of ourselves. We scrub up, scrounge breakfast from a bodega-esque joint, and settle down to wait. It’s just after 10 AM when we decide enough is enough, and we begin to dress for the day and to head out. As we are doing so, we get the call from Duane(!). Come on down, he says, there’s one appointment being handled right then, then we’d be made a priority, he says. Lisa and I have read a lot about this process, one appointment should be 20-30 minutes, tops, so we got moving. (I’m new at this; how’s my foreshadowing doing so far?)

We make it back into their offices and have a seat in the same chairs as yesterday. We draw a bead on the person who is being helped with his visa, and we immediately know that there’s going to be at least a litle trouble. The man at the counter has got a 500-page three ring binder in his lap. We soon grok that he is there with his wife/partner, who also demonstrates the ownership of a similar binder. We also overhear that they are applying for thier two children as well. Now, if you haven’t gleaned all the “oh fuck” in the above, let me illuminate you. There are 11 steps to the D7 checklist. Several of them are satisfied with 1-2 pages. NONE of them require more than 20 (that’s a stretch, honestly, but how you demonstrate your finances can vary wildly I suppose.) This family is WILDLY over-prepared for this process. And here’s the thing. When you’ve brought THAT much extra stuff, it’s clear (to us at least) that, in fact, you don’t which of those things you actually need. We even heard the guy mutter a few times “I’ve got this organized in just my special way, hang on, I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere.” This is, as we say in our household, no bueno.

We’re not com-PLETE-ly eavesdropping, so we aren’t sure what step they’ve made it to, but around noon or so Duane sneaks up to us again (oh boy…) and tells us that he’s been told it’s likely to be another hour or so, and would we like to go get lunch, or perhaps we would like to wait in the British waiting room? We don’t need lunch, but the “British waiting room” was certainly intriguing. Lisa also sussed out that they had COVID protocols and we were probably taking up seats that they needed. So, to the “British Waiting Room” (“BWR” hereafter) we went!

Y’all. Take a look at that photo. This place really cracked us up. Seriously, the Brits our so prissy that they even want prospective immigrants to be given dignified digs. They even had little bottles of water and grocery store biscotti under glass. Meager fare, perhaps, but the default waiting room offers diddly squat. Plus, the chairs are much nicer than the Ye Olde Conference Room Chairs in the other room. Seriously, we giggled. (I posted this same photo to the main facebook group we follow for these things, and many people were tickled as well.) Anyway, I got us a couple bottles of water and for the next couple hours we sat comfortably waiting for…

… why are you looking at me like that? Oh, the “next couple of hours?” Yeah sure, it absolutely took that long. Longer, actually. Our hotel checkout time was 2 PM, so during that time I slipped out, finished packing our bags and took them down to the lobby where they graciously checked them for us, then made it back to the BWR to settle back in with the missus, where we happily passed another hour before finally being brought in to the regular waiting room because “we’d be seen any minute now”. Which, by the by, I knew was incorrect when they said it because I’d heard the VFS staffer telling Duane that she had missed her lunch two hours ago and her blood sugar was getting dangerously low. I don’t begrudge her lunch at all, but that’s another half an hour.

In the end, our actual appointment was anti-climactic. We had done our research thoroughly and were almost impeccably prepared. One or two little niggles (our checks were made out to the wrong office, easily fixed) and we were passed with flying colors. Seriously, we really were done in ~30 minutes or so. By 4:20 or so we were back at our hotel, summoning a Lyft, and by 5 PM we were at the airport. We had, with some foresight, rebooked ourselves to the latest flight available, 9 PM, and so we had a relatively leisurely meal in the D gates, chatted, and boarded our flight. I’m typing this somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle from an altitude of 12,000 ft or so. It has been, as we said at the top, a heck of a 48 hours we went through today.