🍫Dubai Chocolate 3/9/25

Hi Everyone!

I’ll be honest: I’ve never been one to keep up with trends. Most of the time, mainstream pop culture passes me by, but now and then, something catches my attention and convinces me to jump on the bandwagon. In today’s newsletter, we’re diving into me trying to chase trends, Blues Music, and Basketball.

To start the week, I got free tickets to see Vanessa Collier at Yoshi’s. 

Yoshi’s is not a venue based on the eponymous green dinosaur from the Mario video games, but instead a Japanese Restaurant and Jazz Club combo that has been in the Bay Area for over 50 years. We’ve gotten free tickets to concerts at this place a couple of times now, and every time we go we are always the youngest people there by like 30 years. I guess our generation just doesn’t know what they are missing out on.

For all that don’t know Vanessa Collier (and to be fair, I didn’t know about her until I went to the concert), she is a Blues, Funk, and Soul saxophonist, vocalist, and songwriter. She has been nominated for 15 Blues Music Awards, and has won four. While she’s not a jazz performer, she was the best we’ve seen at that venue. I’ve always loved the sound of woodwind instruments, and her saxophone playing abilities were top-notch!

Date night was at 5 Tacos and Beer this week, and despite going to a place named after Rylee’s arch-nemesis, we did not have any beer (they had gluten-free beer there though which was a nice surprise!). We didn’t realize until we arrived that it was the restaurant’s 2nd anniversary, so they had a live band to celebrate. Phenomenal Quesabirria Tacos, definitely plan to come back here at some point.

There is a trendy chocolate bar on the internet known as Dubai Chocolate which is a chocolate bar filled with a pistachio paste and knafeh (a shredded phyllo pastry). It has been trending for a couple of months now, and I have always said that if the opportunity presents itself, I would one day try it. I thought this Saturday might be the day.

Ghiradelli announced a one-day-only sale of a Dubai Chocolate Sundae, so I figured I would run to over to Ghiradelli Square to try it out. Unfortunately, it seems that everyone and their mother also wanted to try it as well, so I arrived to a line that wrapped around the block. In the 30 minutes that I waited, I maybe moved a yard or two, which is bad even in football standards. I gave up and went about with the rest of my day trip. Someday, I will try Dubai chocolate, but today is not the day.

Right across the street is the free Maritime Museum, which tells the story of Kenichi Horie, who at 23 years old completed the first solo nonstop voyage across the Pacific Ocean in 1962. While I was there, a group of older women part of an SF historical society invited me to play dominoes with them, which was very sweet. They then kicked my butt at dominoes, which is less sweet.

I then stopped by the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park Visitor Center, where I explored an array of nautical memorabilia. The exhibit also highlighted the history of Del Monte Foods (you know, the brand behind all those canned fruits) and the site itself, which once operated as the world’s largest fruit and vegetable cannery.

Next up was the Cable Car Museum which detailed exactly how the cable cars work. The cable car itself clamps to a set of cables that runs through the city at 9.5 mph to move the car, and you can see the cables on display too. The musuem also provides information on the history of the cable car and the political battle in the 1950s that almost resulted in the loss of the cable car. I couldn’t imagine an SF without them.

The last museum I stopped at was the Institute of Contemporary Art. Its a small, but free museum that had three exhibits on display: Riverbend by Maryam Yousif, which combines her memories of Baghdad with the legacy of anonymous Iraqi blogger Riverbend using clay, a showcase of Kathleen Ryan who turns American consumer junk into into art sculptures, and The Dimensions of Poetics, which focuses on artists that take everyday objects and turn them into art. 

I couldn’t get ice cream so I stopped at a place called Lush Gelato. They did not have a Dubai chocolate flavor, but Honeycomb and Brown Butter and Apple Sweet Cream hit the spot nonetheless. I also went to a place called Pie Punks that served slices of pizza with Tiki drinks.

I’m not usually a basketball person, but I couldn’t pass up a deal: a ticket to the Santa Cruz Warriors vs. Mexico City Capitanes, plus a hot dog and a fountain drink—all for just $30, which is an absolute steal in SF. To top it off, they were handing out free bobbleheads at the door, so at this point, I felt like I was getting away with robbery. I brought Peter along, which worked out well since he is a basketball person, meaning he had to endure me asking him questions the entire game. He rooted for Santa Cruz, so naturally, just to be contrary, I threw my support behind Mexico City.

I might of stumbled upon one of the greatest videos ever made on YouTube. There is not much else to say about this. Please enjoy!