Mrs. ricepad had a weeklong training class on the Central Coast, so I drove down to meet her at the end of the training so we could spend some time out of the Central Valley heat (100F+!). I arrived early enough to get lunch at Medusa’s in Cambria, a small Mexican place on the main drag. There was only one other party in the small dining room, and since it was quarter after noon, I wondered if the lack of customers was a bad sign. It was not. I ordered a chile verde taco combination, which comes with rice and beans. Everything tasted great, and the server brought me a couple of lime wedges without my asking, which was nice. My only nit was that the servings of rice and beans were a little on the small side, but I would go back again.
That evening, after picking Mrs. ricepad up from her class, we stuck around Cambria for a few hours, checking out the tidepools on Moonstone Beach. As the sun set, we headed back into downtown Cambria in search of dinner. Our noses led us to Lombardi’s, also on Cambria’s Main Street. It, too, was small - maybe everything in Cambria is small, since Cambria itself is small - and we decided on a pizza Margherita and a salad to split. The service was top-notch, and the salad wasn’t bad, either, but the pizza was a disappointment. The crust was thin (a good PM should be thin), but it had no flavor, as if it hadn’t proofed long enough or something. It tasted like a plain old flatbread. And while it was moderately crispy, it didn’t have any char on it. There was ample cheese, but the tomatoes were bland (maybe good fresh tomatoes are hard to come by in the cool climes of the coast?). We’re not likely to return to Lombardi’s.
The next day we found ourselves unexpectedly in San Luis Obispo. Since we hadn’t planned to spend any time in SLO, I did almost no research, so we parked downtown and wandered around. I was drawn like a moth to a flame to the Brown Butter Cookie Company, where we bought some snickerdoodles for dessert, and asked the staff there for a dinner recommendation. After a little back and forth about what we liked, they recommended Efren’s, a small Mexican place around the corner. Once in Efren’s, I was initially disappointed, because it looked like a the kind of place where they slap together your burrito by sliding the tortilla along the counter past the steam table, scooping and plopping your ingredients of choice. The menu, however, had a couple of things that drew our attention: Siete Mares (Seven Seas), which is traditionally a mixed seafood soup in a thin spicy broth, and Caldo de Res, or simply “beef soup”. We both had our struggles with our respective soups: the snow crab legs in the Siete Mares took a little bit of wrangling to remove all the meat, and Mrs. ricepad had her own issues removing the meat from the bones in her caldo. After we overcame those issues, however, we settled into some of the best soups we’d had in a long time (yeah, we don’t eat a lot of soup in the summer!). The portions were so big that Mrs. ricepad had to pack up about half of her soup, but I forced myself to finish. Man, I was stuffed. The service was very friendly and efficient, too. We’d go back to Efren’s just for the soup!
Our last meal on the coast was at Tognazzini’s Dockside Too, their more casual location right behind the original (and still operating) restaurant. Too is not just dockside, it’s actually on a pier. TDT offers a LOT of fried stuff - fish and chips, shrimp and chips - plus chowders, tacos, burritos, and sandwiches. I opted for calamari and chips, while Mrs. ricepad got two tacos, one with salmon, and the other with scallops. My calamari and chips was exactly what I expected: tubes ‘n’ tents, battered, deep-fried, with a huge mound of fries. Yum. Mrs. ricepad’s tacos were even better. The salmon taco, which she ate first, had a huge piece of grilled salmon and too much cabbage slaw on top to pick up and eat, so she ate about half the slaw first, then chowed down. The scallop taco, however, was the single best thing we ate all weekend. When it came, I thought it was filled with garbanzos, but they were bay scallops that had been smoked. As with the salmon taco, the scallops taco was overfilled, too. We’d go back just to order more smoked scallops tacos!
