Belated Birthday Brunch with the Educator GF's @ The Patio on Goldfinch

The second birthday of our little group (the Educator GF's) is always mine...

The first is KD's, the third, D and the fourth is KD's. Ever the good friends that they are, they let me select the destinations today...

The original plan was to do a Trolley Food Crawl but that was thrown out the window...

because our planned crawl was also the same weekend as Little Italy's Art Walk, plus D had to leave early to go to another venue (but there was a fun compromise with this though). Due to my hatred of crowds and not thrilled with the prospect of having the group split up, I opted for us not to hop on and off the trolley. Too problematic. Either that or I'm just anal and inflexible and yeah.

We went in two separate cars so that D could go to her event later so TORC and I enjoyed playing iPod roulette in her car, listening to cool tunes.

Stop one was brunch at the Patio on Goldfinch; we were seated in the back next to a spectacular wall of live greenery. On our way back, we passed by their famous cheese cave...



I thought this table top with a WWII era San Diego map intriguing. What I especially liked was the antiquated spelling of "Tijuana" as "Tia Juana". They even had my old 'hood in there, Otay Mesa. Yeah man!

Southsiiiiide!

All of the ladies had coffee of some sort while I saved my caffeine binge for the stop after this.



Because they were known for their unique cheese cave, we ordered a cheese plate; in this case four cheese (of my choosing) with accoutrements. There were different price points depending on how many cheeses one selected. Since I made the selections, there was to be no GOAT or anything BLUE. In no particular order, we had the Kokos, the Comte, St. Angel and the Beemster. I don't remember the order (although I did take notes but can I find that $%#@ piece of paper, no I cannot, dammit).



The cheeses were served with crostini, edible flowers, raspberries, raspberry coulis, a slightly spice blackberry compote, fig jam and candied walnuts. We liked all of the cheeses. Thank you very much. None of that rank goat or moldy crap for me thank you. This was such a pretty plate but then we attacked it and it was gone pretty quickly.

Our brunch entrees - D' Ranchero Skillet, TORC's Breakfast Flatbread, KD's Chilaquiles and my Shrimp and Grits.

There were two very large and juicy and well seasoned shrimps there. The grits were pretty good but according to KD who had just returned from an educational conference in North Carolina, were of a different style.

I thought the flatbread was a bit to puffy and bland. This was almost like the kind we had during our revisit at Half Door Brewing Co., except this actually had the caramelied onions and way more ham/bacon pieces that ours did.

The chorizo in this dish was soyrizo.

I'd not seen chilaquiles served this way before. It looks like super wet nachos with fried eggs on top.

I had my trusty cooler with ice packs so our leftovers were stored away as we made our way over to a nearby coffee shop.

Previous visit to the Patio on Goldfinch
March 2015 during one of our morning dates

Although Heart Work Coffee Bar was just down the street, we were headed to another coffee place, one that Bert and I visited on Valentine's Day...