Restaurant: Scratch

Lobster, oysters, shrimp go in my belly!

A couple of weeks ago I was reading the paper and pretending to be a hipster by suggesting to my friends we all go try a new restaurant.  Ok, not hipster, but pretensions to foodieness.  Everyone else in the world has a point about South Bay being the absolutely worst place in the Bay Area for non-chain food, low-brow, restaurants, because everyone here thinks Cheesecake Factory is the height of gourmet dining.  Still, not all souls have given up opening restaurants NEAR South Bay - there was an interesting bit about a newly opened place in Mountain View.  Which is technically Peninsula, I think.  Maybe the edge of South Bay.  It counts!

Sort of.  

A long week deserves a drink in each hand.

Scratch specializes in upscale American - the comforts food kicked up a notch.  I felt so hip(ster), emailing my friends to try out a new place I'd read about, but at least it wasn't from an iPad and I didn't get there on my fixie bike.  We picked a Friday that was the tail end of a looooooooooooooong week for happy hour drinks and happy hour drinks could not be more needed.  Wei-ling and I had been planning to leave work early, but were foiled by meetings that ran way over.  After such a long week, we didn't care about missing the happy hour deals that much in our desperate grab for alcoholic relief.

It was a LONG week.

Wei-ling, Ben, Cari, Matt, Cyrus, Yuki and I decided to stay for dinner.  Next time, I'm going to bail out of work for sure to make it for the Happy hour specials.  We all agreed the food was a little overpriced, but good; nothing WOW, but tasty and solid.  The appetizers were the most intruiging (bacon wrapped figs, goat cheese souffle, salad Nicoise) so my plan is to go back for wine and to order three 1/2 price dishes for an early dinner and stuff my face.

I can almost never say no to a some rare tuna.

Scratch seems made for the happy hour crowd, next time I'll have to get a shot of its circular bar.  It's in a cursed location that changes hands very frequently, so by the time I managed to get myself and friends together for another happy hour it might be gone...but hopefully not, so I can go back!