The strangest thing about lunch at A16 was the coincidence that our waiter there had been our waiter the previous night at Orson. Fortunately, he's a really good waiter. He steered us well at Orson, had good suggestions at A16, and recommended some other places to try (including Front Porch, where we ended up Saturday night). A16 is known especially for their pizzas, though we were anticipating the meatballs, since E's dad had actually made their meatball recipe before and it was great. Of course, meat-lovers that we are, we were happy to discover they had a charcuterie selection. On our waiter's recommendation we tried the house-cured ciccioli, which is almost more of a pate than what you'd usually think of as a cured meat (here's a description of the process). This one was soft and sort-of spreadable, though not as much as a pate, more somewhere between sausage and pate. Regardless, it was really good; especially if you don't think about exactly what pig parts might be in there. It also went well with their really really good table bread, which had a nice thick crust and soft inside.

For our main courses, we had:
- Pork meatballs braised in tomato with basil and grana padano. These were amazingly light and fluffy meatballs, with a great pork flavor, and just enough tomato and basil to complement without overwhelming. The texture was great, though personally I prefer meatballs a little more dense.
- Pizza salsiccia - fennel sausage, rapini, red onions, mozzarella, grana padano, garlic, chiles. The crust on this pizza was very good, thin and crispy. I usually don't like the bitter-ish greens so wasn't crazy about the rapini but didn't mind it. The sausage was good and fennel-y.
- Huckleberry sorbetto, fresh yogurt gelato, honey almond gelato. We had originally passed on dessert, since we were planning a trip to Bi-Rite later, but our waiter knew it was E's birthday and brought us these three treats with a candle. All three were good, and were especially good together. The yogurt stood out though just because the flavor was so fresh and clear. I didn't know what it was when I took my first bite and it was a yogurty taste explosion.

We got into SF thursday afternoon and were hungry by the time we got settled in. We're staying near Haight-Ashbury and ended up deciding to try out Citrus Club, which is supposed to be a good noodle house. Unfortunately, it was a little underwhelming. We got a cold lime-ginger soba plate, but instead of being basically soy-based like we both expected, it had more of a creamy salad dressing esque sauce and just wasn't that appealing. We also ordered shanghai noodles, but ended up getting coconut chicken noodles, which was actually pretty good, so that was okay. The menu has some interesting stuff I wouldn't mind trying (e.g. shanghai noodles) if it were, like, my neighborhood noodle joint.

Orson just opened a couple of weeks ago, and is the talk of the town. It's sort of a molecular gastronomy-type place, in that there's a lot of experimentation with the form and essence of things. But it's more that chef Elizabeth Falkner has applied her pastry experience to the rest of the meal in new and interesting ways. We'd read about Orson in Becks & Posh and they recommended leaving all inhibitions at the door and just trying as many interesting-sounding things as you could, so that's what we did. we were there for three hours or so, and it was incredible fun to try different strange sounding things (all of them good, several of them oh-my-god). In several cases, Falkner managed to extract the essence of a food's flavor (e.g. potatoes) and transform it into a radically different texture (e.g. a creamy foam) that makes for a sort of "I can't believe it" experience. But it wasn't gimmicky or pretentious, as I feared it might be (and all the wait staff were informal and appealing). Instead it just conveyed (and invoked) the pleasures of kitchen experimentation.

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