I would like to live in Ocean Beach so that I can buy my groceries at the People's Co-op. This little grocery store is completely vegetarian, has gorgeous produce and tons of bulk bins, is reasonably priced, and has a mostly vegan deli and bakery. Seriously, is that not reason enough to just pick up and move?
On Sunday, with the sun out after a night of rain, Paul and I headed here with the goal of a a muffin and the newspaper, and wound up with heaped plates of breakfast. There was scrambled tofu and biscuits and mushroom gravy and house-made tempeh sausage and breakfast potatoes all decked out in a nice swirl of mango hot sauce and accompanied by a cup of really good coffee. It turns out that this was actually a wise bit of overindulgence, because though we didn't know it at the time, we were NOT about to have brunch at Spread. (They apparently no longer serve brunch, although they are still proud enough of having been voted best brunch two years ago to leave that little banner up on their website, which is insidiously misleading, and mean. Oh, and they were also closed on Saturday night for a private party. So I can now definitively say that they are NOT the greatest vegan restaurant west of the Mississippi, no matter how great their mythical food is. (The space is cute though, and the people were at least somewhat nice about sending us back out into the rain on Saturday night.))
Staggering out into the sun under the weight of our breakfast, we exposed our citified pallor to a gorgeous crisp blue San Diego morning (Man, do I love southern California after a rain). We strolled down Newport past Roots Kind Food where we made a mental note to eat next time. We walked along the beach where couples and kids and old dudes sat with their morning beverages watching the pounding surf that the storm left behind. We headed out onto the half-mile-long fishing pier where we watched the waves form and the morning sun twinkle on the town in the distance.
We walked past the beach volleyball nets where we marveled at the commitment to hair removal that this sporty pastime requires, and past tiny beach cottages, and dogs, and more people sitting on stoops and sipping coffee. We said hello to everyone we passed and quietly pretended that that house on the corner whose backyard was mostly beach was the one that we lived in. As the sun got higher and we were forced to strip down to undershirts and yearn for a bit of shade, we happened upon Stephanie's Bakery.
I giddily narrowed the staggering selection of vegan baked goods down to 5 slices of strudel: cherry/cheese, prune/poppy seed, mushroom, spinach and cheese, and apricot, and two cookies: peanut butter and chocolate mint to take back to the hotel with us for some unforeseeable future in which we were hungry again.
I love this bakery. I was skeptical of the strudel concept before, but I was wrong to doubt. This is genius. You can put anything in a strudel. If,however, you're just not in the mood for a generous slice of flaky pastry enrobing any number of thoughtfully chosen fillings, well then why not a cookie?
If the local vegetarian grocery store is not reason enough to move to Ocean Beach, then surely Stephanie's peanut butter cookie is. It's big and doughy and chewy, and the very cookie that I have been craving for months. After we got home on Monday, upon discovering that we were out of cookie, I actually found myself, for a moment, thinking about the week ahead, calculating when Desmond and I could find a few hours to drive down for cookies.
This is one quality establishment, oh and there's a cute duplex for rent next door. I call dibs.
