Sunnyvale CA – Road Trip (Part I)

So my co-worker and I headed to Sunnyvale, CA last Thursday for a business thing – more on that later. I had mixed emotions about visiting Sunnyvale. You see… Ace and I lived there for a good 5 years. I was still going to college and we were both working next door to each other – me for the Gap/Old Navy and him for a grocery store that shall remain nameless. The Sunnyvale apartment held a lot of great memories for me – the biggest of all – the restaurants that we used to frequent. I chose to not drive by the old apartment or haunts, but I did hit the not-so-hoppin’ downtown for some evening shopping. Other than that, we stuck to the hotel and restaurant attached.

As we pulled into the Sheraton’s parking lot, I noticed the restaurant Faz. I had heard of it, and was excited that we could just walk to it from our hotel room.

We checked into the hotel. They upgraded us to a bigger room (nice!) and then we made our way to drop off our luggage.

The day was beautiful, we couldn’t wait to just chill out after the long drive.

The outdoor patio to our room overlooked the pool. We threw our stuff down, I did a quick Internet search on Faz, pulled up the menu, and we started planning our evening. Wish I would have packed my swimsuit.

We passed by the restaurant on our way back out to the car. We hit up Macy’s for some shopping. I had fun playing personal shopper. My co-worker Gail ended up with a really cool purse. I tried on some clothes, still amazed at the smaller sizes, but nothing screamed – “buy me!” The Macy’s kind of sucked compared to our Macy’s in Sacramento or Roseville. We kept thinking “outlet” with every department, rack, and turn.

We dumped the shopping loot off in the room and then walked to the restaurant – which had gone from dead to super busy in a matter of hours. Lots of business types like ourselves. Mostly men, but whatever, we held our own.

I pretty much went into the evening knowing that I would do my best maneuvering the menu, but wasn’t going to stress about eating something off the diet. The one thing I’ve learned this go around, you can’t always control everything… and that’s a good thing – the old me would have freaked out.

I decided that the pumpkin cheesecake needed to be tried… I’ve seen so many blog posts that have included amazing pumpkin desserts, muffins, breads, etc… so I’ve had pumpkin on the brain. My non-fat/sugar free pumpkin frozen yogurt just hasn’t been cutting it.

We started with warm pita bread and a dipping sauce that had hints of cucumber, mint, and middle eastern spices.

It was tasty, but messy… is it wrong that I was concerned that I had dripped oil on the tablecloth and that my photos would come out bad? The oil didn’t hurt my photos, the low lighting did. Oh well… the life of a food blogger.

Next up was a beet, shaved fennel, orange, goat cheese, and spinach salad with a light pomegranate vinaigrette. I loved the flavor combination and will be recreating this salad at home.

We both chose the mesquite roasted chicken kabob for our main course. Boneless breast of chicken marinated in onion and lemon juice, served with saffron basmati rice, a roasted roma tomato and grilled bok choy and red bell pepper. The smokey flavor was spot on – we really enjoyed our menu choice.

The pumpkin cheesecake did not disappoint. I never would have thought to combine the pumpkin with a strawberry sauce like you might with a classic cheesecake, but we both agreed that it worked well. We pretty much demolished the piece between the two of us. Only my second “real” dessert in the last 78 days… worth. every. sugary. sweet. bite!

Green tea did make a showing. Loved the little hot water carafes. The tea was a nice ending to a fabulous meal. Gail and could not wait to jump into our beds due to the early wake up call scheduled for the morning.

It was so nice to know that we would be attending our event and not presenting at it in the morning. We normally would be practicing our presentation, but not this night. Super low stress and a guaranteed good night of sleep.

Thank you Gail for being a fellow blogger and good sport while I snapped a million photos of our food and day.

To be continued…