Paul "Fat Pookie" W.'s Profile

$3 single scoop, $4 double, organic sustainable creamy delicious real vanilla ice cream.  Would be 5 stars if they just had seats and a few more creative flava's.

Ok whoever kicked off my first review for being hearsay, grow some friendliness you hating little biznatch. All you had to do was send me a two second message reminding me to update my review. Geez you try to help people out by telling them a Michelin rated restaurant owner is opening a new place up and you just get hate back. Makes you not want to love anymore damn. Yelp is for love you hear me you hating little biznatches (and when I say little I am referring mostly to your heart but smallness tends to bleed over to your mind and other important parts too).

Anyway, like I said in the first review that got thrown off by some small biznatch, Noboru is the same place as the Michelin rated Sakae that lost it's lease due to some other small minded (and probably other parts too) greedy lease holding building owner that threw Sakae out so they could crappify bgame with some generic shizzly place probly. Noboru has a bigger menu than Sakae did and all the additions have come at the top end, thus the price complaints in reviews. It is true that Sakae was never the cheapest place but I am sorry people you are not going to get top quality fish flown in from the Tokyo fish market for the same price as your local HAMachi.  And broadening the menu on the high end just further differentiated the best sushi in North America as far as I am concerned.

Don't skip the best Sake menu in North America either.  

And finally, if you want cheap fish don't come here. If you want the best and will not be so off put by the prices to prevent enjoyment, enjoy. The staff is amazing, between the former Sakae peeps and owner and newly added iron chef invited sushi chef that I told y'all correctly in my previously mentioned banned review was going to be amazing once he got over his shyness and by the way he turned out even better than that.

I stopped yelping for a while because I was annoyed at the hating plus Yelp's clumsy handling (I still love y'all but really can't you just warn someone and give the chance to revise before taking down the review of an old school Yelper, damn. I am the guy who gave your list peeps the flashlight off my personal keychain at the holiday party because it was dark and they needed it. Just ask me and I give, it is that easy to love), but screw y'all hater minorities with your small parts. I do what I want.

The latest and I believe greatest version of Jeannine's. Same great cake, breakfast, and espresso as the other locations, with an absolutely beautiful space and place. High ceilings, huge open windows to make it airy, and a walking avenue along one side amid this a really relaxing place to enjoy an afternon.

And did I mention the white cake! Ok all the cake is great and the carrot cake in particular deserves honorable mention for it's blend of seasoning. But the white rasberry cake is one of the most deli ious cakes I have ever had anywhere. Period.

Besides great healthy California food and cake, there is great service, and coming soon gelato, which we were generously offered free samples to. Jeanine's is easily a regular stop for us. Those darn cakes cost too much but you do at least get what you paid for here.

I dread writing this.  For so many reasons I wanted to love this place.  Good Taiwanese food walking distance from my house!  A hole in the wall local place!  Friendly service from sweet waitresses!  A traditional sounding menu complete with stinky tofu of course!

But the food was not that great really.  Ken K is right on this place.  I wish it weren't so.

We ordered stinky tofu which I did not think the texture was right on, to the point where it affected the flavor.  It had just soaked up too much oil and didn't get that crisp exterior.  We also got zha jia mien which I thought lacked the crisp fresh cucumber flavor in the balance, but the noodles were tasty.  The chili oil wonton was waaaaay too salty.  Almost couldn't eat them.  Too bad cuz the wonton's were pretty decent.  The Xiao Long Bao were solid I thought.

On the upside, I was the only white face in the place, which is usually a good sign for authenticity :-)  And I am almost afraid to go back to the servers that were soooooooo sweet for fear they hate me for reading this review.  Oh I hope they don't read it!  But I can not tell a lie, and I was underwhelmed.

Sorry, I think we make better cupcakes at home, and we are amateurs.  I thought these were too sweet, too much frosting, too little flavor, and too dry.  Yet another cake/cupcake place using frosting too mask their dry cakes and make them seem more moist (cake places also use pudding layers to the same ends in my experience).

The rundown:
- Lemon cupcake: the cake really did not have much flavor to me.  The frosting was strongly lemon.  Not terrible as carried by the frosting.  I wish the cake were more moist and why not throw in some poppy seeds?  2.5 stars.
- Carrot cupcake: nice flavor in this one.  Still a bit dry and the frosting a bit overbearing.  Nuts were a nice touch that set them apart a bit.  I would have given these suckers four stars maybe.
- Red velvet: soooo disappointing.  Especially after the raves about it.  Oh I wish I could tell you where to go to get the same delicious red velvet you can find in the South.  This one tasted like a somewhat dry chocolate cake with red food coloring added and too much too sweet frosting to me.  The ones I like taste like a nice delicate blend of cocoa and buttermilk on the cake side, with a thin layer of tangy cream cheese frosting.  The cake and frosting are nearly equally moist if you can believe that. 2 stars for Sprinkles.
- chocolate with vanilla frosting: Not bad really.  Chocolate is not my fave, but this one was a bit dry but reasonably solid flavor.  3 stars.

I would rather buy the cupcakes than make them from a work point of view, and from a how many cupcakes do you really want to consume point of view, but I would make them at home with the wifey before I bought them from here probably.  Of course, if someone gives me some Sprinkles, I will eat them, so it's not like they just suckle or anything!

The Great: Cocktails, service, view.

The Good: Food, especially taking our great server Eva's advice and getting the adobo chicken.  Prices are pretty decent for food especially considering the setting and service.

The ugly: The cocktails, while tasty, are not cheap.  They are not crazy insane but not cheap.  

George's was open on Christmas day, which was huge for hungry travelers.  Our server was personable, fin, and had great advice both for ordering food as well as being a tourist.  She also knew a little something about the birds and aquatic life which was visible from the table, bonus points!

MSDS does all kinds of design and they do a great job with all of it, but I want to talk about what I have done most with them.  I work in online marketing, so I have some high standards when I work with designers, and MSDS exceeds them pretty regularly.  Matthew and his team not only will design a great site for you, but they will actually make you think about your own business better than you did before.  

From concept development, to graphic design, to html, css, and javascript production MSDS has been outstanding.  They do more than these things, but this is what I needed from them.

My company, http://coupons.com, also needed a new logo and I think they produced a logo that can stand out even against a backdrop of the nation's best known brands that we work with.  Oh, don't look at our site today to judge them necessarily, we are working on future stuff.  Way way into the future!!! hahahaha

All their pricing has been better than other high caliber design shops which I think might be capable of producing similarly high quality work across the broad scope of branding, design, and production which they can handle.

Finally, I can't do a review of MSDS without some commentary about its founder and namesake, Matthew Schwartz.  Great ideas flow continuously from the fire-hose that is Matthew's mind (and mouth too maybe, hahaha :-).   He is intelligent, insightful, and an all around pleasure to work with.  The entire staff of the office is a pleasure to work with actually, but you know, you got to say something about the dude whose name is part of the company's, and prolific intelligent ideas would be my three word overview of him.

I have really enjoyed working with them, and I would recommend them in a heartbeat to anyone looking for high quality branding, design, or production work.  I certainly hope that I will get the opportunity to work with them again soon.

I used to come to San Diego for work a couple months a year, and this was my favorite place to stay.  The location is great, right in the heart of Pacific Beach.  The rooms are comfy and affordable enough that I could stay here on my company's budget without getting terrible complaints from our accounting department.  And if I got lucky and got an ocean facing room, I could open the sliding glass door and listen to the surf all night while I slept.

Four stars for location and value, not restaurants and a spa.  Stay here if you want to enjoy Pacific Beach without paying $300 a night.  The rooms are comfortable, and the surroundings are great.

Good frickin' chicken indeed.  This aptly named middle eastern place has delicious rotisserie and flame roasted marinated chickens.  You can buy a half or a whole chicken.  We get the whole chicken usually and share it.  For an extra $5 you can get a tasty salad and one side.  We usually get the babaganooj.  It all comes with bread and we mix it all up and eat it together.  Yum.  Then a rice pudding for desert (it's delicious).  All that plus a draft beer and fresh made carrot juice for $30.  One of my favorite lunches after tennis.

Pretty darn good wine bar. Understated quiet place you can go to sip wine and even have a conversation at the same time. $28 for a tasting flight that included all 6 red wines which they served. I think it was $22 for 4 wines. These are maybe not full 150ml pours, but they are solid. They are much more than the tiny metered tasting that you get in Napa, leaving you wanting a little more if you are just going to sit back, relax and enjoy wine. These are large enough that you can get a charcuterie plate and test a few different ones with the various meats to decide which one you like best with each kind of meat, which goes best with the fig jelly and fresh warm bread, etc. It's really pleasant. My wife and i shared a tasting flight between two people and these were adequate pours for two.

There are some complaints about prices on here, and I don't think theirs are that bad at all, especially for good wine. Glasses were $8 for most red wines and ran up to $10 for the most expensive one. Bottles were sale price + $9 if you want to drink them in the store. Decide for yourself if that is expensive. Considering that all the wine they serve is Robert Parker 90+ points, I don't think this is bad at all. Very reasonable actually.

Anyway, we went on a Saturday night, and they had Jazz playing. It was a piano, bass and a drum, and not at all overwhelming. You could carry on a conversation right through it, but it was certainly enjoyable. The charcuterie plate btw was yummy. The cheese plate, mozzarella, fresh made flat bread, and olives all sounded worth trying too, and that is just what I remember. That is probably half the menu though. Don't come here for dinner, come as an appetizer, or after an early light meal perhaps (lobster shack?) and enjoy the foods with the wine as intended.

If I could make two wishes for improvement, I want more than 6 reds available for tasting at a time, and I want more complete wine descriptions on their menu. They have nice tasting notes posted at the store next to the wine, I just wish they would assemble them into a wine menu. The wine menu also only lists the six wines they are serving by the glass, and I would like to be able to flip through the full catalog of what is in the store, since I could buy a bottle and drink it there. And it is hard to see all the wines on the racks when the stores is full of wine sippers on a Saturday night. Even if only on the weekend there were more than six, that would be ok. Anyway, those are the only two things between Savvy and five stars for me.  But that said, I look forward to going back to Savvy cellars and tasting again.

PS: they have some super cool sounding classes, and they even give you half the price off if you are a member of their very reasonable priced wine club.  They also have ladies night and happy hour specials, and a themed tasting every Sunday with a different cool theme.  Very very cool that they have so much passion for sharing good and affordable wine and so many different ways to reach out and share that passion with consumers!