Maker Faire and Manresa
Trip Start
Mar 02, 2011
1
56
192
Trip End
Oct 14, 2011
Where I stayed
Sunnyvale, California
Sunday, May 22, 2011
We went to the Maker Faire again today. We were delayed a bit since we had to check out of our hotel. Bill will be going home today and I'll be heading south.
We saw most of the booths yesterday so we concentrated more on the presentations today. They saved two of their biggest draws until today. Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, gave a talk starting at 11. Unfortunately, we missed the first half of it. Next was Adam Savage of Mythbusters, who has been coming to Maker Faire for several years.
One talk I was interested in seeing was The Making of Modernist Cuisine, a recently published cookbook. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is by Nathan Myhrvold and a team of writers, cooks and photographers, including the two presenters. It's a six-volume, 2,400-page cookbook to end all cookbooks. The talk was interesting and also included a sample of and "ice cream" made with no cream.
When the Faire was over I dropped Bill off at the airport and then headed for Manresa in Los Gatos where I had a dinner reservation. In 2010 Manresa was number 86 on Restaurant Magazine's World's Best Restaurants list. It is one of three restaurants in the San Francisco area, along with Coi and Cyrus, both of which I visited recently, with a Michelin two-star rating.
Manresa has done some remodeling recently. While the dining rooms are nice, they don't have any views. Manresa offers five- and eight-course tasting menus. Because each menu is custom designed after discussions with the customer, getting a vegetarian tasting menu is not a problem. I got an eight-course vegetarian tasting menu.
The service was good but a little too stiff and formal for my tastes. The food was very good although there was no single course that was really exceptional.
After dinner I headed for Sunnyvale and got a room for the night.
