driving up north sucks

took a long and lonely drive up north (party of one! a certain somebody would say) this past weekend to look for housing. it's slowly starting to hit me that i'm going to be moving and starting school in a few months, which seem both short and far away at the same time. on the suggestion of my sister's friend (haha), we checked out redrum burger in davis after visiting a few apartments. The place used to be called murder burger, but after a change of hands, the new management held a contest to pick a new name, and the people wanted redrum.

the menu. they also had a huge italian soda/milkshake menu, which i should have tried...next time i guess.

zoom sampler which gave you onions, zucchini, and mushrooms. you think you know deep fried? you don't know a g*dda ** thing about deep fried till you see and try how this place does it. redrumin your heart is what they'll do. the poor veggies were practically donuts. this was the thickest batter i've ever seen, and it was way too heavy for me. after one ring, i was done, and proceeded to eat the rest by peeling off the batter. but if you're into that sort of thing (this is america ain't it?), i'm sure you'd enjoy it.

i shared a regular 1/4 cheeseburger and an ostrich burger. let me start off with the burger first: the patty was good, but I think 1/4 lb was too small to really appreciate the taste. what i really liked though was the soft sesame bun. the ostrich burger on the other hand wasn't very good. i was surprised to find out it was red meat(although if you think about it, it's built like a raptor), but it was overcooked, making it a bit chewy. i'm not really sure how to describe the taste because it was something completely new for me. overall, i didn't really like it much, but i'd be willing to give it another try sometime.

finding housing was a success and after a few hours of impulse shopping at the vaca outlets, we headed back to Berkeley to go to Zachary's, a Chicago style deep dish pizza joint, for dinner. I wrote about Zachary's a few months back, but it was a half baked pizza my sister brought down. This time I was here for the real thing. It takes about 30-40 minutes for your pizza to come out, so I enjoyed a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale while waiting. It had been a while since I'd had this, and it's a pretty smooth and enjoyable beer.

more waiting as i looked at the fan art

they had up on the walls.

You can get different toppings for each half of pizza so we opted for the spinach and mushroom on one side and sun dried tomato and basil on the other. The pizza is a little different (I've never been to Chicago nor had their pizza, so I don't know if this normal protocol) but it goes dough, cheese, toppings, then tomatoes, so a sort of upside down pizza if you will. The crust is more thin (but not too thin) and crisp rather than fat and chewy.

After much eager anticipation, our server came out with the pizza, asked which half we wanted first, and expertly cut us off a piece of that pie. I don't know if I had hyped it up too much in my mind over time or I needed meat in the pizza, but it wasn't as good as I remembered it to be. I couldn't really tell the difference between the two pizzas haha (although my sister could). BUT that's not to say that it wasn't any good. I ate three slices, and they were pretty fatty too, boasted the prideful annoying child.