Farewell Tonic and Monkeying Around

The other day we received 2 emails. The first was called “Welcome to Yunkers Pub.” At first thought we just wondered where on Main St this new bar would be….until skipping to the next email “Tonic’s last weekend”. Yes, the bar who’s co-ed bathroom provided Matt with the perfect opportunity to throw out a pickup line like “want to go in front of me?” is no longer. Seems pretty fitting that we left Manayunk at the same time as Tonic.

As they always say, as one door closes another one opens, and in this case, we’ve been opening many doors…particularly ones that lead to lots of good food, because we’re still eating out every night. We’ll end up throwing in some restaurant reviews in these blogs, but since we’ve already tried so many we’ll just report on our first favorite find for now: Ciro’s pizza . Right across the street from out apartment, it became an instant favorite when we grabbed a few slices for lunch our first day here. One bite in, and we knew San Diego had Philly beat in the pizza department….definitely NY style. We’ve since made a number of returns, with one of our favorites being the veggie-boli. And after years of having to consciously think before ordering, Franny can now return to her natural tendency to order a “sub” or “hero” instead of a “hoagie”.

Our 3 day weekend was jam packed. We kicked it off with a building happy hour Thursday night at Stingaree where we met a bunch of other transplanted East Coasters. Friday, we picked up some office furniture for Matt so that he is no longer laying on an air mattress all day. We’re counting down the days until the rest of our stuff arrives.

Then we took the 20 minute walk down to Little Italy for dinner - it reminded us of our honeymoon, walking a ways to get some good food, only at least this walk was flat and not up and down a steep mountain. We’ll do a restaurant review of Trattoria Fantastica soon, but for now we’ll say it is appropriately named.

Saturday we drove over the bridge to Coronado for our first beach action. It’s gorgeous and the most amazing beach weather. Everyone here keeps apologizing to us for the “crappy” June gloom season, but seriously if it was like this year round I don’t think we’d ever realize this was “not the best” weather.


Sat night we had some Tapas before Allie and Greg met up with us for some drinks, and then they became our first over-night guests by literally camping out on our floor. Greg enjoyed some people watching from our large windows, we’re pretty sure he could sit there all day completely entertained.

Sunday morning we got some brunch with some of Allie and Greg’s friends, and were entertained by stories of older women playing match maker at Hotel Del Coronado. Then, it was off to the zoo! Greg found out he gets free admission to the zoo in exchange for his service to the country – we all agreed the least they can do for guys/girls who put their lives on the line is let them see some silver back gorillas at no charge. Zoo picture - they told us to pretend there were spiders in our hands, and if we bought this at the stand they superimposed the spiders, but it's just as funny without them.



All the rest of the pics from Little Italy, Coronado, and the Zoo are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio/Week2LittleItalyCoronadoAndTheZoo#

One other fun story of note – there’s a frozen yogurt place out here called Yogotango , about 2 blocks from us. They give you the yogurt, weigh it, then you add your toppings. If you guess the exact weight after adding your toppings, it’s free. Sure enough, on our first venture there, Matt won his fro-yo…or in this case, free-yo. Of course, the fact that Franny went first served as a litmus test, but still impressive.

Next time we blog we hope to be doing it from our couch! Tastes of Gaslamp is coming up this weekend as well, so yes – there will be a lot more blogging about food in the near future.

Until then, some birthday shout-outs are in order: Happy Birthday to Big Phil and cousin Kim – hope you both had great days. Here's a little something we got one of the monkey's at the zoo to do in your honor: