Even the Airport Food Is Better

Tomokazu - 2 stars
SFO, United concourse

Fung Lum - 1 star
SFO, United concourse

If you read this blog, you may already realize that I love California, or at least the part of it around San Francisco. The weather is like paradise, the food is unmatched, the flowers smell better in the night air, and even the airport food is better. The United section of Terminal 3 has a food court that has five restaurants that are better than anything you can find in most restaurants, all of which are branches of small local chains that first established themselves in the real world (not in airports). The Mexican omelet at Andalé is my favorite airport breakfast in the world, Boudin has better fresh sandwiches than you can find most places, and I have a weakness for the pasta at Firewood. When I landed on Tuesday night I was actually looking forward to dinner in the airport (there would be no good choices in or around my discount hotel), and I got a bowl of veggie udon at Tomokazu, where they also have fresh sushi and good wakame, the green seaweed salad with sesame oil you find in Japanese restaurants. The udon was more Californian than authentic, filled with broccoli, green beans, red peppers, mushrooms, seaweed, zucchini, and very thick, almost square, chewy noodles, but all the fresh vegetables are good for you and the broth was good. On the way out on Friday I had lunch at Fung Lum, which has not only the usual airport-Chinese selection, but also various kinds of dim sum. The spring rolls were mediocre, more roll than filling, but the sautéed vegetables were fresher than usual, and the noodles were not the usual slightly sickening greasy mass you see in most airports. (Travel karma note: On the flight from Dulles to SFO I gave up an aisle seat for a middle seat - the middle of five seats in the central section of a 777 - so that a husband and wife could sit together. On the return flight I got an upgrade - which virtually never happens, now that I'm only Premier Executive and not 1K.)

I was visiting the office for our quarterly company meeting and management team meetings, which comprised an afternoon and a morning of debating a long list of topics with my eleven colleagues, five of whom I have been working with for over five years. The meetings themselves can be challenging: there are too many people who want to talk at once, too many good ideas we won't have time to implement, too few concrete action items (as we say in the business world). But they remind me how lucky I am to work with people who are so smart, so rational, so able to analyze problems and break them into their key issues. I used to work at McKinsey, probably one of the two most prestigious places to work in the business world (after Goldman Sachs), and the discussions there were clichéd, abstract, and just plain slow by comparison.

In the middle of the festival of meetings, we were supposed to go out to dinner at a nice restaurant, but we canceled that and ordered pizza in instead. The original plan was to eat the pizza in the Wii room and play video games, but that part got lost somewhere. We sat around a table in a corner conference room as the sun set and ate pizza (Amici's in San Mateo, 2 stars) and talked about our company and how we could make it an even more unique and special place. It was work, but it also felt like a comfortable dinner party with some of my best friends.