My faves were Si's for burgers, and I continued going there after they moved to Ashby and Telegraph, behind the gas station, Oscar's for cheese dogs, Larry Blake's for late night Cinemascope sandwich eating contests (I always won), LaVal's on Northside for pizza (except the year I had a girlfriend who liked their pizza, but usually made me drive to SF for pizza at Johnny Romano's, which she liked better). I remember Wilkinson's for breakfast, not with fondness, when my Japanese lab partner failed to get up early and make fried rice for us after one of our weekly all-nighters writing lab reports. He always fell asleep by 10PM, so we finished the reports without him, but in exchange for that, he was supposed to get up at 6 and make breakfast for us. When he didn't, it was Wilkinson's. Years later, when I was on the UC staff doing research at the Richmond Field Station, a fellow worker and I used to take off for lunch, driving to Telegraph to look at the nubiles there, and have lunch at Tijuana Taco, three tacos and large Coke for a buck. One day we got stuck in there during the riots at People's Park. When the tear gas started flying, the employees locked the doors, and filled the cracks with towels, but some of the gas still got in. It was a 3 hour lunch, during which we had a few more tacos and Cokes, and we really got chewed out by the bosses when we got back to work in Richmond. They thought we had been protesting, but we were just eating, but with tears.
All of these fine eateries are perhaps one reason that ten years later, in my first blood test ever, my cholesterol was 450. Now I eat like a rabbit, and I ain't happy.
