saturday lunch: a tale of "we got up and left".

i have been coming around as far as my opinion of philly goes.  the displacement has dissipated and i've sunk my teeth into my surroundings (at least, when i am there on the weekends).  much of my pleasure has come from the food in philly.  i mean, holy crap, every place we have gone to eat has been more than just good - more like OMAZING!  for real, i have thoroughly enjoyed every restaurant we've been to.

that's why saturday was such an anomaly.  i had this whole plan for the day . . it turned from "yay!" to "hmm, disappointing" to "what? weird" to "SERIOUSLY?" to "OMG NOOOOO" and finally to . . well . . "FINALLY!"  here is a map of our saturday footpath:

we left home at 12:30 to walk to Reading Terminal Market, a completely awesome place with all sorts of foodstuffs all over the place, but really only one vegetarian place.  we arrived at point B, totally my mistake because i thought the market was at 10th and Arch, so we overshot it by 2 blocks. we walked back to C, only to find that the vegetarian spot was CLOSED. just on saturdays. which makes a lot of sense. we tried one more place inside, a diner, that had no vegetarian options aside from the grilled cheese or a vegetable quesadilla. more like a vegetable questionable-adilla (ha?). we got up and left.

jesse had heard that D, a place down the street called Smokin' Betty's, had a good veggie burger, so we headed there and sat down. the vibe was weird and they were only offering the brunch menu - we looked at each other and said "what? weird." we got up and left.

we decided to head to E (right back where we kind of started at point B), as many people had recommended Banana Leaf to us. sat down and ordered a Malaysian iced tea and looked at the menu which was huge, but everything that was supposed to be vegetarian had shrimp or was in a chicken broth or was fried and i was like "SERIOUSLY?" i left $3 on the table and . . we got up and left.

it was kind of getting funny. but we were also VERY hungry, as it was about 2 or 2:30 and the string of failures was stacking up. jesse navigated us to F, Tampopo, a japanese place he'd been to that had awesome bento boxes and was open on the weekends. we get there . . and . . they are closed for renovations. OMG NOOOO.

i was having trouble keeping it together, but i dragged my feet around the block to G, Aqua. it was open. it was pretty. they had tofu. and finally, at 3 pm, we got lunch. i almost wept with relief.

we rounded out our trek with a trip to get a really crappy pedicure (H), some really good fro-yo (I), and a cute new dress (J). then went home.

total distance covered: 4.2 miles. take THAT, sidewalks of philadelphia.