I haven't been really keeping up. Two nights ago we went to Caribou Coffee. I think I like their coffee better that Starbucks. And of course I like it infinitely more than Kiva Han. People think they are being subversive and practicing some sort of guerilla consumerism by choosing Kiva Han over Starbucks. I think they are just choosing to have bad coffee. Apologies to those non-Pittsburghers. Kiva Han is the local scourge of Oakland. At any rate, I didn't even have coffee at Caribou. I had their tea. Their tea is much better that Starbucks tea or Kiva Han. I'm not sure if I think it's better than the tea at Barnes and Noble. However the common thread amongst the tea at both places is that it's bagged loose tea, not tea bags of tea crumbs, which is more typical.

After tea and books, we went to Tesaro's for dinner. Tesaro has extremely good burgers. The key to their burgers is their onsite butchering. There was a butcher shop in Bloomfield where they got their meat, but when the butcher closed shop they couldn't find anything comparable. So they decided to build their own butchering facilities and hired one of the former employees of the butcher shop to come in part time. He's employed full time as a firefighter.

So usually you can get their rare burger rare, but that night it was overcooked. We ordered it with "country fries" which I usually interpret as potato wedges. However, at Tesaro's it's basically cubed fried potato, which can sometimes be called "country hashbrowns." It really doesn't matter though. The burger is the only important thing on that plate. We split a large chef's salad. I wouldn't recommend it. It was iceberg lettuce with large irregularly cut slabs of turkey meat and ham. They took stacks of sliced marble and mozzerella cutting them into strips. However the the slices never separated. It was one of the more puzzling things I've seen.
We weren't really disappointed by the meal. Everything tasted good, minus the weird cheese. I didn't finish the cheese.