Bay Area Baseball Grub

This weekend is inter-league play in baseball, which brings the Bay Bridge series to town with the San Francisco Giants hosting its bay rivals the Oakland A's at AT&T Park. I thought it'll be a good time to post about the new food items I found so far at the two home ballparks.

I start at AT&T Park, home of the 2010 World Series Champions!! One of the new items talked about is this tri-tip sandwich next to the Orlando hut. The sandwiches are freshly carved and served up with the additional sides of sweet potato fries. But because I'm not a big red meat eater, I actually didn't try this.

I found this at the Tres Mexican Kitchen, which sells a Mexican-style bacon wrapped hot dog. (Their hut is on the field level promenade near third base.) This is what's known as the torta ahogada ($8), which is shredded chicken in a bun lathered in sauce. It was served up with chips and a couple of different hot sauces. I placed some slices of jalapeno's on top too, and it was like eating chicken nachos, but more messy.

Over at the Oakland Coliseum, now with the unfortunate name of Overstock.com Coliseum, there weren't that many new items. But one of the stands that sell the straight-forward hot dogs and ballpark fare also had two new sandwiches that looked interesting. The first one is called the Mamacita ($9), and it's shredded pork with jack cheese and pico de gallo, pickled jalapenos, and shredded lettuce in a ciabatta roll. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't a fan of the ciabatta roll; seemed stale. The sandwich is served with potato chips.

The other sandwich (also $9) was the Grand Slam, and that's a bacon and jalapeno meatloaf sandwich with cheddar cheese, fried onions, and sweet and sour sauce on a brioche bun. Now, on paper it sounded really gourmet, but what was served up looked really sad. The meatloaf itself just had bits of bacon and jalapeno but was on the cold side and the meat tasted of a really poor quality. The sauce wasn't that exciting and the brioche bun was weird. The only interesting thing on the sandwich was the thinly fried onion bits that added a nice crunch to what otherwise a poorly named sandwich because this was no grand slam, not even a home run.

Still, I realize ballparks aren't necessarily the place to find gourmet food, especially healthy gourmet food. It doesn't seem like there's a lot new at both ballparks (although I heard there's a new BBQ stand under the bleachers at the Giants' ballpark, so I have to hunt that down) so really it's just enjoying the scene and the players. As I'm writing this post, the Giants are about to sweep the A's in the Bay Bridge series, so I have to give the edge to the Giants as the most enjoyable ballpark experience in the Bay.