🚀 go-pugleaf

Wow!  Unusual query and a lot of helpful replies.

I only know well parts of CA from about Carmel north, but even in the SF Bay
Area alone there are something like 14,000 restaurants (down slightly from a
couple years ago).  And I don't know I-5 well, I recall it as boring.

Highly unboring when I last sampled it (in 2002), if you like wine and could
stop for dinner (you'd then be tempted to stay overnight and continue later)
was the still-exceptional wine list at The Sardine Factory in Monterey,
unlikely name, good restaurant, the wine inventory a phenomenon, built up
painstakingly by a fanatic and his successor, Andrea (Immer?, now
independent), and faring well as lately as 2002.  (Especially if you liked
certain good wines not especially fashionable in the US and indeed
denigrated by one Mr. RP, a wine critic.)  Not far from the Asilomar beach
(where locals can be a little testy in the water at crowded times.)  (DON'T
drink and surf.)

Slightly south of there on Hwy 1 is Carmel with a concentrated gamut of very
genuine small restaurants in its fashionable little downtown, The Grill? (On
Ocean Ave) has pleased many for lunch, including vegetarians.  Bunch of
other places scattered around there, many of them share owners.

But all this is coastal, well off Hwy 5 of course.  By this point Hwy 1 on
the coast has become reasonably brisk northbound, special golf weekends
excepted, and is one of the more direct routes to SF even if you remain on
it; you might shave some time (and miss some sights) by cutting inland at 17
or 156 and continuing up 280 or 101.

You really need several weeks though, even to begin.

Good luck!      -- Max


"Simon Belmont" <123@abc.xyz> wrote in message
news:3METb.614$JA5.75@newssvr23.news.prodigy.com...
> This weekend I'll be making a road trip along Hwy 5
> from L.A to San Francisco. I would like to hear any
> advice on good eateries between them that I can try.