Well, okay, so this may not be so helpful to residents of The City, but considering how many people we've run into from home and folks around these parts who've spent time in San Fran, consider this an appraisal of one of the best truck stops on the artsy-fartsy superhighway. We mean, if you're stranded somewhere in America's urban archipelago away from home, you'd be hard pressed to find a better island than Austin, though the surrounding sea is deep and wide, to say the least.

Yesterday, realizing that we had to get our column up and didn't have any San Francisco joints on hand to post on, we took a recommendation from our host and hit up "Las Manitas" on the east side of Congress street between second and third, downtown. Trust us -- our hopes for finding something cheap along Congress was running out. High-end steakhouses and sushi joints and junky fast food were the order of the day (we will eat at Chipotle, thank you very much). So we called our friend and got the details. We were not disappointed.

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