Good taste

CECILIA PHILLIPS, Check, Please! Bay Area

WORK • Wednesday Routine

CECILIA PHILLIPS • coordinating producer / reporter • Check, Please! Bay Area
Neighborhood you live in: Lake Merritt, Oakland

It’s Wednesday morning. What’s the scene at your workplace? 
Wednesday is a wildcard day for me. I’ll be either at my desk at home overlooking Lake Merritt, or at my desk in the Mission in KQED’s new headquarters overlooking a Starbucks (still nice to be by a window), or out in the field filming at a brick-and-mortar restaurant for the 20th season of our television show, Check, Please! Bay Area. It’s also the day we film Cecilia Tries It, my segment in the show which takes the audience off the beaten path to find culinary spots outdoors. I’ll also work on a food game show I created called Chew on This, and a series I host on KQED’s website called Beyond the Menu.

What’s on the agenda for today? 
Today, I’m heading to film my segment at the Fork’n Good Food Festival in Santa Rosa. I’ll walk around to peek into each of the 40-plus food tents, and will stop to talk to a woman who sells Mexican-style sushi at Xies Sushi Rolls, where I’ll try her fried nori roll with flavors of Sinaloa inside.

How about a little leisure or culture?
During the non-rainy season, I do my best to spend every free moment I can lounging by Lake Merritt. The scenes never get old. When I’m not sitting on a blanket by the Big Tree (that’s its official name on Google) I’m looking to see when the new Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts auditorium will be completed, I’m checking out the vendors who pop-up near the lake, or I’m stopping to have my favorite cuisine in the world at Coach Sushi.

What was your last great vacation?
I saved a bunch of pennies and headed to Germany for a two-week vacation a while back. I chose it randomly and decided that it’d be my mission to find the best pretzel I could throughout the country. I had no less than a pretzel a day over the two weeks, traveling from city to city, and can’t say that I definitively found it. What I did do was fall in love with was Baden-Baden, a very scenic spa town near the Black Forest. The spot to visit there is the Caracalla Spa Thermal Baths, a modern, gorgeous water world of relaxation with every spa experience and treatment you can imagine.