After the bug arrives, I'm fully expecting a dining-out lockdown for awhile. We'll be tired, anxious, and way more comfortable staying at home and noshing on take-out or leftovers than juggling a new baby and a menu. I know others will say that it's the best time to go out, but for me personally? Not so much.

We're not major restaurant rovers anyway, so it's not a huge sacrifice. However, I have been musing over a list of "last ditch dines" for us. Some are brand new and potential favorites-to-be, others are old friends.

Realistically, I don't know how many we'll get to but it's always good to have goals, especially ones as tasty as these, so here you go, 12 Bay Area restaurants we want to hit before our late-June due date.

1. Contigo: Friend and fellow food blogger Brett Emerson opened his anxiously-anticipated Spanish/Catalan restaurant a few months ago. Unfortunately, while the press and other friends have already been lucky enough to partake and swoon over his pork belly bocadillo and homemade potato chips, I haven't made it to the table.

2. Ubuntu: I was already jonesing to try out the Napa restaurant that celebrates the purest flavors of vegetables, but after meeting pastry chef Deanie at a mutual friends' wedding, I was even more excited to make reservations. Among everything else on their menu, the cast-iron cauliflower and anything they think to do with artichokes beckons.

3. Duarte's Tavern: Speaking of artichokes, I've heard that Duarte's is the aritchoke lover's idea of heaven. I've already sampled their ollalieberry pie (purchased from The Milk Pail) and was seduced by a berry I had never tasted before in my life, so things can only go up with a visit to Pescadero and a calamari steak sandwich. Plus, this artichoke lover has to get to heaven somehow. Bonus: "Pescadero" never fails to make me think of Pinky Tuscadero and Happy Days.

4. Lavanda (old favorite): Well, technically we've only been here once for lunch and it was a few years ago, but we were really impressed by the menu. It's pricey, so it would normally be on our "special occasion" list, but I'm keeping it on this pre-baby list. Since we last visited, they've made a bigger deal about their organic and local provisions, and I'm looking forward to trying: grilled skirt steak with Salinas asparagus and spring garlic butter, stuffed risotto fritters, and potato gnocchi with black chanterelles, Hen of the Wood mushrooms, and nepitella.

5. Bar Jules (old favorite): Hands-down, Bar Jules is my favorite lunch spot in San Francisco. The atmosphere is so sunny and chill, it's the perfect place to meet girlfriends for a good, nourishing gabfest. However, their dinners are nothing to sneeze at, either. I especially love their flank steak and la quercia prosciutto with long cooked favas on toast and pecorino sardo.

6. Delfina (old favorite): Since my mother-in-law will be in town, we already have reservations for Mother's Day here, so I am this close to my stomach checking off Delfina's homemade pasta and grilled calamari with impossibly tiny warm beans.

7. SPQR (old favorite): Last time I was here, I was still in the nauseous stage of my pregnancy and couldn't enjoy my fried Brussels sprouts, cacio e pepe, and fried chicken to the fullest. That's a travesty that MUST be corrected! Also, a new travesty that must be avoided: not tasting their griddled Heritage pork spareribs with rosemary and fennel. I do think "griddled" is one of the most sumptuous words in the English language.

8. Flea Street Cafe: Sadly, Jesse Ziff Cool's other Menlo Park establishment -- JZ Cool Eatery -- recently closed in order to open a new place in East Menlo Park, but luckily Cool Cafe at the Stanford Museum and Flea Street Cafe are both still open. I've done Cool Cafe quite a few times and love their sandwiches, but I'm hankering to do a local, seasonal sit-down dinner at Flea Street very soon.

9. Martin's West Pub: It's a new upscale pub from Michael Dotson and it's coming to Redwood City in May. With items on the menu like Scotch Eggs, peat-smoked fries, and nettle-crowdie ravioli with brown butter consommé, morels, and spring onions, things are definitely looking up in suburbia. Oh, and the fact that they also have my favorite pub grub ever in the form of Ploughman's lunch means they were put on this earth for the sole purpose of feeding me.

10. Humphrey Slocombe: I've been scarfing down my pregnancy pounds in the form of all sorts of ice cream -- Haagen-Dazs Five, Foster's Freeze dipped cones, Blizzards -- so I think it's only fair I give this new place a whirl. If not just to roll my tongue over their oft-Tweeted bourbon-cornflake flavor, then to give major pocket props to fellow Are You Being Served? fans.

11. Piccino (old favorite): My husband has been an angel to scoot up to Piccino from the Peninsula whenever I've had a craving for their pizza, and when we met Mr. and Mrs. Piccino at a friend's dinner party, we made no secret of what fanatics we are for their pizzas. They told me I definitely had come up and eat with them when I was close to delivery. Apparently, their constantly changing pizzas have been known to send women into labor.

12. Pasta Moon (old favorite): Every time we go, I swear I'm going to try something new, and every time we go I don't try something new. I simply cannot resist their butternut squash and mascarpone ravioli with brown butter sage and Amaretti. However, because my husband is more enterprising, I know that their pizzas are awesome, their seasonal fritto misto is outstanding (especially when they include thin slices of Meyer lemons), and their Wild Mushroom Ragú with polenta, Marsala, and Parmigiano-Reggiano is totally bathable.

"The chestnut soup was good, but not Bar Jules good," a friend told me the other day. She was referring to a delicious chestnut and farro soup that we'd eaten at Bar Jules a couple of months back.

In the time since Bar Jules opened in December, it has quickly become a place that I recommend to friends -- especially for its lovely weekend brunches. Chef Jessica Bonecutter is known around San Francisco, having chefed at Hog Island Oyster Bar and Zuni Cafe.

Bar Jules has a stated commitment to sustainable practices and is buying most of their ingredients from local farmers and sustainable sources.

Entering Bar Jules, you will find several large chalkboards with the day's menu instead of paper menus. The small menu changes on a daily basis and is dependent on seasonal availability. As Sam of Becks and Posh stated, "because of the limited options, this is not the place to take a fussy eater."

If you're not fussy, however, delights will abound. I seriously mourned the day that Desiree, my favorite breakfast location in the Presidio, closed a couple of years ago -- mostly because of their perfectly cooked eggs. The brunch that I had at Bar Jules came close to Desiree's taste -- scrambled eggs with sorrel and parmesan were on the menu the morning I went. While those were delicious, the hit of the table was poached eggs with lamb.

Last week, I returned to Bar Jules for lunch. I loved the "mussels on the grill with paprika, garlic & lemon" ($12). The mussels had a deep roasted flavor. I requested bread to dip into my mussel juices, and was given a perfectly grilled toast which went perfectly with the dish.

Even the drinks at Bar Jules are special. Beer and wine are available, along with a lovely rosebud tea, Blue Bottle Coffee and seasonal juices -- last week I had a delicious pomegranate spritzer.

The Bar Jules menu changes daily, but the staff meticulously updates their web page with the most current menu and prices. Bar Jules does not take reservations.

Common Ground on Bar Jules' sustainability practices

Bar Jules
609 Hayes Street (at Laguna)
San Francisco
415-621-5482

Dinner, Tuesday - Saturday
Lunch, Wednesday - Saturday
Brunch, Sundays
Closed Mondays

I admit to being a bit of a design snob. I initially judge blogs on the way that they look or their terrible photos rather than the quality of their writing. And I often want to avoid restaurants whose websites have irritated me in one way or another. Of course, once I look further into some of those blogs I find writing I love, and once I actually go to some of those restaurants I find I enjoy them. But first impressions mean a lot.

A couple of days ago, a friend was asking me for a restaurant recommendation. Easy task, I thought. I had some restaurants in mind and just needed to check and see if they were open and send her the websites. What should have been a 5-minute email turned into a half-hour nightmare as I slogged through websites that are more intent on impressing me with movies, music, and other annoyances than on giving me direct information.

Hear this, restaurants: We are not looking to your sites for entertainment. We want to get our information, get out, and get back to watching Eli Stone. Noise of clinking glasses or a dull roar or fancy music does not make us want to go to your restaurant more, it just tips off our employers that we are making dinner plans instead of filing our TPS reports. We don't want to sit through 30 second flash movies of how happy we'll be if we go to your restaurant. We just want the facts: When are you open, what's for dinner, and how much does it cost. And I want to do that in as few clicks as possible.

Oh, and also? We are in the Bay Area -- arguably the technology capital of the world. How difficult is it to learn to code up a simple HTML page? Why are you still making us click through to PDF's of your menus or (horrors) Word documents? It's all about time for me, and opening up the pdf takes up my precious seconds.

MY FAVORITES

Some of my favorite restaurant websites are super basic, nice to look at, and tell me all I need to know.

Spork. Looking at this website makes me want to spend my hard-earned money to hire this designer to redo all other restaurant websites. It's gorgeous.

Bar Jules. The lovely Bar Jules site changes daily and tells us what's for lunch and dinner.

Slanted Door. Chock full of information, and has a handy plug-in to make an Open Table reservation.

Arizmendi Bakery. Arizmendi's pizza changes daily, and Arizmendi has a calendar for the whole month of delicious flavors.

SITES THAT MAKE ME WANT TO SCRATCH MY EYES OUT
(warning, many of these have music)

Bix. I want to send a friend directly to Bix's list of cocktails, as I had an excellent one there the other night. Oh wait ... the whole site is in FLASH so I can't send a direct link!

Market Bar. Don't. Resize. My. Browser. Ever. (And while you're at it, you might want to get spellcheck. Mediterranean is spelled with one "t".)

Spruce. Let's review how many steps I have to go through to find the Spruce dinner menu:

1) wait for flash site to load
2) click "menus"
3) click "food"
4) click "dinner"
5) change my browser to allow pop-ups for this site
6) PDF!

House. Give us prices. Seriously. Not having prices reeks of pretentiousness and is absolutely useless.

And then we have a "bandwidth exceeded" message over at 1300 Fillmore.

Fortunately for us consumers, there are ways around these horrid websites. Menu Pages, while not the prettiest site out there, lists over 4000 menus in San Francisco. And Yelp is the easiest place I've found to figure out restaurant hours.

Let's call out all the bad restaurant websites -- which would you nominate? What are your pet peeves?