Chili Cha Cha Sunflower Daimaru Sushi Malai Thai
The weather has finally taken a turn toward winter. On Saturday night there was a genuine downpour. Vida hasn’t experienced much in the way of rain—just a few “rainy day schedules” here and there during the last school year. Being from Seattle I grew up with the mantra, “a little rain won’t hurt you” and braved the wet weather in search of a warm dinner. We were driving down 16th Street after visiting with Vida’s half sister and I thought I would try and find a restaurant around there that I hadn’t been to yet. I drove by a remarkable number of pretty good restaurants, Sunflower, Malai Thai, Bangkok 16, Daimaru Sushi, none of which would I go out of my way to visit again. As 16th Street turned into a bust I tried to find parking around the corner on Market Street with a sushi restaurant in mind. I couldn’t think of one restaurant in this area that I would really be excited about. The food at Café Flore is pretty good but I can’t get over eating off of paper plates. Tin Pan was a good neighborhood restaurant for me when I actually had disposable income. Against my better judgment I once went with a friend to the glorified steam table, Bombay Restaurant. I never found parking so we kept driving.
As the weather got worse I was thinking that soup would be good and we headed over to the Lower Haight to a Pho restaurant that I had been considering. After we parked and got out of the car the smell of marijuana smoke wafted from the corner of Webster and Haight. We not only parked in a dark and sketchy part of Haight Street, but I realized that the name of the restaurant was Chili Cha Cha and started to get nervous about finding Vida anything not spicy to eat.
Luckily the place was a full service restaurant as well as Vietnamese noodle joint. I ordered Pho with chicken, lime, chili and rice noodles. It was a bit too sweet for my taste. Every bite was an exercise in subtle disappointment. I ordered Vida fried rice that she yet again would have nothing to do with. She drank a Sprite and had a couple of bites of chicken.
As Vida gets older dinner out is getting less and less unpredictable. I think she has finally out grown the need to disrobe every time she spills something. In the past few weeks she has become much calmer and easier to please. She has really become more of a dinner companion than a gnarly three year old. I don’t think every meal will go as smoothly but she has definitely changed. She amuses herself much more completely and needs me less. This is the age of imaginative play and Vida is just as likely to talk to her straw as to me.
I was reminded as we went home of another evening drive home from dinner. As we drove toward the bright lights of Castro Street, Vida exclaimed, “that’s our city!” She said it with such excitement that in the moment I was inexplicably proud of our city too. She continued saying, “we don’t hit our city . . .do we, Mom . . .we don’t bite our city” while I nodded like a moron at the nonsensical wisdom of her declaration. I think that eating dinner out with Vida has somewhat impressed upon her elements of the tacit social contract. When I say, “we’re in a restaurant” she is starting to understand that she can’t behave as if she was home. Restaurants in San Francisco are dense, numerous and give the sometimes mean streets a communal feeling that even a child can sense.
Restaurant Total: 90
Il Pollaio US Restaurant Mario's Buca Giovanni
Last week, my apartment acquired yet another layer of paint on the top of its multicolored coats of poisonous lead. The institutional green and old lady pink molding has receded even further into the past of this hundred-year-old building. My mother was here to visit and since we couldn’t stay in the apartment we decamped to the Hotel San Remo on Mason Street in North Beach.
While staying in North Beach we savored the experience of seeing the tourist’s view of San Francisco but with warm clothing. I was brought back to a visit my mother and I made to San Francisco in 1982 when I was a teenager. I fell in love with San Francisco then even though we barely made it past Union Square. It was less the scenery than the food. We had fabulous meals at the famous Ernie’s and Tadich Grill. Although Ernie’s is long gone, Tadich Grill, with its brisk yet gracious service and its “long branch” French fries and “pan fried” fish is probably my favorite San Francisco restaurant. We also visited more modern restaurant destinations. Our national awareness of food was experiencing cataclysmic changes at this time and we tried our best to keep up. We made the requisite visits to the Oakville Grocery Vivande Porte Via, and to the East Bay to visit Cocolat, Il Fornio and the source of the Holy Grail, Chez Panisse.
During that first visit to San Francisco my mother and I stayed at her favorite, relatively inexpensive, Union Square hotel, The Chancellor. The San Remo lacks its sophisticated, well-lit entrance and the dining room tucked into the corner but the location can’t be beat. The first evening we walked from the hotel to Columbus Avenue in search of a restaurant for dinner. We walked by some of the great North Beach restaurants that I have visited over the years. Buca Giovanni is owned by one of the chefs that taught a course at the forgettable California Culinary Academy. Buca Giovanni, with its cave like dining room and sparse lighting is a cliché of an Italian restaurant only in décor. Its food is satisfying and authentic, with a serious Bolognese and house-made ravioli. If the showy line of pasta and sauté cooks that Original Joe’s On Broadway sported (and probably still does even though they have changed locations) typifies the dramatic heart of North Beach Italian restaurants, Mario’s’ Bohemian Cigar Store is its soul. The numerous afternoons and evenings I have spent progressing from espresso and biscotti to focaccia and wine at its brown Formica tables have made Mario’s my ideal North Beach destination. If we were sans Vida and in the mood for fine dining, Rose Pistola would also have been at the top of my list.
We walked up to Il Pollaio and peered in the window. It was one of the busiest restaurants that we had seen while strolling up Columbus. This might have been a bad thing if we couldn’t have gotten a table quickly. Vida was in one of her “I want dinner” moods. Il Pollaio is a concept restaurant without the pretension. It had a simple menu of grilled chicken, fries, soup and salad but it was not accompanied by the psychological warfare of MacDonald’s-like bright colors that other restaurants with basic menus are so prone to abusing. The food stood on it’s own and, in company with the thoughtful service, was a great experience. I feel bad for those poor souls that go to Il Pollo Supremo, in the Mission, for grilled chicken when they could be going to Il Pollaio. The server or cook in the open kitchen behind us thought to bring Vida her own plate of chicken gratis and quickly before she ceased to be amused by her orange soda. She actually ate more chicken than fries for once. My mother and I ate a kitschy medley of a salad that included coleslaw and canned beans.
The next evening we walked up to the U.S. Restaurant, a classic old school North Beach Restaurant that was recently remodeled. I technically had already eaten at the U.S. Restaurant but this new incarnation was so radically different than the place that I had visited many years ago that I made a decision to duplicate a restaurant. It didn’t have the dirty charm of the old restaurant but the food was good. We ate a perfectly cooked marinated seafood salad served on mesclun and bowls of pasta with half ravioli and half spaghetti.
The next night was Halloween and ironically we ate pizza from North Beach Pizza, but at the recreation center at Jackson Park on 17th Street. Two of the mothers from Vida’s school organized a post-trick-or-treat party complete with black and orange balloons on the back of all the little chairs that surrounded the child size tables. On Friday afternoon it was disappointingly obvious that we couldn’t yet go home so after checking out of the San Remo that morning we went back for one more night. After a visit to the farmer’s market we finally were able to go home. The inconvenience of staying at a hotel was more than compensated by the tourist adventure I was able to have in my own city.
Restaurant Total: 83
