Mona Lisa: Now That's Italian

Are we going to find something open at this hour? We find bars with no food; we find tortilla and Thai and Chinese places, take-out places with a chair or two in an over-lit storefront with no bar. Many restaurants are closing down; I see staffers in the windows, putting chairs up and cleaning. Too bad we didn’t arrive a few hours earlier.

I didn’t realize how close our hotel is to the Italian area, North Beach, home of the early 1950s poets and writers known as the Beat Generation. We pass City Lights, the Beat bookstore owned by Lawrence Fehrlinghetti.

Gene spots Ristorante Mona Lisa up the street and it looks open. The Mona Lisa is indeed open late, a long, narrow, sentimentally gaudy Italian restaurant, decorated with gigantic chandeliers and Renaissance-era murals.

We are seated at a small table by a window. We watch a group celebrating a birthday at the table outside. The group has been there awhile judging by the number of empty bottles on the table.

Christmas lights trim the bar and climb up the lanterns over the tables.

The tablecloths are pink, I think. Even the outdoor tables have tablecloths. Pink tablecloths represent the desire to be upscale, rather than actually being upscale. Only simple white tablecloths make a white-tablecloth restaurant. No substitutions.

But pink or white, upscale or downscale, the food is the point. A gnocchi dish on any menu makes Gene happy and The Mona Lisa offers eight gnocchi dishes. What to chose? There must be fifty pasta dishes on the menu. I love pasta and I try not to eat it too often, but with a menu like this, I must order pasta. Can you tell I’m hungry?

Gene chooses Gnocchi Pomodoro and I have Penne San Francisco (when in San Francisco . . .) Penne SF has a creamy pink sauce and bit of asparagus and crab, plus whole pieces of stone crab.

After our meal, we walk through the friendly sleaze of North Beach back to the hotel.