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| Sentinel Building |
Saturday, April 18, 2009
A Night In San Francisco
Landing in San Francisco 11pm local time, we are wide awake and hungry. We taxi to the San Francisco Hilton in the Financial District.
I am surprised; I have been here before. I stayed here on a business trip last year when the entire town was booked for an Oracle convention. I was here for two nights at $750 a night. (We’re paying $120 on this trip.) I walk into our 24th floor room and I am sure it is the same room I stayed in before. Of course, there are a number of rooms in this hotel with the same layout, but I still suspect it is the same room. The view of downtown San Francisco from the window is identical.
The desk clerk informs us the hotel restaurant is closed and recommends we walk up three blocks to Columbus Avenue. On Columbus, we see a few gentlemen’s bars and a prostitute or two hanging on the street corner. Gene remarks that there is something benign about San Francisco sleaze.
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.
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| Mona Lisa's Exterior |
Mona Lisa, North Beach
I didn’t realize how close our hotel is to the Italian neighborhood North Beach, home of early 1950s Beat Generation poets and writers. 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, a long, narrow, sentimentally gaudy Italian restaurant, decorated with gigantic chandeliers and Renaissance-era murals, is indeed open late. 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. 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.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Chinatown Trip & Divine Brunch
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| Got Nothing But Time |
She tells us to walk up Stockton—the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown—to Broadway. At least Stockton is not as impassable as New York’s Canal Street I say, but within a block or two, the street clogs with shoppers. We weave around parked cars to avoid the masses. At Walgreen’s, we buy makeup and pick up a couple of other forgotten items. Aren’t there always forgotten items, no matter how carefully you pack your bags?
We reroute to Columbus Ave on the return. We see last night’s clubs, bars, storefronts and restaurants bathed in early Sunday sunlight. We pass some interesting spots: The World of Ginseng, Asians.com and Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope
Back at the hotel, I find my makeup bag, cleverly packed inside a straw hat. Armed with brunch suggestions from the Hilton’s concierge, we head out again on the now-familiar Columbus Avenue to the Café Divine. And divine it is; the one-room cafe is constructed of beautiful, dark wood and glass. Tiny white floor tiles add to the Victorian ambiance. We sit in one of the window tables, watching the people dining at sidewalk tables. A young, tattooed father hands a baby to the mother. She hold the baby girl to her shoulder and the baby flirts with us and laughs, inches away but with the glass between us.
Gene snaps a picture of an elderly patron sitting alone.
Looking for Parrots on Telegraph Hill
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| From Telegraph Hill |
A small art show is going on at an equally small park, Washington Square. We see a row of easels from our café seats across the street.
After finishing our “Bennies from Heaven,” Café Divine’s variation on Eggs Benedict, we walk through the park, stop and get silly over an adorable terrier who I swear wants to come home with us. Young families stretched out on blankets fill the park on this first beautiful day of the season.
Gene and I walk toward Telegraph Hill, hoping to see the parrots we read about in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. The incline of the streets grow steeper and the Stairmaster jokes are losing lost their punch. We sit down to rest on a curb. How can anyone live so high on a hill? Cars are parked at a ninety-degree angle and street signs warn parking cars to turn their wheels to prevent runaway cars.
We trudge slowly to the base of Coit Tower and search the trees for parrots. We see no birds, but we get the classic panoramic view of San Francisco Bay and the island of Alcatraz.
Hanging in The Haight
I leave Gene at Amoeba Records. Gene disappears in the vortex of one of America’s greatest record stores. Some might argue the Amoeba in Los Angeles is better, but we won’t be in LA for a few days yet.
I stroll down Haight Street, knowing I have plenty of time to wander while Gene record shops. The iconic street seems less commercial than it did ten years ago when I walked these blocks the first time. (Does any place ever become less commercial?)
I see more small businesses and fewer franchises. Ben and Jerry’s is still on the legendary intersection of Haight and Ashbury. An American Apparel shop is down the street. Of all the chain stores that might have wedged in, these two have a bit of hippie spirit—albeit in a less-than-authentic 21st century way.
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| Turn On . . . | Tune In . . . |
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| Drop Out | On Haight Street |
Haight Street is dotted with coffee shops, vintage clothing and boutique dress shops. I pass the fabled Café Cha Cha Cha; I see Cheap Thrills, the clothing-slash-head shop I browsed through last visit. The mannequin-to-beat-all-mannequins, the giant legs with fishnet stockings and red high heels still stick out a second-floor window. I stop in a couple boutiques and try on some well-priced skirts and tees. I see fewer old hippies haunting the street, and more kids digging the scene, as they might say in retro-speak.
Haight Street draws its panhandlers; most are young and sincere. Yet I ignore them or mumble a barely audible “sorry” as I do in New York. One guy shouts “smile” to me as I pass; he is not offended that I give him no change. He seems genuine and now I feel bad. Trying to avoid bad karma, I give money to the next guy I see—a young guy with a dog. Nodding out, he is not asking for money; but he needs it. I ask after his dog. He is pleased and I feel a little better.
Haight-Ashbury, like 1967 and the Summer of Love, is a place-in-time that can never be replicated. Whether the kids hanging out are bad imitations or not, it beats a museum.
I meet Gene who happy with his haul from Amoeba.
Taxicabs and San Francisco City Lights
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| Lawrence ferlinghetti quote |
We try to hail a cab on Stanyan Street on the edge of Golden Gate Park. Fifteen minutes later, we try to remember who told us San Francisco is cab-hailing city--either our hotel concierge or the cab driver who dropped us off.
Not today, it isn't.
A taxi finally pulls up; a sweaty man in sloppy business attire jumps in front of us and steals the cab. The guy can’t pretend he didn’t see us. He says, “I’ll give you $20. I really have to get somewhere.” Now he’s halfway inside the cab as he says this so his offer is no offer at all, only a way to ease his conscience. We decline: we’re tired and his conscience doesn’t deserve easing. I bet he’s from New York.We pop into the cozy, Victorian Stanyan Park Hotel across the street and ask the girl at the front desk to call a cab for us. She obliges us cheerfully. The girl chatters to the other couple in the lobby about a local oil store. She recommends using blood-orange oil to make brownies. Note to self. The Stanyan Park Hotel, listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, is worth considering for our next San Francisco trip.
Before dinner, we walk to City Lights Bookstore, the landmark bookstore co-founded by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Independent book stores are rare and City Lights is probably the best known of them all. City Lights carries two copies of our friend Daniel Nester’s poetry book, God Save My Queen, Part II. Perhaps they sold out of Part I?
I buy both parts of Gore Vidal’s memoir. Gene buys a Noel Coward memoir.
Mexican Food, California-Style
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| Mr Bing Has Cocktails |
We want Mexican food tonight. Friends from California claim that California has the best Mexican food. They go as far as saying New York has no decent low-end Mexican food at all. They concede that California can’t do pizza like New York.
Our hotel concierge enthusiastically recommends Maya on 2nd and Folsom. Set back from the street in an office building plaza, I suspect the bar and restaurant are probably hopping during the week. But tonight, the restaurant is almost empty on this Sunday night, with only four or five tables seated in the cavernous main room. Only one person works the front of the house.
I order a pomegranate Margarita on the rocks. Our guacamole and chips arrive in a two-tier silver serving tray. Gene and I each have a lobster taco appetizer—it sounds too good to share. I order a half-portion shrimp enchilada as a main course. I wish more restaurants offered small and large portions so I can try more dishes (without sharing).
Gene and I want to stop in a bar for a nightcap after the taxi drops us back in our Financial District/North Beach neighborhood. Last night, we could only find bars, no open restaurants. Tonight, we can only find restaurants and no bars.
Not exactly zero bars; we poke our heads into several.
Vesuvio Café has no bar to speak of, only tables. We feel like chatting with locals or the bartender, at least. Each bar we look in has either too many people or too few. Coppola’s place locks their doors by 9:30 pm. The problem must be us; we are not in the right mood.
We walk back to the hotel for a nightcap there. Hotel bars are always perfect—always seats available, but never deserted. And San Francisco Hilton bar carries Absolut Ruby Red. We will pick up our rental car early tomorrow to start down Highway 1. Thirty-six hours in San Francisco is not enough.
