San Francisco is the kind of city that defies whatever expectations you have before you arrive, and just like The Pogues classic hit of the same name it is my kind of "dirty old town". There are so many cool aspects to the city, and so many ways to see the sites. You can bus-it, catch the metro, ride a cable car, cycle or walk. Some people might say with it's mountainous and hilly streets that San Francisco is not a walking-friendly city, but believe it or not we walked the whole city, although sometimes especially around the tenderloin, lower Haight, and mission areas wondered if we were masochistically toying with fate.We stayed at the Hilton in the financial district. It is a stone's throw from Chinatown and Little Italy and about 10 minutes walk down to Market St, and to Union Square. You are spoiled for choice by the sheer volume of old-world Italian cafes, restaurants, deli's and bakeries that line the steep streets around North Beach or "Little Italy". If you are after a seriously good coffee and pastry, the place to be in Little Italy is without a doubt Cafe Trieste, but be prepared to line up every time. The place is popular, and it's said that Francis Ford Coppola wrote much of the screenplay for The Godfather here.
This could be true, as he would have had no problem finding inspiration to write. On the first of a number of daily visits to Cafe Trieste, a Balkan looking man with a thick heavy accent in a Camel colored coat was in the cafe menacing patrons, standing in front of them muttering largely unintelligible but clear obscenities and giving them "the bird". The customer in front of us remarked "If this is the local color, I'm gettin' out of the neighbourhood". Silent diner and I have laughingly paraphrased these words in similarly bizarre situations many times since. We encountered the Balkan stand-over man a number of times around North Beach and in local uber-cool bar and cafe Vesuvio's at 255 Columbus Ave, usually talking to himself and generally looking scary. The key was no eye-contact.
We ate and drank out at North Beach quite a lot. The food is authentic, and the neighbourhood still retains a Jack Kerouac-ish beatnik charm. Two restaurants I would recommend are Sodini's restaurant an Italian trattoria at 510 Green St (don't forget to stop by the Grant and Green saloon nearby on 1371 Grant Ave - a small bar with live music and a happy hour - what more could you want) and also
Capps Restaurant at the corner of
1600 Powell and Green St, a no-fuss Italian diner which serves humungous family-style meals - which consist of a soup, a salad and a main. If you are burning the midnight candle and want an after-dinner aperitif a treasure trove hidden in 12 Saroyan Place (off Columbus) is Specs' Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, and also perhaps a little less salubrious and more of a dive-bar but the service is good and the alcohol is strong, try Mr Bings Cocktail Lounge at 201 Columbus Ave - where if you are lucky the owner and the regulars might involve you in their Chinese dice game Sic Bo.
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| The Canneloni at Capps |
Another great North Beach eating spot is Molinari's Delicatessen. Its at 373
Columbus Ave, and they make seriously delicious sub-sandwiches and certainly don't
scrimp on the sliced cured meats and cheese fillings all
freshly made, once you grab your ticket to order.
San Francisco is a serious foodie's mecca, and with 33% of the city's population Asian - there is certainly no shortage of choice of great Asian restaurants. We headed out to Yank Sing located at 101 Spear St for dim sum, which happens to be listed as one of the top ten dim sum restaurants in the Bay area. The Xiao Long Bao or Shanghai soup dumplings are great, but it was the Imperial Walnut Salad made with finely sliced purple cabbage, jicama, and honey roasted walnuts mixed with an Asian herb dressing that had me back home post-holiday scouring the internet for the recipe.
If you are looking for Vietnamese Pho you only have to google the search words "Best vietnamese Pho in San Francisco" to find an array of choice. After reading considerable reviews, we opted for Pho 2000 which is on 637 Larkin St in the tenderloin. Although, Turtle Tower next door is also supposed to rank highly in the Vietnamese soup stakes. Do yourself a favor though, don't believe the geographical scale of your map like we did, and then walk the entire span of Larkin St from West to East in order to get there. The restaurant is very close to Market St, and if we had of walked the 10 minutes to Market St from our hotel and the 10 minutes down to Larkin from Market, we would have saved an hour-and-a-half walking time. For the ladies out there, that's extra shopping time you can't get back. But to be fair, after such a long walk there is nothing better than a hearty bowl of fragrant broth to nourish the body and replenish the spirit.
Walking to North Beach every day past Portsmouth Square on Kearny St, we passed a restaurant called "House of Nanking" (
www.houseofnanking.net) which was always abuzz with diners, and more often than not had a line out the door waiting to get in. Now I have learned a thing or two in my time, and lines out doors generally means one thing - good food. The food was good, and damn cheap. I had a particularly tasty sizzling rice soup with lemon broth and shallots, whilst Silent Diner opted for his go-to dish Hot and Sour Soup. Then we shared a plate of Bao Bing wraps - sizzling beef with lightly stir fried cabbage, Asian pickles and pancakes, do-it-yourself wrapped goodness. After dinner I went next door to Wayne's Liquor for some "supplies" and waited for Silent Diner who seemed to be taking an eternally long time paying the bill. When he emerged from Nanking I asked what had taken so long "The owner was showing me the photos of people who had eaten at the restaurant" "Oh yeh, like who?" "I don't know some guy called Jamie Oliver". I guess that's why only one of us is a deadhead and the other is a foodie.
By far for a self-confessed foodie ("SCF") like me, I could not have gone to San Francisco without eating at Charles Phan's Vietnamese restaurant The Slanted Door. The restaurant is located at 1 Ferry Building Marketplace down by the Embarcadero, and it has a beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge, if unlike us, you are not there during the misty fog of a San Fran Winters night. The Slanted Door channels the Yank Sing vibe by also featuring a purple cabbage salad mixing it instead with grapefruit, jicama and candied pecans. Two dishes that feature permanently on the menu are the cellophane noodles with green onion, dungeness crab and sesame, and the shaking beef - cubed eye fillet with watercress, red onion and lime sauce. The standout dish of the night for me was the spicy broccoli with pressed tofu, fragrant with the smoky earthiness of five-spice powder and hon-shimeji mushrooms.
The second mandatory foodie destination has to be Nancy Oakes restaurant Boulevard. I bought the cookbook about a year beforehand and realised by the sheer complexity of the recipes that I would never actually make anything from it, dreaming instead that one day I might actually get to dine there. I did enjoy the experience, definitely, but like any other fine-dining restaurant - it was very she-she-la-la, you know white table cloth, table napkin in your lap, that jaw dropping moment as you open the little leather folder that contains the bill, and then casually feigning indifference as the waiter has to almost pry your credit card from your hands.
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| Boulevard lamb rump with romanesco broccoli and rabe |
Aside from all the usual things you should do if you go to San Fran -
the Alcatraz Island tour, visiting the painted ladies at Alamo Square Park, a cable car ride through Lombard St, a
visit to Pier 39 to see the Sea Lions, Fisherman's Wharf for a clam
chowder, a shopping stint at Union Square and Westfield on Market St, you should also include a stop to Ghiradelli's for their fabulous chocolates
and chocolate peanut butter fudge sundae. If after this your digestive system will let you, a stop at "in-n-out" burger where you sidle up to the counter and with a wink and an impish grin, ask for your burger "animal style". As much as I would like to tell you there is a kink factor involved in this request, the not-so-secret, secret menu is really just additional toppings such as pickles, extra spread, grilled onions and mustard fried onto the meat patty. Then perhaps you should think about burning the 10,000 calories you just ate. You can hire a bike
from one of the cycle hire stores down near Fisherman's Wharf (we went
to
Blazing Saddles) and ride ride over the Golden Gate Bridge across to the now-gentrified fishing village Sausalito, where you catch the ferry back to
Pier 41.One-way it's around 18km.
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| You can choose to eat this sundae, or just smother it on your hips |
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| Happiness is in the arms of an in-n-out burger animal style of course |
Or if you are really inspired, you can go off the grid like we did and bike
to Tiburon which is 33 kilometres from Fisherman's Wharf one-way (to this day Silent Diner still does not realise this is how far we actually biked). We
stopped at Waters Edge Hotel for lunch before boarding the ferry back to
Fisherman's Wharf late in the afternoon. My advice would be if you are
not a regular biker this longer trip is probably not for you, as aside from travelling
through marshes and parks with a constant view of the bay, there are a few spots where its necessary to
ride on larger roads. Still it was all an adventure for us, and a
glorious sunny day so it was perfect to be outdoors and enjoy the
charms of the Bay and this quaint coastal fishing village.
A walk along Haight-Ashbury is a must for any Grateful Dead fan who wants to see the house where Jerry Garcia once lived on 710 Asbury St, or anyone wishing to wear a flower in their hair and reminisce about the bohemian beat movement of the swinging sixties known as "The Summer of Love". And if you are really, really, lucky (or perhaps not) like we were, the rock band Further whose songs play longer than it took for me to fly to San Francisco might be playing at the Civic Centre. The band founded by original Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh have a following of "deadheads", and we met a father who was with his mate and son at the concert who had taken some magic mushrooms, as you do, to heighten their overall experience of the show. This was the first time in about 20 years the oldies had touched the psychedelic stuff and became considerably sick, managing to miss seeing the show altogether.
Close to Haight-Ashbury, the Panhandle leads into Golden Gate Park and its a great way to spend a sunny afternoon, but take my tip and give the Japanese Tea Garden a miss, unless of course you enjoy looking at Koi fish swimming in ponds and Bonsai. I would have paid the $6.00 not to see it. Instead head to Stowe Lake where you can climb up high on Strawberry Hill for a sensational view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay. Be forewarned, the air up there does develop an earthy tangy aroma which might or might not be caused by the numerous potheads also enjoying the vista.
Another great vantage spot to see the city from was shown to us by a friend, Fripster living in San Francisco at the time. We met up with him the day before we left, and he was struggling to suggest spots to take us we hadn't already seen. We mentioned we wanted to see "The Cross" that featured in the 1971 movie Dirty Harry "You know Mt Davidson Park?" "Yeh" "Go to the Cross". Here Harry meets Scorpio a sadistic serial killer, and after a tussle Harry stabs Scorpio in the leg before he escapes. At sunset, Fripster took us to "Twin Peaks" which is more than 900 metres high where not only do you have the most fantastic view of the whole city, but you can also see Mount Davidson and the Cross.
Now this wouldn't be a blog post about San Francisco if I didn't give some form of honourable mention to the Castro, and of course the Mission district. We walked the lower end of Market St (which is known as the tenderloin) a number of times - on our way back from Haight-Ashbury and also to and from the Mission and the Castro. The tenderloin noted for its sketchy and seedy reputation is home to a regular crew of hip-hopping African American teens who beat-box around the Civic Center wearing their saggy pants, serious bling and caps on sideways. It didn't occur to us that the fact we were forced to cross the street in order to avoid contact with them was a dead-giveaway we should have been avoiding the area like the plague - it was only evident afterwards reading our guide book that the areas we should most avoid due to violent crime including "brazen daylight shootings" were the very areas we were frequenting on foot most.
Although I am not sure where I felt more unsafe, but I would guess that an area that has a web page dedicated to finding "The Mission's 10 Most Dangerous Blocks" might be it. The area is known for fantastic Latino and Mexican culture and cuisine, but due to feeling uneasy in our surrounds our quest to find
La Cumbre an authentic Mexican taqueria, became a kind of get-in-get-out kind of proposition. The food there is however, good, very good. Meat is cooked on an open grill and everything made to order while you wait. Seating can be hard to come by as the place is always busy so be prepared to wait.
Living in Sydney with Oxford St the gay heart of the city, there is not much to say about the Castro that I haven't already seen. It's a gay district, and everyone is either buff or well groomed or both. The Fripster regaled a story about his mate from Australia visiting San Francisco in the middle of Summer and stopping in at the Twin Peaks Tavern for a drink, not realising it was a landmark gay bar until he noticed that a number of the patrons were enjoying their tipples and shooting the breeze out in the open seating area on Jane Warner Plaza completely starkers. If you do want to get slightly off the beaten track, and enjoy a cider on tap from perhaps the only bar in San Francisco that does serve cider on tap (well the only one I found) head to The Wild Side West at 424 Cortland Ave, Bernal Heights (
http://www.wildsidewest.com). We met Fripster there on our last night in San Francisco before heading to Napa Valley, and lucky it was a warm enough winter night we were able to sit out in the beer garden out the back.
One of my absolute highlights of San Francisco was being able to see the very talented master of funk, saxophonist Maceo Parker perform live at Yoshis San Francisco (
http://www.yoshis.com/sanfrancisco) on New Years Eve. Maceo Parker and his band - who I might add consist largely of family members including his son and nephew had the whole floor jumping to his self-proclaimed "funky stuff". It was a buzz of a night, and a great way to end 2011, "off the hook".
