Shh... I Don't Love S.F.
(Third installment in the followups to my California trip and the request for tips above; earlier installments
here and
here.)
Am I the only one who finds L.A. more congenial than the American Paris, the Bagdad by the Bay San Francisco? I suspect not, because almost every time I try this heretical notion on people, they look shocked, think for a minute, and then admit that they kind of feel the same way too. Yeah, it's staggeringly beautiful from at least three or four angles, yeah, Marin County has the most gorgeously comfortable lifestyle mankind has achieved since the days of Tiberius Caesar on Capri, but do what I did-- tromp kids around the cramped, hot, dirty city for six hours, explaining every few steps why there are so many homeless people and why free public bathrooms mean you can never actually find a bathroom (I swear, six hours in SF oughta be enough to make Milton Friedman out of anybody, though obviously it hasn't)... well, let's just say there's probably a way to have a good time in San Francisco, but it has nothing to do with kids.
So unlike my L.A. report, this one isn't about knocking great places off my list. There was no way I'd be able to make the rest of the family jostle for stools in hopes of cold seafood at Swan Oyster Depot, for instance; no way I'd drag them across another bridge for pizza at Chez Panisse, to determine if John Mariani was right about it; no way the kids were coming along for a nine-foam-course lunch at French Laundry. The best I could hope for was dim sum in Chinatown:
Actually we tried, first, Yank Sing in the financial district, but they don't start serving until 11 and we wanted breakfast. So we paid the sucker-bait cable car fee and rode up to the top of the hill to find somewhere in Chinatown to eat. Years ago I'd had a dim sum epiphany at a giant hall with rolling carts called New Asia, trying many things I'd never seen in Chicago, digging the atmosphere of hundreds of Chinese reading their papers and chit-chatting over tea and chicken feet.
So we started looking for another such cart place. And we walked, and we walked, and along the way the kids were complaining enough that I just went in some place, the kind of place with no English signage and seating for one and a half and packed with old Chinese ladies, and I bought a couple of things to tide us over until breakfast five minutes later. One of them, barbecued pork inside a kind of croissant-like material. It was really, really good and I don't even know the name of the place.
Anyway, failing to find any other choice, eventually we walked across all of Chinatown and wound up at...
New Asia.
Which was fine, visiting again (actually the third time over the years), but it was that barbecued pork thing that haunted my dreams that night. Yet how would you take a whole family in search of such things in this tiny, cramped Chinatown? There's nowhere to sit, people would bonk them in the head with bags...
New Asia Restaurant
772 Pacific Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94133
415-391-6666
Actually, though I may not love S.F., there is one thing it has that I am deeply jealous of:
The Ferry Building Marketplace. A fine old public building (where some ferries from Marin still dock) has been transformed into the ultimate culmination of all that Alice Watersian work over the last 30+ years cultivating artisanal local produce and goodies-- a mall. A mall full of artisanal cheese (Cowgirl Creamery), naturally-raised meats, homemade bread (Acme), exotic honeys, gelato, fruits and veggies, soaps and candles, even a store devoted to this:
An artisanal mushroom store. A free-range mushroom store. Let that one sink in for a minute. I wept with joy. I would live in S.F. for a year just to cook from the shops here. (Not that I could probably afford either the living or the cooking.)
Of course, traveling as we were I couldn't get much of this stuff, but I bought some bread (Acme, pretty good but not great), some Cowgirl cheese (one of which was so pungent it actually stunk up our hotel room-- from inside the fridge!), and some honey to take back, and got us lunch at Taylor's (quite good burgers, and unlike most of the disdainful service people in the greater Bay area, the young counter guy entertained my kids while we were waiting).
This 12,000 square feet of S.F., at least, I loved.
Ferry Building Marketplace
One Ferry Building
San Francisco, California 94111
(415) 693-0996
www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com
* * *
Marin
We actually stayed in Tiburon in Marin County (hence the arrival at the Ferry Building) because we have friends there; a couple of meals we had there included dinner at a nouvelle-ish Mexican place, recommended by G Wiv, called Guaymas. It was all right, but frankly I had better of the same genre on either side of it-- Loteria in L.A. before and Sol de Mexico since-- and the service was downright lackadaisical (I managed to take one child out for gelato and have him finish it, between the time my wife received the bill and the time she was able to actually sign the credit card slip and leave). Its main draw is a charm-by-the-bucketful waterfront location:
The only other restaurant meal we had there, I think, was breakfast at a place on Tiburon's oh-so-cute old main street called The Swedish House Bakery, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody and you can forget, for a moment, that no one's actually lived in California for more than the last week. A bit pricey (in Marin? No!) but a nice little slice of small town life in The Big Suburb-- so pleasant, you could almost be in Lindsborg, Kansas!
Guaymas
5 Main St
Tiburon, CA 94920
(415) 435-6300
The Swedish House Bakery
35 Main Street
Tiburon, CA 94920
415 435 9767
* * *
Sonoma
While in Tiburon we took a day trip up to Sonoma. Why Sonoma rather than Napa? Because of Train Town:
Train Town, to adult eyes a fairly marginal operation as California attractions go, was a huge hit with you know who, but otherwise I can't say I much recommend the idea of visiting wine country with kids, either. The attempt to find a winery with interestingly dugout caves or something was only minimally successful (we saw Buena Vista's cave-- from behind an iron fence), I was too weary to even want to try to sample wine while the kids glowered at me and tried bouncing Riedel stemware off each other's heads, and other than Train Town, basically all we did was have lunch at an alleged New Haven-style pizza place (I can't speak to the justice of that claim) which was pretty good, called The Red Grape. I hear John Mariani considers it the 11th-best pizza in America!
Red Grape Pizzeria
529 1ST St W
Sonoma, CA 95476-6606
(707) 996-4103
* * *
Monterey
Pardon me for jumping all over chronologically but before we ever got to San Francisco we spent a few days in Monterey-- technically in Pacific Grove next door, which is less touristy-bohunk-- and, based on the recommendation by ToniG above, with a couple of visits to Santa Cruz along the way. (Where I even ate at the recently-discussed Lee's Sandwiches, the Subway of Banh Mi.)
Monterey alas was overcast (not uncommon I gather) the whole time, so while there was a certain melancholy splendor to gazing out over the rocks to the gray seas and sky, it tended to drive us toward the tourist attractions.
Truly here is Steinbeck's dream for Cannery Row realized-- the most ungodly collection of irritating tourist bait fudge shops and cutesy-poo restaurants with names like Louie Linguini's on earth. I mean, all you really have to say is that here's an authentic fishing port, immortalized by one good author, and the big restaurant draw in it is a crappy seafood restaurant paying royalties to a much crappier writer, the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Good for the locals if they've managed to find a new basis for their economy once fishing and canning pooped out, but the whole area would deserve a surgical strike by submarine were it not for the lone respectable, indeed world-class attraction amidst the fudgeries, the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
It really is marvelous-- and you should try to go before the jellyfish exhibit is taken down at the end of the year-- though I must admit that for a place sending hundreds of people off to the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. for lunch every day, the constant harping on P.C. messages got to be a little much for me:
Still, it's quite an experience and when it came time for us to eat deep-fried Cajun popcorn Chilean sea bass in a ground coral reef-seahorse dipping sauce, we managed to escape the tourist hell and find an entirely reasonable seafood alternative only a block or two outside the district, an outpost of
Sea Harvest, a local fishing company which also operates a few restaurants/fish markets. Nice that the real deal manages to survive next to so much fakeness, even without Governor Schwarzenegger's help.
The only other notable meal we ate in Monterey was at a restaurant called
Passionfish, which seems to be the favorite of, for instance, folks posting on the California board on Chowhound. It also happened to be about three blocks from our B&B, so eating there was pretty much inevitable.
I was concerned that, being this close to places like Pebble Beach, Passionfish might be overly stuffy for the crazy boys but actually it was very kid friendly and we had an older (i.e. older than 26) waitress who was very savvy about all that, for a change.
This being the Monterey area, Passionfish's menu starts off with the obligatory text of nautical correctness: "Passionfish is dedicated to serving sustainable seafood; seafood that is harvested in a manner that does not harm the habitat of the ocean floor nor result in by-catch of the ocean's endangered turtles." The contradiction for a high-end restaurant in being pledged to sustainability was soon revealed when the table next to us asked if the tilapia was "ocean-caught." The waitress (not ours) hemmed a little and then said, yeah, sure it is, everything our chef cooks is ocean-caught... Uh huh. It's tough for a restaurant in a place like this, pledging yourself to fishy correctness without wanting to admit that one of the costs of that means that you're going to be serving and eating chicken-of-the-tank like tilapia. I'm not saying there's one right answer, I'm not saying I'm all for fishing things to extinction, I'm just saying... there's a lot of pious talk about that stuff in California (and especially in Monterey), but there's also a lot of people ordering what they think is going to be authentic, better-than-Costco-at-home Pacific seafood and it's sure coming from
somewhere.
Passionfish was, a little unfortunately, one of those meals where everything was great except the entrees. Sweet potato fries with a sesame aioli, gotten for the kids, were scarfed up enthusiastically by all. The salad with silky smoked sturgeon above, and a salad with Dungeness crab, avocado and a citrus dressing, were utterly delectable, beautifully balanced, exactly what you hope for in seafood dishes from a place next to the sea (even as I realize the crab was not exactly local).
Entrees, well, her scallops were kind of ordinary in a "tomato-truffle butter" with a glob of "risotto custard" in the middle; and my duck confit was sort of like the description Jim in Logan Square offered of a similar dish, "almost well done, with only a hint of pink in some of the slices, and the rest cooked -- very thoroughly -- to a complete greyness." Both were overcooked, neither cooked to the point of perfection one would hope for from those two ingredients. At least dessert sent us out on a higher note:
Not sure if those were local strawberries, pretty sure they weren't local peaches, but the strawberry mousse had the zing of really good produce.
Sea Harvest Fish Market & Restaurant
598 Foam
Monterey, CA 93940
831.646.0547
Passionfish
701 Lighthouse
Pacific Grove, CA 93950
(831) 655-3311
(Incidentally, for those looking for accommodations in that area, our
B&B in Pacific Grove was reasonable ($150/nightish), pleasant and very well located.)
* * *
Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz has a fun area to stroll along, preserving a time period in all its cheesy excess perfectly, and letting you gawk at all the wacky characters.
And then besides the 2006-era college town shopping district, it also has an old boardwalk and amusement park!
Santa Cruz was fun, more fun for the kids than the rest of northern California on this trip put together. We rode a steam train through the redwoods (Roaring Camp, about 10 miles before Santa Cruz on Rte. 17), we rode the boardwalk rides, we played on the beach, we ate corn dogs at a place decorated with pictures of former Miss Santa Cruzes and Miss Californias--
Actually, I had ordered a cheeseburger when I noticed, unexpectedly, that my other choices at this very typical-American dog stand included a Portuguese Linguica. Hey, I'll have that! It was a greasy gut bomb, but at least it wasn't another damn hamburger.
We also ate at John Mariani's 12th-best pizza in America (or is Santa Cruz too far from a major airport for him to drive?), an oh-so-this-minute yuppie pizza and pasta place called Kianti's (ick), which did indeed make pretty good wood oven pizzas. (The pizza thrower placed in some international contest for that skill.) It was a walking cliche of faux-Italianness, but I do think it was a better choice than the first place we were attracted to, an alleged bistro called Chocolate. Normally any place calling itself Chocolate would have my wife in there in a minute, but when we looked at the menu and saw that the bistro food included such French classics as pasta with pesto, chicken mole, and Impeachment Pie (the notion of impeachment did seem to be the main decor theme, in a way that suggested something more than casual interest in the topic), we decided that maybe that place was spreading itself a little thin across too diverse a range of interests to be a really tip-top bistro.
Anyway, I may not love S.F. but I liked Santa Cruz fine, we had a good time, and thanks to all for their suggestions, even if I was able on this trip to act upon only a very few of them.
Kiantis Pizza & Pasta Bar
1100 Pacific Ave
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
(831) 469-4400