San Francisco

So I have been to San Francisco probably 15 times.  Each time I am there I get creeped out by these Dementors hovering above at 580 California Street.  Why are they there?  Who do they know?  What are they doing?

Anyway, Mark and I bopped down to San Francisco for a mini-break last weekend to celebrate my new job. Yes, my new job.  If I had a soul it would have been sucked out at The Cookbook Factory.  But I am free.  Next Monday I start at a gaming software company which I will refer to here as The Pond.  More on this later.  Off to San Francisco to celebrate!

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I am not in seat 1A.  I know it’s is hard to believe.  I am in seat 10F.  I am here because first class was sold out.  Normally I would have just waited to go at a different time, but I start my new job next week so it was now or Labor Day weekend.  Waiting  ≠ celebrating.

I am sitting in something called Premium Main Cabin Select.  This means I paid a lot more that I would have for coach (which is good for my self-esteem), I get 8 inches of extra legroom, free drinks, and free food. 

This also means the tempest-tossed wretched refuse are yearning to breathe free all around us.  They are…ill mannered.  Carrying on giant luggage, sticking it in other people’s overhead bins, blocking the aisle, traveling with free range screaming children, going barefoot with very unattractive feet.  It’s all bad.  I have to say again I never want to be a part of it.  But it was this or no trip.  90 minutes later we land.

We are met at the airport by Driver.  Driver is an older white guy, very articulate, very chatty.  Too chatty in fact.  He has gone through some kind of job change / divorce thing and is being Driver this until he figures out what is next.  I respect that, but he needs to quit talking.  He reminds me of that crazy driver we had in Amalfi who would not shut up.

As we creep through traffic into downtown San Francisco I am struck by all the new buildings.  I have not been here since 2011 and things have changed.  The stub of what will soon be the West Coast’s tallest building is just starting to poke through the skyline.

Around 1:00 PM we arrive at the Hotel Triton.  We are staying here more out of a sense of tradition rather than anything else.  It’s not the nicest hotel in town, but it has a great sense of humor.

I walk up to the front desk and say to the young woman working there, “Hey.  I know it’s too early to check in but could we drop off our bags and come back in a few hours?”  She gets this weird look on her face and picks up the phone.  I don’t quite hear the whole conversation but the gist of it is she is sick of dealing with mean people and would like to do something nice for guests who are not mean.  When she gets off the phone she explains that I will be getting upgraded to the Haagen-Dazs suite at no additional charge! 

Well, this is a small miracle.  I never get upgraded to anything, except on my final flight on Air France.  They put me in first class as a final goodbye before I switched to British Airways.

My room is painted to evoke Dulce De Leche ice cream, and the furniture is raspberry sauce red.  There are photos of ice cream on the walls and coffee table books devoted to ice cream. Oh, and a freezer full of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, bowls, spoons, and a scoop.

We have a champagne-based lunch downstairs at Café de la Presse and then go on a super annoying walk though tourists in Chinatown.  We’re looking for The Work Shop so we can look for cooking knives. They either have super cheap ones or super expensive ones and no one will help us so we leave. 

It is very busy in Chinatown today. Why is it that people do not understand they need to keep to the right side of the sidewalk?  You drive on the right side of the road, you walk on the right side of the sidewalk.  This change was approved by the United Nations in 1973. Tourists who walk on the left side of the sidewalk, or even worse, walk in herds two or three abreast holding hands blocking the entire sidewalk, are in violation of UN protocols.  They are in violation!

Escaping the sidewalk chaos of Chinatown we end up in North Beach at the Coppola family restaurant Café Zoetrope for a glass of Sofia.  Then we are back to the hotel for some ice cream and a shower. 

Dinner tonight is at La Mar for cebiche (or is it ceviche?).  This is a huge place right on the water near the Ferry Terminal.  We have Pisco Sours to start, then shrimp empanadas.  They have Godello on the wine list, the life affirming magical liquid that goes with all food.

Then the cebiche comes.  Several kind of raw fish served with corn, chilies, onion, and magic sauce.  Amazing dinner. 

We Uber home for ice cream and early crash.  The people in the room above me are possessed and the demon is throwing their bodies around the room, which is kind of loud. After a while I call the front desk.  They say the exorcist in en route but that they have some sage leaves and a lighter downstairs if I cannot wait.  I wait.

………

Breakfast is at Café de la Press again.  Not the most creative decision in a city of great restaurants but it is easy. There is an annoying Swiss family named the Robinsons next to us.  They are finding it difficult to communicate with the Mexican bus boy.  They think he is the waiter.  I could have helped out help, but I don’t want to support Europeans who are not in the EU. 

We walk over to Union Square and take pictures of the building that was the pet shop in The Birds, then head over to SFMOMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  They reopened in May after a huge expansion.  The space is more than doubled.  Unfortunately, I am kind of underwhelmed.  The highly touted mobile app they have developed does not work, there are free range children all over the place, and lots of vile dark German art.  Even the featured shows are a letdown.  Despite its size this place has nothing on The Broad in Los Angeles.  That is an amazing museum. But here are a few things from SFMOMA:

Oh wait, there was one thing.  Do you remember that black hole that the Road Runner used to use against Wile E Coyote in the old cartoons?  They have one at SFMOMA.  It’s just this large black hole on the wall.  It distorts space and time.  As light is sucked into the hole it warps a bit and gives the edge of the hole a weird glow.  People are amazed and try to see if there is something behind the hole since it looks three dimensional, but is not.  It’s just a black hole.

After 7 stories of “art” we walk down to the Ferry Building for lunch.  We get this amazing wine from Sicily, some salumi, and this awesome Mt. Tam cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery.

Dinner tonight is at the Tosca Café.  Recently we had been watching “Mind of a Chef” on Netflix and met chef April Bloomfield.  She is British, by way of New York.  About four episodes in she is opening a new restaurant in San Francisco.  As they talk about this I recognize the space. It’s the Tosca Café from Until the End of the World, one of my favorites movies, ever.

Oh how can I even start to write about Until the End of the World? It was filmed in 1991 by Wim Wenders.  I believe it was the first movie filmed in HD.  It stars William Hurt and my very, very beloved Solveig Dommartin.  The original cut was like 13 glorious hours long.  I guess it’s kind of a road movie, but it’s so much more than that.  It predicts our addiction to cell phones and tablets years before they were a reality.  I could write a whole paper on this movie and how much it means to me, but I won’t make you suffer through that here.  There is no way we are not having dinner at this place.

The remodeled space respects the old dive bar from the movie.  We are greeted by a very pretentious host who insists on us sitting at the bar for a drink even though we have reservations and there is no one in the dining area right then.  He does the same thing to other people so I try not to take it personally and am forced to drink Negronis.

Finally, he seats us in this back room instead of the main dining room.  He pulls the same stunt on other people so I am unsure if this is some kind of a hate crime or not.

Dinner is interesting.  We decide to order a half chicken that takes an hour to cook.  We start with some pretty forgettable focaccia bread followed by squash blossoms and anchovies breaded and deep fried and served with a chili caper sauce.  Then some pig tails that were also breaded and deep friend. This is all fine.

Mark gets a good bucatini all’amatriciana.  I order rigatoni with morel mushrooms and English peas.  I have not really gotten over the centipede incident with the morel mushroom earlier this summer, but there is a different horror awaiting me in my pasta. Chicken hearts.  They put chicken hearts in my pasta.  This is not on the menu and I am on a strict NO INSECT / NO ORGAN diet.  It’s just vile.  I should have sent it back, but I just can’t do that.  Mark eats the hearts. 

Sitting next to us is the loud mouth fat fool who might just be the governor of New Jersey.  He’s verbally abusive to his girlfriend and keeps trying to pull us into their conversation.

Across from us is an older rich couple who resemble Stanly Tucci and Lesley Stahl. With them is their 20 something gay son who appears to have just escaped from boarding school in Europe.  Mom announces loudly that she only drinks California Chardonnay. 

I don’t know which table is more cringy.

The chicken arrives and is really good.  I am too full to move at this point but Mark wants cannoli.  I tell him to leave the cannoli but he won’t.

Somehow we Uber back to the hotel.  The demon upstairs is at it again.

………

For breakfast we go back to Café de la Presse again.  Swiss Family Robinson is still there wreaking havoc with the wait staff.  I have some poached eggs with sausage and toast.  As we are sitting there I see a number of European tourists come in.  They can’t seem to figure out they need to wait at the hostess stand to be seated.  They either seat themselves or move to other tables after they have been seated. They all smell like cigarette smoke.  Maybe we do need to build a wall.

We check out of the hotel and wander around downtown for a while.  The flagship store for William Sanoma is kind of disappointing but the flagship Apple store is quite amazing. 

Lunch today is at some dim sum place called the Singing Yank……or maybe it’s called Yank Sing.  Service is fast, the food is good, especially the Shanghai soup dumpling, but we inhale everything in 10 minutes. $86 dollars later we are on our way to the airport.

In the TSA-Pre line at SFO I see David Mason.  David Mason the famous gay New York fetish-ware designer and former really funny blogger. He is tall and buff and his ass defies gravity. His beautiful Spanish husband is much shorter but really pretty.  It’s kind of surreal standing this close to him.  I was a huge fan of his blog for years.  I wish he still wrote.

So SFO is the home of Virgin America but it turns out they do not have a first class lounge, unlike LAX.  We are forced to sit in a bar with the huddled masses and drink cava for a couple hours while we wait for our flight home.  

Ah first class, it’s nice to be home.

So more on that whole new job thing once I start.

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