Bohemian San Francisco / Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining.

by Clarence E. Edwords

Perhaps you would like to know something about the bourgeoise French, those who have come from the peasant district of the mother country. Go a little further up Broadway and you will begin to see the signs changing from Spanish to French, and if you can understand them you will know that here you will be given a dinner for twenty-five cents on week days and for thirty-five cents on Sundays. The difference is brought about by the difference between the price of cheap beef or mutton and the dearer chicken.

Up in the second story on a large building you may see a sign that tells you meals will be served and rooms provided. One of these is the rendezvous of Anarchists, who gather each evening and discuss the affairs of the world, and how to regulate them. But they are harmless Anarchists in San Francisco, for here they have no wrongs to redress, so they sit and drink their forbidden absinthe, and dream their dreams of fire and sword, while they talk in whispers of what they are going to do to the crowned heads of Europe. It is their dream and we have no quarrel with it or them.

But for real interest one must get back to the slope of Telegraph Hill; to the streets running up from Columbus avenue, until they are so steep that only goats and babies can play on them with safety. At least we suppose the babies are as active as the goats for the sides of the hill are alive with them.

Let us walk first along Grant avenue and do a little window shopping. Just before you turn off Broadway into Grant avenue, after passing the Fior d'Italia, the Buon Gusto, the Dante and Il Trovatore restaurants, we come to a most interesting window where is displayed such a variety of sausages as to make one wonder at the inventive genius who thought of them all. As you wonder you peep timidly in the door and then walk in from sheer amazement. You now find yourself surrounded with sausages, from floor to ceiling, and from side wall to side wall on both ceiling and floor, and such sausage it is!

From strings so thin as to appear about the size of a lady's little finger, to individual sausages as large as the thigh of a giant, they hang in festoons, crawl over beams, lie along shelves, decorate counters, peep from boxes on the floor, and invite you to taste them in the slices that lay on the butcher's block. One can well imagine being in a cave of flesh, yet if you look closely you will discover that sausage is but a part of the strange edible things to be had here.

Here are cheeses in wonderful variety. Cheeses from Italy that are made from goats' milk, asses' milk, cows' milk and mares' milk, and also cheeses from Spain, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, and all the other countries where they make cheese, even including the United States. These cheeses are of all sizes and all shapes, from the great, round, flat cheese that we are accustomed to see in country grocery stores, to the queer-shaped caciocavallo, which looks like an Indian club and is eaten with fruit.

There are dried vegetables and dried fruits such as were never dreamed of in your limited experience, and even the grocer himself, the smiling and cosmopolitan Verga, confesses that he does not know the names of all of them.

As you go out into the street you blink at the transformation, for you have been thousands of miles away. You think that surely there can be nothing more. Wait a bit. Turn the corner and walk along Grant avenue toward the Hill. See, here is a window full of bread. Look closely at it and you will notice that it is not like the bread you are accustomed to. Count the different kinds. Fourteen of them in all, from the long sticks of grissini to the great slid loaves weighing many pounds. Light bread, heavy bread, good bread, soft bread, hard bread, delicate bread, each having its especial use, and all satisfying to different appetites.

Now go a little further to the corner, cross the street and enter the store of the Costa Brothers. It is a big grocery store and while you will not find the sausage and mystifying mass of food products in such lavish display and profuseness, as in the previous place, if you look around you will find this even more interesting, for it is on a different plane. Here you find the delicacies and the niceties of Italian living. At first glance it looks as if you were in any one of the American grocery stores of down-town, but a closer examination reveals the fact that these canned goods and these boxes and jars, hold peculiar foods that you are unaccustomed to. Perhaps you will find a clerk who can speak good English, but if you cannot either of the Costa brothers will be glad to show you the courtesy of answering your questions.

Turn around and look at the shelves filled with bottles of wine. Now you feel that you are on safe ground, for you know about wines and can talk about Cresta Blanca, and Mont Rouge, and Asti Colony Tipo Chianti. But wait a minute. Here are labels that you do not understand and wines that you never even heard of. Here are wines whose taste is so delicious that you wonder why it is the whole world is not talking about it and drinking it.