Night life in a city means the intoxication of many lights, the creature comfort of good restaurants. San Francisco does not lack either. When the last glimmer of day has disappeared out over the Golden Gate, Market street, Powell street, all the highways and the byways that lead into them are ablaze with the incandescent glories of electricity. Commerce and the city's lighting boards vie with one another in the splendor of their offerings.
And as for the restaurants—San Francisco boasts of twelve hundred hotels, alone. Each hotel has presumably at least one restaurant. And some of the finest of the eating-places of the city at the Golden Gate are solely restaurants. As a matter of real fact, San Francisco is the greatest restaurant city on the continent—in proportion to her population even greater than New York. In New York and more recently in Chicago the so-called "kitchenette apartment" has come into great vogue among tiny folks—two or three rooms, a bath and a very slightly enlarged clothes-press in which a small gas or electric stove, a sink and a refrigerator suffices for the preparation of light breakfasts and lunches. Dinners are taken out. In San Francisco the "kitchenettes" are omitted in thousands of apartments. All the meals are eaten in public dining-rooms and the restaurants thrive wonderfully. The soft climate does much to make this possible.
Living in these new apartments of San Francisco is a comparatively simple matter. Your capital investment for house-keeping may be small. A few chairs, a table or two, some linen—you are ready to begin.
Beds?
Bless your soul, the builder of the apartment house solved that problem for you. Your bed is a masterpiece of architecture which lets down from the wall, à la Pullman. By day it goes up against the wall again and an ingenious arrangement of wall-shutters enables the bedding to air throughout the entire day. In some cases the beds will let down either within, or without, to a sleeping-porch, for your real San Franciscan has a healthy sort of an animal love for living and sleeping in the open. The glories of the open California country that lie within an hour or two of the city tempt him into it each month of the year, and he is impeccable in his horseback riding, his fishing and his shooting.
To return to the restaurants—a decided contrast to that rough life in the open which he really loves—here is one, quite typical of the city. It is gay, almost garish with color and with light. Its cabaret almost amounts to an operatic performance and its proprietor will tell you with no little pride that he was presenting this form of restaurant entertainment long months before the idea ever reached New York. He will also tell you that he changes the entire scheme of decoration each three months—the San Franciscan mind is as volatile as it is appreciative.
Little Jap girls pass through the crowded tables bringing you hot tea biscuits of a most delicious sort. Other girls, this time in Neapolitan dress, are distributing flowers. The head-waiter bends over you and suggests the salad with which you start your dinner, for it seems to be the fashion in San Francisco restaurants to eat your salad before your soup. The restaurant is a gay place, crowded. Late-comers must find their way elsewhere. And the food is surprisingly good.
But we best remember a little restaurant just back of the California market in Pine street—into which we stumbled of a Saturday night just about dinner-time. It was an unpretentious place, with two musicians fiddling for dear life in a tiny balcony. But the table d'hôte—price one dollar, with a bottle of California wine after the fashion of all San Francisco table d'hôtes—was perfection, the special dishes which the waiter suggested even finer. Soupe l'oignon that might linger in the mind for a long time, a marvelous combination salad, chicken bonne femme—which translated meant a chicken pulled apart, then cooked with artichokes in a casserole, the whole smothered with a wonderful brown gravy—there was a dinner, absolute in its simplicity yet leaving nothing whatsoever to be wished. And a long time later we read that Maurice Baring, author and globe-trotter, had visited the place and pronounced its cookery the finest that he had ever tasted.
The Mission Dolores—San Francisco