Bohemian San Francisco: Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining.Edwords, Clarence E. (Clarence Edgar)
History
Bohemian San Francisco: Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining.
Edwords, Clarence E. (Clarence Edgar)
Cooking; Hotels -- California -- San Francisco
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.
Here are wines from the slopes of Aetna, sparkling and sweet. Here are
wines from grapes grown on the warm slopes of Vesuvius, and brought to
early perfection by the underground fires. Here are wines from the
colder slopes of mountains; wines from Parma and from Sicily and Palermo
where the warm Italian sunshine has been the arch-chemist to bring
perfection to the fruit of the vine. Here are still wines and those that
sparkle. Here the famed Lacrima Christi, both spumanti and fresco, said
to be the finest wine made in all Italy, and the spumanti have the
unusual quality for an Italian wine of being dry. But to tell you of all
the interesting articles to be found in these Italian, and French and
Mexican stores, would be impossible, for some of them have not been
translated into English, and even the storekeepers would be at a loss
for words to explain them.
This is all a part of the Bohemianism of San Francisco, and that is why
we are telling you about it in a book that is supposed to be devoted to
the Bohemian restaurants. The fact is that San Francisco's Bohemian
restaurants would be far less interesting were it not for the fact that
they can secure the delicacies imported by these foreign storekeepers to
supply the wants of their people.
But do not think you have exhausted the wonders of Little Italy when you
have left the stores, for there is still more to see. If you were ever
in Palermo and went into the little side streets, you saw the strings of
macaroni, spaghetti and other pastes drying in the sun while children
and dogs played through and around it, giving you such a distaste for it
that you have not eaten any Italian paste since.
But in San Francisco they do things differently. There are a number of
paste factories, all good and all clean. Take that of P. Fiorini, for
instance, at a point a short distance above Costa Brothers. You cannot
miss it for it has a picture of Fiorini himself as a sign, and on it he
tells you that if you eat his paste you will get to be as fat as he is.
Go inside and you will find that Fiorini can talk just enough English to
make himself understood, while his good wife, his sole assistant, can
neither speak nor understand any but her native Italian. But that does
not bother her in the least, for she can make signs, and you can
understand them even better than you understand the English of her
husband.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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