San Francisco
02 & 03 April 2024
My formative experience of the motorcycle repair and maintenance industry was at Mick Bull’s in Derby. ‘Bully’ was a ‘bike-breaker’ in the sense he would buy written-off bikes from insurance companies and pick the carcasses clean of anything that could be flogged.
He was years ahead of EasyJet and their algorithmic 'dynamic pricing’ model whereby fares fluctuate depending on several factors, all unseen to the customer. He just made up prices on the spot, depending on how much he thought you’d pay and what he had in stock.
Mick was famously short-tempered with a rumoured drink problem, scurrilously peddled by Bob Tate of Burton Bike Bits, a local rival with a taste for alliteration. Overexposure to impoverished youths wanting clutch levers for their 'Fizzie’s' (Yamaha FS1Es) and other mopeds had taken its toll. Everyone would wail about the price set by Mick, whereupon he would suggest they “Fuck off down to Palin’s and buy it new then”, Palin’s being the local main dealer for most Japanese bikes, before the hapless customer would carefully count out the sum demanded of them.
Forty-four years later, BMW San Francisco is an altogether different proposition. Mario has responded promptly by email to all my enquiries. They are used to visitors from far and wide in different time-zones. Requisite parts have been pre-ordered and they are expecting me as I ride up the ramp to the spotless service bay off Bryant Street in the Tenderloin District of the city. The showroom is plusher than most hotel lobbies. The new bikes are immaculately displayed and the clothing merchandised like a Bond Street boutique. All this comes at a price. New tyres and a minor service is north of $1200. I wonder: does Mick Bull have a long-lost Mexican relative, Miguel Toro, living nearby?
Taking an Uber to my hotel on Nob Hill - Hampstead or Highgate would be its London cousins - the scale of the homelessness I’d read about is truly shocking. Tenderloin has always been a bit sketchy, but stepping over vagrants on Hyde Street (one of the two famous cable car streets) would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
My friend Tom has been in touch to say how much he is enjoying these posts. Given he’s a professional writer and accomplished photographer to boot, this is high praise indeed. One of his many constructive comments is I haven’t wanged on too much about high-end restaurants, so the articles are more inclusive and relevant to a wider audience. Sorry Tom, that’s going to change with this one.
Going back a night, I was a walk-in at the Michelin-listed Montrio Bistro in Monterrey for a Lobster Bisque with fennel confit and chervil that was like mainlining distilled ozone, cut with the fermented contents of the scraps bin from the River Cafe.
Next up was a local, Grimaud Farms duck breast, pan-seared with a wildberry sauce on a timbale of Bok Choy, wild mushrooms, pancetta, shallots and fingerling potatoes: a Top-10, Best-Ever experience. Both dishes were so brilliant, I yielded to the temptation of a flourless chocolate torte with pistachio. Very good it was too but I’m not really into desserts. It must be an age thing…
Back to this Tuesday evening, De Popolo is a pizza restaurant near my hotel and again, Michelin-listed with good reason. Raucous and welcoming with a soundtrack provided by The Cure, Nirvana and Echo & the Bunnymen, it’s inexpensive by San Franciscan standards but still $75 for a pizza and two glasses of wine, tax & the now-expected 20% service charge.
But what a pizza…Having long been of the view that the American Hot at the UK’s innumerable Pizza Expresses is unimprovable, I’m now forced to concede that Popolo’s Salsiccia with sausage, mozzarella, pecorino, mustard greens and Castelvetrano olives has the edge.
Earlier in the evening, I’d dropped into ‘Liquid Gold’ a craft ale bar on Nob Hill and tried two of the thirty-one beers on tap. ‘Pliny the Elder’ a West Coast Double IPA from Russian River and ‘Ferris Whale’ a ‘foggy, triple IPA’ from Santa Cruz
America in general and California in particular have really upped their game in the brewing department and also have a keen marketers eye for the naming of their beers. The claim that “English beer is the best in the world’ no longer rings true and names like 'Pride, 'Pedigree' and 'Old Peculiar' don't stoke anticipation and curiosity in the same way that 'Lord Whangdoodle; Churro Chapacabra 2023' and others do.
The main event for this trip to San Francisco though, is a reservation at Chez Panisse at the children’s tea-time hour of 17:45.
Bereft of a Michelin star since 2010, it’s still ambitiously priced at $175 a head (plus booze, tax & service, naturally…) for a four-course, no-choice menu. I’ve tried to get a reservation every time I visited the Bay Area in the last thirty years to no avail, so not about to start carping over the hour. This time was all that was available when I reserved thirty days previously when the book opened for Wednesday 3rd April.
Located in Berkeley, the university-town cum liberal ghetto over the Bay Bridge, the restaurant opened in 1971 under the guidance of author and food activist Alice Waters. It has been celebrated as one of the originators of California cuisine and the farm-to-table movement ever since.
The menu is decided about a week in advance so as of a few days ago, I know I’ll be getting this and will be about $300 poorer as a result:
Warm asparagus salad with mustard vinaigrette, hazelnuts, and Parmesan
Northern halibut with wild fennel beurre blanc, spinach, and turnips
Grilled Sonoma County duck breast à l’orange; with baby carrots, sautéed mustard greens, rutabaga purée, and herb salad
Strawberry savarin with Pixie tangerines
So, was it worth it? In a word and with the proviso that no single meal can ever really be worth $320, the answer is “Yes”.
The little log-cabin sits on the outskirts of town. On entry, you wait in a narrow corridor along with other diners waiting expectantly to be collected. A nice lady says how much she likes my boots. I explain they are made by a French company, Hardrige, who supply the French Army and so are particularly well-suited to marching backwards. They titter politely but this is Berkeley after all. In Texas, you’d just get a “Huh?”
No item of apparel I’ve owned has attracted more comments than these boots. Back in the Mick Bull days, I did own a white leather jacket but reaction to that was uniformly derisive. Entering the Silk Mill one evening, a notorious bikers’ lair in Derby, the barman took one look at me and just said: “Fuck off Trevor”.
Anyhow, her companion has eight motorcycles and is pleased I’m going north on Highway 1 the next day. He firmly believes it’s a better ride than the more famous stretch, south of Monterrey. We wish each other a good dinner as a fresh-faced, pretty young woman invites me to my table and draws back the curtain that separates the vestibule from the temple itself…
It’s a lovely space of only perhaps 20 covers which goes some way to explain why it’s so damn hard to get a reservation and why it costs what it does. At one end is an open kitchen where a busy but unstressed brigade go about their work. The dining room is panelled in presumably local redwood and the furniture is simple and elegant, possibly of Northern European design. The lighting is subdued bathing the diners in a flattering glow while a blend of aimless urban jazz burbles in the background. I’d never listen to this out of choice but it works in this setting. In many respects, it’s reminiscent of another great favourite of mine, Union Square Cafe in New York
And as to the food, it’s the only restaurant I’ve visited where I feel lighter coming out than going in, such is the euphoric sense of well-being it promotes. There is no spume or foam in evidence, no centrifuges or water bath but I suspect tweezers are used to prepare the beautiful plates. Every ingredient has received a minimal amount of human intervention from field to fork and just tastes cleaner and brighter as a result.
The waiting staff are all between 20 and 60 and evenly divided along gender lines. All look as if they are force-fed the menu every day as they glow with health and happiness. Apart from their uniform white shirts and black trousers, they are indistinguishable from the customers and how rare is that? The late AA Gill lamented that few waiters could afford to eat in the restaurants they worked in. On the whole, he’s surely right but the evidence here in the form of the high prices, statements about staff welfare on the menu and the staff themselves suggests they are being properly paid.
I’m not surprised they’ve lost their Michelin star as this is a restaurant that aims to please customers and not jaded critics. I’m sure I could have enjoyed exactly the same meal in 1971. The changelessness is the point of Chez Panisse, just as it is with Union Square Cafe. Here, one dish - the seared cube of Ahi Tuna - has been on the menu every day since opening in 1985. It was taken off one evening and they nearly had a riot on their hands so was reinstated by lunchtime the following day.
Walking back to the BART stop, I pop into the Triple Rock Brewery and chat to Bryan at the bar. He's a website accessibility guru, ensuring those with any impairments can use the internet easily. A noble calling and one nobody can impugn. I explained I had some recent negative experiences with his profession and he agreed some in his trade - the public sector in particular - are overzealous.
Before dinner, I’d walked around the block and nosed in a Realtor’s (estate agent’s) window. I mention to Bryan how stunned I was to see that a one-bed, one-bath property, ‘modest’ in agent-speak and just plain crappy to the rest of us, in an area light-years away from the first signs of gentrification, costs $800,000.
Bryan traces this back to the 1970s when Ronald Reagan was governor. He passed a law pegging property taxes to the historic price paid, galvanising the support of this wealthy but liberal state. Thus, a handsome mansion on Russian Hill (think St John's Wood for the London equivalent...) bought for $50,000 in 1900 would still be assessed on this figure rather than the $20 million plus it would fetch now, assuming it was bequeathed down the generations and never sold.
The effect of this is nobody sells property if they can avoid it, crimping supply and inducing an inevitable steepling of prices while constraining the tax revenue raised by the state. This is highly significant as property taxes are a far higher proportion of overall taxation in the US than they are in the UK, for example. This partly answers the conundrum of how California, which would be the 14th richest country on earth if it were an independent state, is permanently skint.
In centuries to come, our descendants will look back, utterly mystified by the quite dreadful, blinkered, self-serving, expedient decisions taken ostensibly on our behalf by the very people who convinced us they could see around corners when they had no better handle on what was going on than the rest of us.
One of the very best song lyrics from the last twenty years is from Don Henley of The Eagles, who nailed the haughty, vaulting overconfidence and hollow wisdom of the ‘first world’ political class with this gem in ‘Long Road Out of Eden’:
“Captains of the old order, clinging to the reigns
Assuring us these pains inside are only growing pains”
Back on the BART, I meet Jeffrey as he asks me how to get back to the city, now the direct trains have stopped. I explain I am a visitor but think I’ve figured it out. Jeffrey is 67 years old, walks with some difficulty, is dyslexic, Jewish, and gay; a veritable human smorgasbord of protected characteristics. He is also wildly, randomly funny, and a great companion for the 37-minute journey.
His ex-boyfriend also lives near London, in Addlestone. No that was another ex, Robert. The one he was thinking about lives in Amsterdam, and he needs to write to him and apologise for what happened….I didn’t ask, well actually, I couldn’t as he just carried on without pause…
He (Jeffrey, oh do keep up...) has just moved back to the city from Springfield, Illinois where he lived with his 97-year-old mother. Well, in an apartment above hers. Beautiful, it was, with two toilets. He doesn’t drive in the city as you can’t park anywhere and would never ride a motorbike… His neighbour does have a car but the car she bought gave her bedbugs. He had them too, but from not from her, oh no…. He doesn’t use Facebook much and hates Twitter. So aggressive. Unnecessary. Oh, and his mother says he talks too much and should listen more.
I tell him this is nonsense and suggest that one pernicious legacy of social media is the boring and stupid have become convinced they have something to say worth listening to, when really they should just be told to shut the fuck up and let natural raconteurs like him hold the floor. He looks delighted with my thesis and off he goes again, all the way to the Market stop where we say goodbye and I get off.
On the way back to my hotel, I pay a last visit to Liquid Gold. I can’t leave San Francisco without trying Lord Whangdoodle.
It’s an 11.5% Milk Stout that “flows like the ancient motor oil from a 1950s Chevvy pickup truck” according to my host. Even the barman are poets in this town. It does indeed have that level of viscosity and blackness with a depth of flavour and finish closer to wine than beer.
It’s delicious and the perfect end to a great evening. But as the barman solemnly intones: “After Whangdoodle, there is nowhere else to go”
Sorry, I’ve gone on a bit with this post. It’s just I’ve loved every visit to San Francisco and this has proven no exception.
So Tom, you can open your eyes again as I don’t think I’ll be experiencing the likes of this again for a while.
