TRAVEL SPECIAL ..................Summer of Loaves

Summer of Loaves

                                                                           



San Francisco offers much more than the touristy delights of clam chowder.
Haight-Ashbury, the hippie enclave for one, is now a gourmet-chic destination

Strangely, it is not the Golden Gate, not even Boudin's sour dough bread or clam chowder on the pier that's on my mind as the plane touches down on the tarmac in San Francisco. In stead, all I am thinking of is, well, weirdly enough, scones! At Heathrow's Galleries lounge, where I have stayed firmly put -skipping London's summer rush, for almost half a day's worth of doing nothing but gorge on champagne, WiFi, food and the British press -the highlight has been a high tea of sorts in true Brit style. The scones have stolen the show warm, buttery, with real clotted cream; not the flaky glazed kind that have been fashionable the world over for a while now. The treat has been repeated at 30,000 feet on the BA flight, and despite a dry mouth and a palate unable to taste very much besides Tattinger, I have found the carb comfort so, literally, heady that I can't get the memory out of my mind.

As it turns out, scones are not so inappropriate even on the other side of the Atlantic. Frisco, the epicentre of so many gourmet fads -right from those food trucks to Edison-bulb-lit, stripped-down bars and organic lattes -is high on British style high teas just now. And scones form part of virtually every fashionable menu.

Tea rooms abound -from Lovejoy's Tea Room on Church Street, done up like an intimate European parlour, to Dartealing that serves up robust fish and chips alongside scones and wafer thin sandwiches even as you watch a Giant's game. Also, there are places like at the Palace Hotel, with its high ceilings, crystal chandeliers and heritage art works, that offer you charm ing 3 o'clock ceremonies of dainty porcelain cups alongside silver trays piled up with all that nosh you associate with British aristocracy. But then Frisco is perhaps the most European town on this continent, and this is just one of its laidback charms that you discover when you go beyond the touristy.

Culture Counter

Back to basics and tradition may be a current trend. But San Francisco's soul has always been entrenched in its counterculture. This after all has been home to the world's first gaybourhood in Castro, to the Beat gen bohemia in North Beach and to, of course, the hippie movement.

Haight-Ashbury, one of the world's most famous neighbourhoods after that Summer of Love, is now a tourist magnet.The erstwhile hippies have long sold their Victorian houses and while it may be possible to buy some of their psychedelic trance -as also rock, punk, indie -at Amoeba Music, a store that has the biggest music record collections you are ever likely to encounter, there are fewer chances of you finding the “stuff“ unsolicited on the streets or even in cafes and bars in this neighbourhood, once dubbed “Hashbury“.

What Ashbury seems to have turned into, instead, is a gourmet-chic destination. The liberalism that it celebrates today has more to do with pushing culinary boundaries than personal ones. It is a good idea to walk through the district, delving into the unexpected pleasures of its many trendy, boutique-y but cutting-edge dining spaces.

Bacon Bacon lies at the very edge of Ashbury, almost in Mission District. It's a food truck now turned into a café. The décor is basic: bar-style tables and stools, menu on the board over the counter, a big rocking pig on which you can get cheeky pictures clicked! The idea behind the café is simple too, as its name suggests. You can come here for breakfast, lunch and dinner and eat, well, bacon -in different forms.

The idea of single-ingredient restaurants and cafes is emerging as a hot new trend globally.And the popularity of bacon refuses to fade away. It is one of the hottest ingredients that chefs love to play with. At Bacon Bacon, you see evidence of all the quirky possibilities. From triple pork tacos to, well, homemade bacon scones (yes, we told you, they are hot property), the café cooks everything on its menu with 2,000 pounds of its salty preferred meat every month! Bacon Bacon's neighbours tried to shut it down because of the smell of pork that hung in the air -though one can't understand what that fuss may have been about! At the Citrus Club, the ingredients in focus are again simple and to-the-point: Noodles and citrus juice. Post a night of hectic partying, this seems the go-to place for your bowl of comfort ramen, except that the noodles -scores of different kinds -are all cooked in citrus juice instead of oil! Well, health is always a trend in this part of the world.

Back to Classics

In the 1980s, cafes at Ashbury became centres for San Francisco's comedy scene. Several well-known careers were launched, including that of Whoopi Goldberg and the late Robin Williams. The Other Café, where both started out, does not exist today. But there are other cafes and bars that replicate that casual, chatty, arty vibe.

Alembic is the trendiest of the lot. A pioneer of the craft cocktail movement, this one has a deliberately uncultivated garden, where fresh herbs (not what you think; lemon-basil, pineapple-sage, and many such `double flavours') are grown. The herbs find their way into near perfect drinks using only fresh ingredients. Half the menu is devoted to the 1920s style Classics (they do their Old Fashioned with a local Bourbon, obtained by the barrel). The other half comprises of “new school“ tipples such as the Bait and Switch (a fruity and smoky mix of mescal, Chareau Aloe Liqueur, strawberries, lemon juice, peppercorn syrup and green strawberry bitters). Bar snacks could be the likes of pickled quail eggs, and duck heart (a special here). It's a great hangout for all kinds of people -ageing hippies, cocktail fanatics, locals and luckily very few tourists.

But the hottest trend in Haight-Ashbury has to be food halls. Trucks are almost passé -what with the inconvenience of having to keep up with their impermanence. Food halls that incubate small, often quirky businesses are the latest buzzword.

The famous Red Vic Movie House, the only one in the city to be owned and oper ated by workers till it closed down some years ago, is now a food hall offering tastings of everything from Russian peroshki (baked dumplings) to organic ice-creams, buckwheat crepes and raw, cold-pressed juice personally mixed by an “alchemist“ who has a near magical, herbal cure for anything from hangovers to old age! All these are independent businesses, testing the waters as it were before striking out in bigger formats. The food hall has a theatre, where some of these -and other -experi ences can be savoured in close groups, much unlike the mayhem and hustle bustle of what you may find at the Ferry building, Frisco icon and the biggest possible food marts around with all manner of bespoke, artisnal stuff available.

Two Sides...

One way to see San Francisco is to do all the things most people descend here to do -take a boat tour to the Alcatraz, see the sea lions, stay put on pier 39, drive down the “world's most crooked street“ and eat at all the fancy Michelin rated restaurants that have made vegan, raw, local gastronomy and the like very very fashionable.

The other way to do it is to just wander around, may be take a lazy ride on the cable car, layer up and breathe in the spirit of this 7x7 city, alternating in the warmth of the sun and the chill of the cold wind from the Bay. If you choose to do the latter, the results are far more rewarding. What becomes evident almost at once is the laissez faire attitude of the city -where the very names of establish ments, of stores and restaurants, proclaim that sense of quirky, individualistic fun that once made Frisco famous.

In Castro, where the rainbow flag flutters in the wind proudly and where the names of LGBT activists are inscribed on stars on the street walkways, the wittiest nameboard I encounter is: “Does your mother know?“ It's the name of a shop selling, well, adult stuff. Naturally. There are scores of gay bars that you could walk into at dusk, including The Twin Peaks, a Frisco institution, the first gay bar in the world to have full-length glass windows. Before that these were dingy, dark holes, where men would go surreptitiously for a drink and company, fearful that their genteel landlady may spot them in that den of vice and render them without a roof on their heads.

In North Beach, the other liberal enclave steeped in colourful history, sandwich places like The Naked Lunch summon up memories of the Beat poets, the post World War II generation of bohemians and writers who rejected boundaries both in fact and fiction. City Lights, the iconic bookstore (and publisher; Ferlinghetti's press produced works such as Howl and The Naked Lunch) still stands sentinel at one corner. Restaurants like the Stinking Rose, a garlic-only restaurant -everything from starters to desser t has copious amounts of the ingredient -push boundaries, proclaiming on free takeaway postcards that it is “chic to stink“. But really where I find myself heading back every day is to Ashbury. There's a laidback-ness to the district that defies all American stereotypes. The last of legit neighbourhood cafes still exist, in the face of Starbucks-isation. And their names say it all. Coffee To The People and Central Café are both congregation points for the local community. You can have a veg lasagne, strong coffee, read a radical book, and possibly pass around a petition or two for your pet cause. For a taste of the yesteryears, this is the only place to be.

Anoothi Vishal

ETM19APR15