San Francisco has great food and lots of culture but our recent trip there, wonderful as it was, told me something about food culture.
We went to some great restaurants. La Ciccia won top honors with its authentic Sardinian cuisine. The octopus stew in its incredibly rich and concentrated tomato sauce was one of the best dishes I've ever eaten. The mild seafood flavor rounded out the tomato and the actual octopus was tender and fresh. Andrea had a pasta dish with pork that was also exquisite. The restaurant was crowded and tight but the atmosphere was buoyant and the decor classy. The ceramic works of a Sardinian artist, cleverly framed in wood, brightened the gray-brown walls. The warm welcome from co-owner Lorella Degan made us immediately comfortable even though we had to wait for our table (the complimentary prosecco also eased the pain) and her chef husband, Massimiliano Conti (the Sardinian half of the couple, she is from Venice), visited our table so I could be the umpteenth guest to tell him how wonderful the octopus was.
The warmth and genuineness of this restaurant in out-of-the-way Noe Valley stayed with us in our subsequent meals. La Fringale, a French Basque restaurant in SoMa, had a similar feel to it, though perhaps a little less Old World. I went for the duck confit with Du Puy lentils and was not disappointed -- every bit as good as the confit I've had in France.
The meal in the middle was at Range, a trendy Mission restaurant. The food was good -- I had a delicious halibut poached in olive oil -- but this is where we came crashing up against the difference between food culture and culture. We were crammed into a bench that was essentially a hallway connecting the front bar area to the rear dining room and there was a guy at one of the tables there who persisted in talking to his table companions in a voice so loud it virtually made any other conversation in the area impossible. It was rude beyond belief and when we remarked to the waitress we had never seen anything quite so crude in a restaurant, she sighed and said she sees it all the time. She had spent some time in Paris and wondered at the the civil behavior of restaurant patrons. There was no loud talking, no high-fives, no high-pitched laughter. "I said to myself, that's the way it should be," she concluded. No sooner had the obnoxious guy left than three young women sat down at another table in our area and proceeded to squeal and giggle in a way that would be embarrassing in a home but was incredibly inconsiderate in a restaurant. And yes, they had a round of high-fives. The fact is, with restaurants designed to reflect noise to create a "buzz" and loud piped music considered necessary to convey hipness, a place like Range is destined to stimulate this kind of behavior. The guests are lacking in culture, for sure, but the fault lies ultimately with the restaurant management. To me, it was no coincidence that the behavior in the Old World restaurants was more civil because the ambiance was so much more civil.
We had great experiences with breakfasts and lunches as well at the Tartine Bakery (a great pastrami sandwich and quiche), Craftsman & Wolves (the Rebel Within, a semi-hardboiled egg baked into a sausage muffin, has to be eaten to be believed) and some others to come.
