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.
[Illustration: The Mission Dolores--San Francisco]
There are dozens of such little places in San Francisco--named after the fashion of its shops in grotesque or poetic fashion--and they are almost all of them good. There is little excuse for anything else in a town whose very cosmopolitanism proclaims real cooks in the making, whose wharves are rubbed by smack and schooner bringing in the food treasures of the sea, whose farms are vast truck gardens for the land, whose markets run riot in the richest of edibles. Your San Franciscan is nothing if not an epicure. It is hardly fair, however, to assume that he is a glutton or that he merely lives to eat. For he is, in reality, so very much more--optimistic, generous, brave--and how he does delight to experiment. California is still in the throes of what seems to be a social and political earthquake, with each shake growing a little more rough than its predecessor. She has just overturned most of her political ideals for the first fifty years of her life. She delights in politics. She really lives. San Francisco, standing between those two great schools of thought, the University of California at Berkeley, and Leland Stanford University at Palo Alto, prides herself upon her growing intellectuality. From the folk who dally with advanced thought of every sort down to those who are merely puzzled and dissatisfied, the population of this Californian metropolis demands a new order of things. That as much as anything else explains the recent political revolutions. Since the great fire, the plans for those revolutions have been under progress.