Diary 6|23|2017: Grand Old Restaurants In San Francisco.

[title type="h2"]Leaving One's Heart In San Francisco. [/title] During mid-June this year all three generations of my family--starting with my wife Mary Ann and me--took a vacation in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Our son Jude, his wife Suzanne, and their 18-month-old son Jackson live in Los Angeles. To and from Los Angeles I traveled by rail on Amtrak's trains #1 and #2, the Sunset Limited, whose route passes through the heart of the American Southwest. During all parts of the trip I have kept the Dining Diary rigorously. Now I'm spilling it all out, as much as I can edit every day. Here is the fifth installment. (At the ends, I'll run them all together for the many people who have asked me to do that. ) Saturday. June 24, 2017. 8:00 a.m. Jude wants us to have breakfast at the grandest hotel in San Francisco. The Palace Hotel is well named. Its largest dining room is topped by an enormous glass dome some 100 years old. Very impressive. The breakfast is served mostly in a buffet, for which the charge is over forty dollars per person. The waiter seemed to be on our side, telling us which dishes to avoid if we want the lower price than the full feed. Some of us get it, some of us don't. It's my turn to pick up the check, which pushes past the $150 line. The gang spreads out into the many stores on and around Market Street, San Francisco's answer to New Orleans's Canal Street. nearby. I split off to the nearest Walgreens, where I buy a razor and a quartet of shoe laces. I am also in need of a pair of clip-on sunglasses, but I only find that item where I don't desperately need it. 8:33 a.m. I have another goal. Market Street is served by antique streetcars. Some of them are from the same era as New Orleans's fleet on St. Charles Avenue. But I everything about those. More interesting are the 1940s-1950s modern streetcars. They looked like the General Motors transit buses that were everywhere until the 1960s. Among my geekiest interests, I'm fascinated by these machines. I spend a few minutes riding the streetcars up and down Market Street. I am particularly (and, my gang says, weirdly) in the thrall of the old streetcar doors and how they operate. Ask me about it someday. Also here are the famous SF cable cars--an entirely different and older technology, amazing and unique. But I've been on those on other trips. Meanwhile, the Marys and Jude walk around the financial and Mission districts. When we meet again, we drive down some of the steepest streets in SF. I mean some really scary ones, including the zig-zaggedy Lombard Street. We work our way back into the center of town, there to dine at Yank Sing. It's the best-known Chinese dim-sum restaurant in San Francisco. Carts roll up to your table, full of dozens of one- or two-bite appetizers of all kinds. Indeed, you have to negotiate pronto. If you don't move quickly enough to turn the waiters' offerings aside, you find yourself with another little plate to eat, one that perhaps you were thinking of asking for. This runs up a tidy $260 for our gang of six. New Orleans doesn't have anything like this (although the Royal China near Dorignac's in Metairie has an excellent if smaller assortment). Jude and Mary Ann are particularly fascinated by Yank Sing and its wares. It's been a long time since my last dinner here, and I come away with less on an impression. The jam-packed fining room is one reason for that, as is the rapid-fire moves of the waiters. But it's still engaging in its way. 3:28 p.m. We scatter after that, me to the St. Francis for a rest and to let my stomach to catch up. The planned restaurant for tonight is a vaunted Vietnamese place in the Ferry Building: The Slanted Door. I meet up with the gang after taking another streetcar to the ferry, checking out its door movements. 6:44 p.m. When I arrive at the Ferry Building, Mary Leigh and I run into one another. We walk up and down the interior and exterior halls of the place. We never found The Slanted Door. The others decide against the place anyway. We change plans. We were to have dinner tomorrow night at the Tadich Grill, the oldest restaurant in San Francisco. But we learn that the place is closed Sundays. We try to get in tonight, and we do. The Tadich Grill dates back to the 1849s. It will feel comfortable to New Orleans diners, especially those who like me have a taste for the old bistros--Galatoire's, Antoine's, Arnaud's, and Tujague's. The Tadich is more like that last one than the others, but the similarities are many. The front door is managed by the bartender and loose waiters, all of whom have a somewhat wise-guy approach. For example, one of the waiters--he looks just like New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu--tells us just stand there until all six of us had ditched the car and were now within the waiter's eyeshot. The Marys had this place figured as yet another old-pooperoo restaurant of the kind I like. So, to make its points, the Tadich had to put on a show for the Marys that we all agreed was the best dinner we had in this visit to San Francisco. Most of that magic was performed by a nicely-seared steak with some nice steakhouse sides. Jude, who put in the order, was especially thrilled, even though he had to pass the platter around. 7:33 p.m. My dinner was the best on the table. I start with a half-dozen oysters Rockefeller. As is usually the case when that dish turns up outside New Orleans, the oysters were topped with melted cheese over the classic green, buttery sauce. Different, but very good. My entree was the same one I remember having when I last ate here about twenty-five years ago. Petralé sole is a smallish local flounder found in the seas around S.F. It's small enough that it took three fish to fill the plate. The sauce was a magnificent veloute, the kind of thing I will play with at home next time I find some nice fish that might work for this concept. The waiter--an older guy who had the style I expected to find in a restaurant like this--was helpful, always on the move, and entertaining. 9:49 p.m.Back at the St. Francis, some of us go down to the pastry and coffee shop in the lobby. They bake all this in house, but that operation could use some more life. They have specialty coffees, but they're not very good at it. Most of the three days we are here, I remember that there's coffee down here--it might even be complimentary, I thought. It wasn't. U made do with the little coffee maker in the room. But even that effort is stymied. After the first morning, they never restocked the percolator again. I'm sorry to say that the St. Francis, which I have called my favorite hotel in the world, is not the hotel I remember from the 1980s-2000s, when I came this way once or twice a year to cover the wine world. On the positive side, I still love the sounds of the cable cars as they make the turn in front of the hotel all day and all night. And the beds are the most comfortable I've ever slept in. I probably will stay here again, unless MA is with me. I don't think she'd stay here again.