By Donald H. Harrison
SAN FRANCISCO – In previous articles in this West Coast travel and sightseeing series, I have described visits to such Bay Area attractions as Alcatraz, the presidential yacht USS Potomac, the California Academy of Sciences, the Jewish Contemporary Museum, and the Wells Fargo Museum.
Before taking leave of San Francisco, however, and moving on to describe the high points of our journey by the cruise ship Sea Princess to British Columbia and Alaska, permit me to pause to write about getting around in the Bay area, the place we stayed, and an unusual restaurant where we ate.
Cable cars and street cars will take you through most of San Francisco. During the day they can become quite crowded, typically resulting in a good part of your journey hanging onto a pole or a strap – not unlike the San Diego Trolley after a special event. There is an interesting multiplicity of ethnicities in San Francisco. Listening to tourists and residents speak among themselves in so many varieties of languages, seeing their different modes of dress, and watching their little children all combine to make the scenery inside the cars at least as interesting as that outside. Unless you fear crowds, I’d recommend a cable car or street car ride just for this experience.
To visit venues outside San Francisco, but within the San Francisco Bay Area, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system is typically fast and efficient. The cars on BART trains are bigger and have more seats than the trolleys and streetcars, so you don’t always get that same sense of intimacy.
The route maps in every BART car make travel from one point to another quite simple. The names of stations are called over a train-wide loudspeaker, but often it is hard to make out the words being spoken. A more reliable way to know exactly where you are is to look out the window at the station platforms, where their names are typically well signed.
When we went to Alcatraz, we took another form of transportation: a ferry operated by Hornblower Cruises, the same company which offers harbor excursions in San Diego. The crossing to Alcatraz from the Fisherman’s Wharf area provides pleasing views of the San Francisco skyline, and of various San Francisco Bay bridges. A word of caution: be prepared for the possibility of whipping winds during the crossing from San Francisco to the prison island. One of the local jokes is that winter is never so cold in San Francisco as on a summer day on the Bay.
Always appreciative of a bargain, Nancy, grandson Shor, and I stayed at the 138-room Comfort Inn in San Francisco, located at Van Ness and Lombard at the border of the Russian Hill and the Marina District of San Francisco. Owning a home or renting an apartment in either of these sections of the city can be pretty pricy, but this high rise Comfort Inn is moderate in rates, compared to, say, the hotels at Union Square.
The Comfort Inn offers views of the Golden Gate Bridge, is but a three-block walk from the world-famous curvaceous section of Lombard Street, and is on main streetcar lines offering ready access to other parts of the city, according to Henrietta Weiner, the half-Jewish, half-Filipina marketing director.
Weiner adds that an American breakfast buffet is included in the price of the hotel room, and guests are likely to meet tour groups from other countries staying at the hotel. It was our pleasure to encounter about 40 Israelis, most of them from the Hadera area, in the middle of their tour of the American West Coast. From San Francisco, they were to head down the coast to stay a few days in Los Angeles and go on to San Diego.
San Francisco is a restaurant town, and wherever we were, it seemed, there were good restaurants nearby. After leaving the California Academy of Sciences, a walk down nearby Ninth Street brought a wide variety of ethnic restaurants into view. However, San Francisco history and literature were on our menu: An American style steak and chophouse, located only a few blocks from the Contemporary Jewish Museum, is John’s Grill, which not only boasts sophisticated cuisine but has good literary yichus.
Today the three-story restaurant’s “Maltese Falcon Room” is headquarters for the Dashiell Hammett Society of San Francisco, an organization devoted to the literary works of mystery writer Hammett and to a far lesser extent his San Francisco contemporaries, including his longtime lover, the Jewish writer Lillian Hellman. John’s Grill is owned by John Konstin, now in middle age, who has been working at the restaurant since he was 8. The walls of the restaurant are covered with portrait photos of San Francisco writers, law enforcement and fire officials, as well as political and show business celebrities.
Founded in 1908, John’s Grill boasts a menu item that Hammett himself wrote about in the celebrated detective story The Maltese Falcon. As recalled on the menu, Hammett wrote: “Sam Spade went to John’s Grill, asked the waiter to hurry his order of chops, baked potato, sliced tomatoes, and was smoking a cigarette with his coffee when…”
That teaser was enough to persuade me to try “Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops,” which were served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes. Up to the point that I had read that —always looking for a Jewish angle—I had been considering ordering the Grill’s “Chicken Jerusalem,” sautéed with artichokes, mushrooms and creamy white wine sauce. This selection had drawn a write-up from Gourmet Magazine.
Nancy meanwhile had “John’s Steak,” described as a “thick prime bone-in New York” whereas Shor went for the “Grilled Pacific Red Snapper” in lemon butter sauce.
While I didn’t order it, I couldn’t help noting a house drink named by the California Historical Society as the “Bloody Brigid.” There was this explanation on the menu: “Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s partner was done in by Bridgid O’Shaughnessy at the blind end of Burritt Street just west of the overpass ‘where Bush roofs Stockton Street.’ (As told by Dashiell Hammett in his famous novel, The Maltese Falcon.)”
Among the accomplishments of the Dashiell Hammett Society was to lay out a Sam Spade tour of San Francisco that visits such venues as the blind end of Burritt Street just west of the overpass.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com File: US Canada West 11