A Big Night in North Beach

There are those of us gifted with the ability to cook meals that titillate the taste buds and those of us that are begged to stay out of the kitchen. I ashamedly admit that I fall into the latter category. An example: a few weeks ago I was preparing to come to Eating San Francisco while simultaneously making dinner. Between reading and stirring, reading won out, and I forgot that I had left something on the stove. By the time I closed my book and returned to the kitchen, smoke was billowing out of the pot and I could barely see three inches in front of my face. I frantically spent the remaining minutes before class using a towel to blow smoke out the window, leaving me dinnerless and reeking of burnt food. What a nice way to start off a class about eating!
As a result, this is my attempt at a recipe about food without food:

Recipe for a story on an “authentic” Italian experience in North Beach:

Ingredients:
1 movie on Italian cuisine to whet your appetite
27 pages of reading on said movie and on mafia families’ relationship to Italian food (to understand that eating Italian is serious business)
28 pages of reading on North Beach’s Beat Generation and on the poetic transformation of San Francisco (to properly assess the transformation of the North Beach culture from starving artist hub to tourist trap)
1 camera
1 adventurous spirit
1 large appetite
1 professor with money

In a small bowl, beat together movie and pages until fully comprehended. Let sit for a week or two.
In a larger bowl, beat together camera, adventurous spirit, appetite and professor (gently). Combine remaining ingredients and place in oven at 65º from 6:15 pm to 9:00 pm. Enjoy.

Trekking

I came to North Beach with my small bowl of movie and pages fully comprehended, prepared absorb the rest of my ingredients with gusto and reporter-like attentiveness. First stop: City Lights. Having visited City Lights multiple times before, the setting itself was nothing new, but this experience would be. I’d only just learned from the first half of my recipe that two of the Beat Generation’s premier writers—Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—had their poems and novels published by City Lights Publications. One of Ginsberg’s book of poems was so controversial that City Lights founder and proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested on charges of selling “obscene material”. Eventually winning the case, City Lights became an advocate for free speech. With this interesting piece of history in mind, I was excited to examine City Lights from a new perspective, seeing what details and glimpses of stories I might have overlooked before.

However, finding parking proved difficult in North Beach (no way!) and my carpool and I arrived late. I lost my opportunity to rendezvous at City Lights, which I think is the figurative cooking equivalent of leaving the food on the stove too long. Intent on salvaging this meal, I hurried instead to meet the class at our next location—Bocci, an out-of-the-way, group friendly, moderately priced Italian restaurant. Just in time to order, I politely asked the waiter posing as Italian for the spinach raviolis. Having watched Big Night (1996) a week or so prior, my appetite for Italian food grew voracious, and I simply couldn’t wait for North Beach. Halfway between watching Big Night and visiting North Beach, I ate at another Italian restaurant, Il Fornaio and ordered raviolis there as well. Even though the cost of the raviolis at Il Fornaio was about three times that at Bocci, the Bocci raviolis proved far more delectable. Here, my appetite for Italian food was finally satiated.

The Family - Here's dad teaching all us kids valuable life lessons about Italian food.

After my meal, I made a point of using the restroom, which is something I usually do whenever I go out to eat. I have a theory that you can determine the overall cleanliness of a restaurant by how clean they keep their bathrooms. This is where you can determine a restaurant’s true devotion (or lack thereof) to cleanliness. One out-of-order toilet and what appears to be old (possibly original?) pluming. While the pink walls and doors might be a bit overbearing, the sinks and floors are clean: pass.

Toilet - Talk about a pink bathroom. This one's out of order.

To top off a night of excessive starch consumption, the class and I made our way to the Italian French Bakery in search of more free bread. One of the first things I noticed upon entering the Italian French Bakery was that NO ONE there was Italian or French (Well what did I expect? This is San Francisco). The owner, a Chinese man, did delve a bit into the immigration aspect of North Beach while he showed us the massive brick ovens in which they baked their bread. Apparently these ovens are almost the last of their kind in San Francisco, because the newer ovens are built to be more earthquake safe. As a parting gift, the owner gladly gave us the free bread we were looking for, and the class and I went to Washington square to munch and talk about our assignment before heading home. All ingredients combined and baked at the scorching temperature of 65º, I do believe I make a pretty damn good figurative meal, even if I burnt it a little at the beginning. Practice makes perfect, right? Hopefully my next figurative meal will come out flawless.