Where do we find such romanticism as in San Francisco? Where do we find
so many strange characters and happenings? All lending almost mystic
charm to the environment surrounding queer little restaurants, where
rare dishes are served, and where one feels that he is in foreign land,
even though he be in the center of a high representative American city.
San Francisco's cosmopolitanism is peculiar to itself. Here are
represented the nations of earth in such distinctive colonies that one
might well imagine himself possessed of the magic carpet told of in
Arabian Nights Tales, as he is transported in the twinkling of an eye
from country to country. It is but a step across a street from America
into Japan, then another step into China. Cross another street and you
are in Mexico, close neighbor to France. Around the corner lies Italy,
and from Italy you pass to Lombardy, and on to Greece. So it goes until
one feels that he has been around the world in an afternoon.
But the stepping across the street and one passes from one land to the
other, finding all the peculiar characteristics of the various countries
as indelibly fixed as if they were thousands of miles away. Speech,
manners, customs, costumes and religions change with startling rapidity,
and as you enter into the life of the nation you find that each has
brought the best of its gastronomy for your delectation.
San Francisco has called to the world for its best, and the response has
been so prompt that no country has failed to send its tribute and give
the best thought of those who cater to the men and women who know.
This aggregation of cuisinaire, gathered where is to be found a most
wonderful variety of food products in highest state of excellence, has
made San Francisco the Mecca for lovers of gustatory delights, and this
is why the name of San Francisco is known wherever men and women sit at
table.
It has taken us years of patient research to learn how these chefs
prepare their combinations of fish, flesh, fowl, and herbs, in order
that we might put them down, giving recipes of dishes whose memories
linger in the minds of world wanderers, and to which their thoughts
revert with a sigh as they partake of unsatisfactory viands in other
countries and other cosmopolitan cities.
Those to whom only the surface of things is visible are prone to express
wonder at the love and enthusiasm of the San Franciscan for his home
city. The casual visitor cannot understand the enchantment, the mystery,
the witchery that holds one; they do not know that we steal the hours
from the night to lengthen our days because the gray, whispering wraiths
of fog hold for us the very breath of life; they do not know that the
call of the wind, and of the sea, and of the air, is the inspiration
that makes San Francisco the pleasure-ground of the world.
It is this that makes San Francisco the home of Bohemia, and whether it
be in the early morning hours as one rises to greet the first gray
streaks of dawn, or as the sun drops through the Golden Gate to its
ocean bed, so slowly that it seems loth to leave; whether it be in the
broad glare of noon-day sun, or under the dazzling blaze of midnight
lights, San Francisco ever holds out her arms, wide in welcome, to those
who see more in life than the dull routine of working each day in order
that they may gain sufficient to enable them to work again on the
morrow.