My first morning in San Francisco, I awoke in the dark, somewhat neurotic and crazed, at about 4:00. I had been dreaming about wandering the streets of this unfamiliar city throughout the night. My companions were River and his brother Noah, who were jovially skateboarding everywhere we went, and Pedraum Pardehpoosh, a Palo Alto resident who participated in our weekend series of meetings. In the dream, Pedraum was photoblogging, using his camera cell phone to upload straight to his blog. I don’t know what the point of all this was, but it felt hectic and tiring. Waking up was a relief, although it was to the black interior of a third-floor Days Inn room at the fringe of the Castro District.
By 7:00, River and I were ready to head out and find some coffee. Grey skies and drizzle greeted us as we headed east on Grove Street and south on Gough. Jet-lagged and confused, and a bit emotionally frazzled from all the open-ended questions that had emerged from our short Web meeting the prior night, the only thing we knew for sure was that a hot cup of java would solve all problems for the short term.
Forty rain-soaked and argument-filled minutes later, we had walked a complete loop around several city blocks only to return to an inviting-looking bakery storefront window. We had spotted the place on our first pass, but it was closed, set to open at 8:00. The proprietor, a French man named Marc, opened the door on this, our second pass, and said, “Would you like to come in?”
Our sad, puppy-dog faces must have done the trick. We walked into the small, somewhat cluttered foyer, welcomed by the sound of NPR’s Weekend Edition blaring over the café’s sound system, and the aroma of strong, dark French roast invading our heads. Marc said, “All you have to do is knock on the window, I’ll let you in.” If only we had known this earlier, it could have spared us a lot of aimless wandering, thinking that in the Civic Center district we’d find a place catering to an early-morning set.
We ordered two large French roasts and settled down at a table in the second, crimson-painted, larger room. Marc changed the news to music. We stared at the several chalkboards on the wall with curly handwriting, trying to decide what to eat. Our French roasts were ready in the other room, waiting on the counter. River got up to retrieve them, and then motioned me over.
The coffees were served in cereal-bowl sized ceramic containers. I immediately felt I had been transported to heaven. I had been served coffee this way before, but only in Europe and New York City. We carefully dripped a bit of cream into the coffees and then went back to our table to indulge. The wonderful thing about drinking strong coffee out of a bowl is that it is like going back to the womb.
Next we ordered an “omelette,” which was more like a soufflé, in that it was served very puffy and contained, overturned onto a very large plate with a huge bed of dressed salad greens, tomatoes, red peppers, and cucumber. The egg-thing itself contained goat cheese, onion, black olive and red pepper. We were overwhelmed with how good it tasted. I had a cheese danish on the side too, and the whole combination was almost too much to bear.
In retrospect it’s not clear to me if it really was the food that was so good, or the fact that it represented a rescue–from ourselves, from the rain, from each other. Regardless it was paradise, for a little while.