The first “real” martini I ever had in America was at John’s Grill in San Francisco, a onetime hangout of Dashiell
Hammett, which was mostly why I went there.
Of course I knew what a martini was, and I’d made some myself, but I’d never
had one in a bar, because I lived in England at the time, and if you went into an English
pub back then and asked for a martini you were most likely going to end up with
a glass of warm vermouth.
And so, back in the day, in John’s Grill, I ordered a martini, and the
waiter said, “Do you want that up?” and I had absolutely no idea what he was
talking about. I said yes, because
obviously “up” was a way you could
have a martini, and if I’d said I didn’t want it up then I knew he’d have asked
me how I did want it, and I’d have
had no idea what to say. Still, when the
drink came it was exactly the way I wanted it, and the way I’d been making and
drinking them back in England, but I had no idea that I’d been drinking them “up.”
John’s Grill is still very much in business and I go there whenever I’m in
San Francisco, as I was last week. The
menu now features a specialty house cocktail, the Bloody Bridget, named by the
California historical society (go figure), consisting of sweet and sour, vodka and
soda, served over ice rather than up. I didn’t order one because I didn’t think
it sounded all that exciting, but an even better reason for not ordering - it
came in a souvenir highball glass that you got to keep. For one think I couldn’t see the glass
surviving the flight home in my hand luggage, but in any case I didn’t want to
look like the kind of rube who wants a souvenir glass. I didn’t even have a martini; I had a glass
of merlot instead. But now I discover
there actually is a souvenir martini glass too. It's probably just as well I didn’t know about it at the time – it would have
given me quite a dilemma.
San Francisco is a culinary center of heartfelt this, locally
sourced that, and sustainable the other, which is all well and good but
sometimes a bit humorless. So when the
Loved One and I saw that a French restaurant called La Bouche had Buddha’s hand
on its menu, it seemed unmissable. Buddha’s
hand is a legendary citrus fruit that I’d only ever seen in
pictures, a fruit without flesh or juice, and in this case it was served as part of a
starter with octopus and roasted garlic aioli, and it
came in long shreds like a soft, delicate, lemony spaghetti. It was
terrific. I was too cool to take a
picture of it: Bouche is a fairly sophisticated restaurant and again I didn’t
want to seem like a rube. But the thing itself looks like this:
On another
night in SF we went to a Japanese restaurant called Maru Sushi, and it so happened
that the Loved One and I had been saying to each other just a couple of days before, how come you never see
monkfish on menus anymore? It used to be the coolest and most expensive fish
around, now you never see it. Well, Maru
Sushi didn’t have the fish itself, but they did have monkfish liver – known in
Japan as ankimo - which was rolled and compressed into a sausage shape and (I'm pretty sure) poached. Again I didn’t
photograph it, but it looked very much like this, seen here in a photograph by Craig Lee of the SF Chronicle, and again it was terrific.
But
now, having done a little research I discover that eating monkfish is bad and
wrong. All the monkfish stocks are overfished, and the trawling
method used to catch most monkfish damages the ocean floor. The seafood watch
program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium has put monkfish in its “fish to avoid” category. So now I feel guilty, but at least not like a
rube.
