Monday, June 28, 2010

Kareuac on Food and San Francisco



San Francisco is a food hunter’s paradise; even the United Wing of the San Francisco Airport has a plethora of delights.    Jessica (my wife) and I had so many choices for lunch, there was Clam Chowder in San Francisco Sour Dough Bread Bowls, Japanese Bento lunches, mission style burritos, good micro-brews, and probably a lot more; I was unable to see it all because my senses were overwhelmed.    

Jack Kerouac wrote of the bounty of food in San Francisco:

From on the Road by Jack Kerouac (Part Two - Chapter Ten)
In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco.   There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths roasted dry and good enough to eat too.  Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu, and I'd eat it; let me smell the butter and lobster claws.  There were places where hamburgers sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel.  And oh, that pan fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman's Wharf- nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market street chili beans, red-hot, and french-fried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausalito across the bay, and that's ah-dream of San Francisco.  Add fog, hunger making, raw fog, and the throb of neons in the soft night, the clack of high heeled beauties, white doves in a Chinese grocery window.

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