Everybody's Gotta Eat

Instead of lounging around eating bonbons and wallowing in roses this Valentine's Day (which is traditionally cursed for me anyway), I got out of bed and pedalled to the Tenderloin at 9am to volunteer with some friends at Glide Memorial, bagging lunches for their meal program.

When I arrived, a sparse group of volunteers was seated on hard plastic chairs, watching the beginning of Reverend Cecil Williams' 9am service on a television being broadcast from upstairs.

We were trundled down a long dark corridor by a very large black man wearing a plastic apron and missing some teeth. We shuffled past the last seated recipients of the morning's hot meal handout in the dining room, spooning oatmeal directly from a plastic tray, and were introduced to a short man with a round chin and a squinty eye.

"I'm Popeye," he said gruffly, "because I look just like Popeye." (He did). "We're going to make 1,200 sandwiches today, people, so just put these hairnets, gloves, and aprons on, and we'll get started."

The 12 or so volunteers looked at each other apprehensively. Suddenly, a group of 40 teenagers poured in, directed loudly by a brunette woman who quickly realized that we'd do well if she directed us, too.

The teenagers began opening little lunch bags on the dozens of large folding tables and dropping cereal bars and packets of mustard into each one. Over more folding tables, six of us began to open large bags of sandwich bread.

Assembly-line style, we busted out 1,200 sandwiches in under an hour. Near the end of the sandwich-building, a volunteer came out from the kitchen, where she'd been placing sliced meat into the large flip-tubs that were then carted out to the room we were making sandwiches in.

Barbara, a schoolteacher, was a regular volunteer at Glide with her husband. We asked her how the meals were allotted--Glide serves two hot meals a day, but the 1,200 bag lunches were getting packed in huge plastic garbage bags to go elsewhere. She told us that 50 here, 30 there, would go to different organizations.

"Everyone's gotta eat, you know?" she asked as she tucked a sandwich into a plastic baggie and then placed it into another industrial-sized flip-tub.

Yes, I do know.

I am a robot

Someone just posted a comment on the blog asking, "Are you a robot?" I'm not really sure what that meant but I liked it a lot.

This morning, ie 1:30pm, I was at Trader Joe's getting a few things: a Judy's breadstick, a bottle of green juice, a blemish stick, and kitty litter. Pretty typical waitress morning stuff to get. I was shuffling around in my furry parka and flip-flops because I'd just gotten a pedicure and sipping on the tiny cup of free coffee they give you while you shop.

After the checker finished ringing up pre-made sushi for the fit lesbian couple in matching red fleece vests, army green cargo pants, black messenger purses, and Oakleys, he took one look at my purchases, and me, and asked, "You just wakin' up, girl?"

"How did you know that?" I asked. "It's one-thirty pm!"

"You know, you just all quiet, sippin' on your coffee," he smiled. I told him I was a waitress and as I left TJs (after telling him he should come to The Restaurant sometime; I just can't help myself!) I heard him say to the person in line behind me,

"I knowed she worked nights. I could just tell."

The conversation and the bustle of the grocery store fading behind me, I padded home with my bag in hand, smiling to myself because I have a secret existence here in this busy city: that of a night owl.

There are plenty of us, and you'll recognize us as the ones in the bar at 1am who aren't drunk, but chatting with the bartender sincerely about how his night is going. We're the ones in the sunglasses at the coffeeshop at 2pm, lingering over the New York Times and a bagel. The streets of San Francisco are my domain at lunchtime and before, I share moments with bike messengers and homeless people as I wander the streets just for a look (I can't get enough of this city, even though I've known it all my life), corporate types bustling through their mornings with eyes wide shut.

Coming home at midnight on a Sunday, my whole neighborhood is asleep, and once again I have the streets to myself. I never guessed working late at night would make me feel that the city belongs to me, personally, because I see it during off-peak hours.

Sometimes I have weeks where I'm sick of serving people, jealous of their shiny Christmas presents exchanged in cozy booths as I open yet another bottle of expensive Burgundy for people who are paying to ignore me. Today, though, walking calmly through a city that felt like it belonged exclusively to me, I sipped my tiny coffee and relished my existence.

A not-so-cynical Thanksgiving

Until yesterday, I hadn't any plans for Thanksgiving. I was going to stay in San Francisco and not go on a bike ride and wallow in the misery of being an orphan in my home town (my family does not "do" holidays, so to speak of) and refresh www.perezhilton.com every thirty seconds, but I was invited last minute to celebrate Thanksgiving at the Burwells' up in Healdsburg, from where I now sit as the high-powered men play pool and smoke cigars and the ladies sit on comfortable ottomans and sip juicy zinfandel.

I arrived around 3pm after taking a scenic route through the horribly constructed new downtown Windsor and past the old family farm, which Grandma sold three or so years ago to finance her retirement and her move to Oregon. Visiting Healdsburg is always bittersweet for me. It's strange to suddenly be a celebrity of sorts for being a fifth-generation Healdsburger; when grandma was growing up Healdsburg was barely a town, and when I was growing up it was not the groovy land of Diesel jeans and fine zinfandel it is now. I can't even afford to live here now but my status as built-in hick lends me a street cred that people bring up at dinner parties for an entertaining conversation tidbit.

There were twenty some-odd folks here; friends, family, and orphans like me. None of my family lives in town any more, and I don't know that my mediocre salary as a freelance writer and Restaurant Girl will ever afford me the luxury of the beautiful surroundings I'm in right now. That's okay, though, because the paths that I am following in my late twenties seem to be taking me in a direction I never thought I'd see, and I'm thankful for that. Greetings, all, and count your blessings be they large or small.

Ruthless Insouciance

As so often is the case, my day off was filled with big plans yesterday that disappeared into the stratosphere as I slept through calls from my friends urging me out of bed and on the bike (it was a gorgeous morning, and in my previous life I was a mediocre bike racer)and groggily picked up the cell only at 11am when a writer friend called to say he'd be in the city doing research for his first feature in Details magazine (congratulations!).

I rolled out of bed (only about an inch as I sleep on a mattress on the floor)and washed my face (something that I never let slide no matter how drunk/hungover I am, thanks to my mother's semi-rigorous upbringing) while boiling water for a gourdful of yerba mate. As usual, I f*****d around for way too long on www.perezhilton.com, a ridiculous website that I've been obsessed with for over a year. I don't have television and rarely watch movies, but some cruel friends of mine who know how shallow I can be plied me with trashy celebrity tabloid magazines last year until my addiction was firm and now I feel like Hollywood is my own personal comic book. I couldn't name Kate Bosworth's last movie (or any of them, for that matter) and I couldn't tell you what Nicolette Sheridan's voice sounds like, but I breathlessly follow their love lives and weight losses.

I finally made it out of the house by 1pm but only up the street for a much needed mani-pedi (where I enriched my brain with Ready Made magazine as opposed to my beloved US Weekly) and afterward lazed around the house doing god-knows-what. I know I sent some emails that must have meant something, because I have more stories assigned (for national magazines as well as San Francisco publications, hurrah!) but didn't write a word. I want to feel like I'm this very deep person but the truth is I adore my bourgeois-bohemian (boo-bo?) lifestyle, and although waiting tables is starting to take its toll on my body, the luxuries it affords me (like coming home last night and bidding on a T-Mobile Sidekick II on ebay although it doesn't even match my wireless carrier) are important to me and that makes me feel shallow as hell.

Laundry called around 5pm, and then I went to yoga until 9pm; the class size was me, another student who'd been practicing exactly as long as I have (off and on for a couple of years, more heavily in the last two months) and was at the same skill level, and the teacher. It was excellent, Wendy gave us lots of personal attention and I felt like I really improved. I left tranquilly and filled with love. In short, ready for cocktails.

I went down to The Restaurant all by my lonesome, sat at the bar, and put down a gorgeous hamburger and a serving of bread pudding with caramel ice cream. And three cocktails. I thoroughly enjoyed the (mile-long) walk home, which is absolutely unbearable after my eight-hour shifts (twice as long as a normal Restaurant shift) but after a 5,000 calorie meal felt invigorating. Nick Cave is still singing directly to me through my headphones, and I'm struck by how after almost two years of living here (which have passed by literally in the time it takes to say "I.love.city.living."), I am still struck dumb by the littlest things like a theater poster in the window of a locksmith's shop, the way the air smells at 12:13am in the fall, and the fact that you can never stop discovering little bits of beauty at least every other hour when you live in San Francisco.

Acid Tango

There´s something truly amazing about a 10-piece tango band made up of dreadlocked Argentineans all in their 20s. Last night a group of us went to see underground acid-tango group Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro play a show to release their new CD ¨Mucha Mierda.¨ There were four accordionists, four violinists, a cellist, a bassist, a pianist, and a vocalist. The accoridonists sat on plastic chairs in the front of the stage with the violinists standing behind them. To go along with the ¨A lot of shit¨ theme, the accordionists´plastic chairs had toilet seats zip-tied to them, and the playlists were written on rolls of toilet paper that hung from the low microphones.

The group was shaggy and the smell of hashish wafted through the air. The muisc was wild, untamed. I don´t know where accordions got the reputation for being dorky, but after hearing these instruments play the same notes in semi-perfect time, watching the cute boys passionately stomp the floor and coax, and slam, and shove, the tango notes from the accordions, close enough to hear the bellows slap together, was a bold realization: this is the silent soundtrack that´s playing whenever I have really, really good sex.

I´d seen a tango show before, at the famous Cafe Tortoni, when I was in Buenos Aires this summer. It was lovely, a small venue with slick, gorgeous music and glittery dancers. Last night was piano pounding, accordions shrieking in minor-note disharmony, the music teetering just on the edge of out-of-control, and sometimes the drunk singer would growl in the microphone while wearing a motorcycle helmet perched on the back of his head.

The place that tango has had in my life so far has been relegated to movies, stereotypical sultry women with roses in their hair, flingling fishneted legs about with controlled passion. Later tango, mixed with groovy electronic lounge music, graced my stereo when it was chillout time and I had friends over I wanted to impress with my hip, worldly, tastes in music. Tango in Buenos Aires is a normal part of life, a type of folkloric music that has never gone away and had a resurgence (like bluegrass in America). The passion in both in the music and in its playing, is in-your-face without boundaries like the passion for living, and loving, is here.

Now THAT'S Fusion!

I didn't think I would be posting from Buenos Aires but I have been to so many restaurants here in just two days that I had to dish some out for the rest of the world. I arrived Thursday morning after an exceptionally long coach flight, with which the details of I shall not bore you. It was hot and sunny here in Argentina's gorgeous capital, and after resting at the pad in San Telmo (the ancient, bohemian neighborhood where tango was born and where the freelance food and fashion photographer I'm visiting lives) for a couple of hours we went just round the corner for goat cheese sandwiches.


My friend "Che" (the international nickname for all Argentineans, hence the moniker Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Argentineans are so named because they say, "che" like North Americans say "hey.") is vegetarian, even though his homeland is home to the best steaks on the planet, and as I was raised vegetarian for most of my life and only started eating meat once I became Restaurant Girl, it's nice to take a break from the heaviness San Franciscan restaurant food and find a different side of Argentinean cuisine. The sandwiches were excellent and it was lovely to sit outside in the sun and watch the street.

There aren't many great sidewalk cafes I can think of in San Francisco (and if you can think of any besides the Cafe du Soleil, where I already spend a LOT of time, please let me know!) so when I get to a city that's got a sidewalk-cafe culture, I happily plop my ass down in the sun and drink coffee or wine, or both, and watch the world go by.

Yesterday Che and I had lunch at an Asian-themed restaurant in Palermo, the ritzy neighborhood right on the river with beautiful ancient trees waving over the cobbled sidewalks. Palermo reminds me of Hayes Valley or downtown San Luis Obispo with the gorgeous weather, shady trees, and cute little boutiques--there was even a Kid Robot store with some great dresses that I refrained from buying (I'm too tall for most clothes here, unfortunately). The food was great, and what I love about restaurants here is that you can get a "Menu del Dia" for something like 15 pesos (or $5) with a main course, a dessert, and a beverage (wine, water, or coffee) and it's good.


The hip-factor of the restaurants here reminds me of the San Francisco dining scene but more relaxed (and everyone's speaking Spanish). For dinner last night, Che took me to Olson, a Northern-European-themed restaurant. He had a baked goat-cheese appetizer (I think vegetarians here must eat a lot of goat cheese) and I had some little fishes (I think it might have been pickled herring) with arugula, caviar, and blanched potatoes on brioche. We both had the pumpkin-Gruyere-mandarin-mushroom risotto for our main course and an apple bread-pudding for dessert.

The bottle of Malbec Che chose do accompany dinner was a little overwhelming but I have made it a policy to always drink Malbec while in South America and he remembered that. The waiter, who had an ueber-hip mini-mullets and a hot body packed into a tight brown-and-white t-shirts like all of the waiters, brought us each a shot of vodka as a present after dinner; Che knew the hostess at the restaurant, so we had a great table, and everyone made much of the fact that it was my birthday. One vodka was infused with chiles and the other with honey.

I love how the restaurants I've been to so far feature foods from different cultures but with a decidedly Argentinean flair. Also I dig how the waiters here wear leather fanny-packs (like some hairdressers do) with all of the tools of their trade in them; there's a pocket for a notebook, a wine-key, and pens. I'd get one here except impressionable me no longer wants to work as a San Francisco waiter--now I want to move to Buenos Aires and be a starving writer. All in all, it was a great birthday.

Making Money, Spending Money

My roommate was right. When I came home from South America, I was so unsettled. I felt like I had too many possessions, led a spoiled lifestyle, and had my priorities skewed (favoring designer jeans and champagne-fueled evenings over seeing the world and connecting with myself). Her response to my bitching about accompanying her to mani-pedis and sample sales in the Marina, "You'll get used to San Francisco soon enough again."

It's true. Working 4-5 nights at the New Restaurant, I'm pulling in enough cash to have paid off my credit card and I'm working enough hours to begin the cycle of thinking, "Oh, but I deserve this.."
1) expensive dinner out
2) gratuitous fashion accessory
3) other expensive dinner out
4) new sneakers
5) expensive haircut, shampoo, and over-tip

So many servers I know get caught up in that cycle of working their ASSES off all week and not doing anything during the days besides having coffee and reading the Times, maybe a walk in the park or some other sort of exercise if they're truly motivated individuals. Because I'd been so broke since returning from South America, I'd virtuously scorned all of the excesses that servers tend to indulge in on their days off. It's like we try to spend all of the cash we made during the week on our weekends; which, amazingly enough for me this week was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday--unheard of! I've actually been able to hang out with non-server friends.

Here's the low-down on all of the money I wasted, happily, this weekend:

Friday: thought about going shopping at H&M but was still feeling virtuous about not spending money (it was only Friday, after all), so I rode my townie bike down Market Street past One Post (the BART station where all of the bike messengers hang out) and had some messenger minutes with friends I don't often see. The day was glorious (as has been the whole weekend) and I pedaled around the Ferry Building (walking my bike through until I got thrown out by the security guard) and drank some juice on the dock overlooking the bay (the one not behind the Slanted Door, but one further north). 4pm, massage at the Mindful Body. I'd been a-hurtin' for weeks and hadn't had a massage in months, so I indulged. Beginning of my spending downward spiral.

After the massage, I hopped a cab (indulgence #2) to Edo, where the fantastic Roxy had squeezed me in for a cut (indulgences #3,4,5: cut, shampoo, styling products). My friend Emiley (the bartender at Treat Street, where I spent last Saturday night) had gotten a haircut there and highly recommended Roxy. Roxy worked magic on my unruly in-between length not-curly-not-straight hair (which one of the servers at the New Restaurant recently likened to a wig), and I strolled down to Mecca to catch the last of happy hour oysters (indulgences #6-20). A dozen oysters, a martini, and a glass of champagne later, I was busily texting everyone I knew to come down and join me. A friend arrived, and we tasted through several of Mecca's appetizers, opting out of the expensive entrees and saving our money for a bottle of Flowers red table wine. It wasn't the best choice to go from drinking a gin martini (me) and a glass of Syrah (him) to drinking a red wine blend that was mainly pinot noir--my error. I should have gone with my instinct and gotten the Red Car Syrah (friend of a friend Carroll Kemp just won a Food & Wine award for "Best Wine under $20" for that wine; funnily enough it was $35 on Mecca's wine list!) but I wanted to see what Flowers could do with their mixin'. A sweet, pretty, feminine wine (indulgence #21).

After dinner (where we had excellent service, even by Restaurant Girl's scrupulous standards) we headed up to North Beach for a Fernet and Cola (a disgusting drink that is popular in Argentina, and I don't know why I ordered it. Fernet should be sipped straight or shot directly after work, and after work only).

Saturday was a leisurely stroll through the park to the Upper Haight for breakfast at Squat & Gobble. Upper Haight street always makes me want to shop and yesterday was no exception. Over the course of the day (which included drinking tall beers on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park and a matinee of The Triplets of Belleville, one of my all-time favorite movies that was playing at the Red Vic) I accumulated some feminine undergarments, a skirt from the Adidas flagship store, a super-80s pair of sunglasses, and some leggings from American Apparel, cementing my status as scenester fashion victim (indulgences #22-30)

I managed to stay away from spending too much money Saturday night but it was only because I passed out and slept 12 hours...brought on by working 5 nights last week and the beer in the park. It's amazing what a difference that fifth night of restaurant work makes. It's the breaking point for me--give me a fifth night in a week and I'll refrain from all exercise (too tired; just trying to recover) and spend hundreds of dollars "treating myself" because I work so hard.

*Sigh.* The fun news is that wearing leggings makes me feel like I'm 13 years old again and I enjoy how awkward that is.

Impromptu Bourbon

I think I have an excess amount of energy. Saturday, after driving up to Carneros to pick grapes all day with the group of bohemian food-lovers I was lucky enough to fall in with a few weeks back, we crushed and de-stemmed nine 30-gallon barrells of pinot noir and feasted on a spread that Angelo had been making all day. It was the last day of the harvest and the big group of 12 or so of us was HUNGRY.

Angelo, his nephew Gaetano, and Angelo's friend Sandro (all lovely, warm, Sicilian men) had been cooking since 2pm. The feast included wild boar (that Angelo had hunted--he still has one more and he's going to roast the whole thing sometime in January), polenta, quartered fennel bulbs, eggplant done several ways, turnips, roasted peppers, lots of bread... a lot of things that I can't really remember right now but it was one of the most delicious meals I've ever had.

I'm used to "family meal" being a tedious affair in which the kitchen of a restaurant uses the waiters as walking garbage disposals--we're hungry enough at the beginning of the shift (because we don't have anything in our home fridges except for beer and Perrier) or at the end of the shift (because we've been sprinting from table to table all night) to put away whatever the kitchen throws at us. Family meal at Angelo's forge is another thing entirely. Bottles and bottles of wine were opened (from the pinot bottling we did last Wendesday) and the platters of food that piled over the table emptied out after just a half an hour, hungry grape pickers from all walks of life completely satisfied after a day of hard manual labor that they welcome as a respite from their fancy indoor city lives.

So after all of this (and I worked HARD crushing and de-stemming. It's my favorite part, I think because it happens so fast it reminds me of restaurant service, or catering) I decided to go to the Mission with a couple of the group who weren't falling asleep in their plates. We were going to check out the Litquake finale at 12 Galaxies but it was over by the time we got there so we headed over to Treat Street, a super divey bike messenger bar where my friend Emiley works. I'd never been there (I never get as far out as 24th and Treat!) and I wanted to see her. The bar was PACKED from all of the Litquake overflow, and after about a half an hour Em asked me to hop behind the bar and help her. She was alone and I was happy to collect and wash glassware.

The fun and dangerous part about having bartender friends is that you drink way too much and way too long--drinks are free and you're allowed to hang after hours (I was helping clean up). So there were a lot of bourbon shots taken, probably not the best idea after a whole evening of drinking home wine. I had some steam to blow off, though, but Sunday morning I had one of those mornings where I swore I'd never ingest anything alcoholic again.

Waiter Nightmares

In one dream, my college roommate told me she'd be walking down a peaceful tropical beach, when she'd suddenly come upon ten tables that all needed service right then.

A friend of mine who worked the insane schedule of the lunch shift at Boulevard followed by the dinner shift at Jardiniere told me he had a recurring dream in which he'd be working at both restaurants at the same time, and somehow had to take all of his orders and put them in the computer at Boulevard, then manage to get across town on the Muni to deliver all of the food that must have come up on the line by then at Jardiniere. Ouch!

My waiter nightmares are usually a simple re-hash of the stress of the shift I've just finished. It's usually pretty bad when I start a new job (and they never went away for the entire four months that I worked at one of San Francisco's top restaurants this spring) but then taper off after a couple of weeks. I haven't had any since starting work at the New Restaurant, which is a good sign.

I think that because a restaurant shift is so fast-paced, there isn't much time to process the stress of the job during the shift. It's wham, bam, thank-you ma'am (especially in a busy lunch place, where 200 covers are crammed into three hours), and you're off work with a shot of Fernet in hand. It's not until your body has time to relax and de-compress during sleep that your mind can think about the stuff it's gone through that evening. I sometimes wake up with a start, remembering in my sleep some small error I'd made--did I give that to-go box back to the table? did I adjust the tip properly or did I short myself again? why was the GM giving me the hairy eyeball at 9:23pm?

Get Out of the Way

Remind me to never, ever, own a restaurant. I've been working 5-6 shifts a week at the New Restaurant, and while the bloom is still on the rose enough so that it's not too much of a big deal to spend nearly every waking moment working, I just can't understand how anyone would want to actually own a restaurant and willingly spend all of their time there!!

I will ideally work 2-3 nights a week in a restaurant where I make a gajillion dollars a night so I can afford my San Francisco rent, cocktails, yoga membership, and designer-jeans habit. When I was working doubles all week this spring, I lasted about three months before I quit all of my jobs and disappeared deep into South America. I'm determined to be more of an adult in 2007, like maybe keep the same job for more than a few months and save up some money for longer than it takes to buy a plane ticket to somewhere exotic.

**

Last night after bumping into yet another drunk chick buying a cocktail from the side of the bar that's right next to the kitchen, the chef looked at me, rolled his eyes, and asked, "Now why don't you blog about that?"

Tight spaces in restaurants are such a funny integral part of the way the dining-room floor and the kitchen work. There's something that develops, I call it the Restaurant Ballet, and it's the way people working very very quickly in a very small space move around each other; spinning about it rapid, graceful pirouettes, trays filled with martinis held perfectly aloft. Cooks slam knives down in precision, throwing pork chops on the grill as they reach through each others' arms in an octopus-like Tetris move to shake a frying pan as it's just starting to smoke.

When someone who is not in tuned with this dance comes into the space, it throws a wrench into the works. That's why there are metal bars to separate the service well from the rest of the bar, and why chefs give the hairy eyeball when a server steps over the invisible boundary between the side of the line where the food comes up and the side of the line where the food is cooked.

Sometimes customers unwittingly (or knowingly, which is worse) cross this line, and insert themselves into the spaces where we are trying to work. Everyone has their own tricks to get these people out of there without asking "Could you please move?" which would be a complete non-non in the fancy food world where the customer is always right. My tactic is to bump a purse every single time I walk by. Even if the purse's owner is not in my way, she will be soon. If I actually bumped someone on purpose, I'd feel guilty (I'm of Nordic descent and I'm extremely tall and sturdy) because I'd probably take them out, so a gentle purse bump every six seconds does the trick pretty quick.

One of my coworkers has no compunction about throwing an elbow, but only to guys. He lets the girls stand wherever they want. One waiter tells a story about passing a plate of hot food very, very close to a customer's ear; not so close that it touches them, but close enough that they realize something bad might happen if they don't get out of the way--although what the in-the-way-person doesn't know is that the waiter, an absolute master of balancing, will never let a drink spill or a plate drop, no matter how much drunken gesticulating goes on at the table by the people who are about to eat and drink the goods we deliver.

Restaurant Ballet keeps you in shape, but I think it's also the main cause of Waiter Nightmares, a topic which deserves its own post. More on Waiter Nightmares tomorrow...

Rain Has Come

And thus begins my year of never-ending winter. It was so lovely to have a month of sunshine upon my return to San Francisco from South America, but today the rain has arrived, reminding me that I missed summer entirely this year and am now in for two more months of winter. Sigh. Last night I went to Angelo Garro's forge in SoMa and helped Angelo and Jeff bottle wine. Helping to make wine is fun! Although I worked at wineries for years (Roshambo, Iron Horse Vineyards, and Michel-Schlumberger), it was always as a tastron, an events coordinator, or a tour guide--never in the cellars.

We bottled 50 cases of the 2005 Pinot Noir, drinking plenty of it as we went along, and finished the evening with a lovely dinner of homemade Penne (Angelo's nephew, Giatano, was cranking it out of an ancient machine as I arrived) with a sauce Angelo made with tomatoes from Jeff's parents' house in Healdsburg and sausage made by a friend of theirs whose name I've forgotten but is supposedly a famous sausage-maker. We also had a tomato salad (just fresh heirlooms with olive oil and vinegar and dried oregano that was hanging from the ceiling in bunches, from Angelo and Jeff's plot in one of the city's community gardens), and lots of songs (Hope from the Lincart gallery pulled out a guitar and proved she's got a set of pipes as soulful as Gillian Welch) and laughter. It amazes me how Angelo can have such a slow-food, Sicilian lifestyle right in the middle of San Francisco. Having been introduced to a group of people to whom simplicity and friendship is so important to is inspiring.

After bottling the pinot (two barrels), we punched down the grapes we'd picked last Wednesday. My hands are completely stained purple (although I managed to escape with my clothing free of wine-stains), and I have to wait tables tonight. I'll just wear them like a badge of honor, shrugging casually and saying, "Oh, you know how it goes during crush! I haven't had a day off in weeks and everything's covered in various stages of wine. But, you gotta do what you gotta do!" like a seasoned pro.

Travesties

Today I went to the matinee of Tom Stoppard's Travesties: a comedy revolution with Grandma, who was in town for a couple of days. The comic mixture of literature, love, and dadaism reminds me of my own life, and I hearkened back to Lukka's sniggering taunts last week when upon my exit from the Barn Diva I ran into an old "friend" at the bar, white-shirted and fresh off a lunch shift at the Very Prestigious Restaurant where the two of us worked together.

This boy trained me as a waiter there (he's a great server, charming and slippery and smart like a waiter should be), and I wound up hooking up with him a week into my employment at the Very Prestigious Restaurant. I have no interest in blogging about my love life (except when it intersects with a restaurant, and I have sworn to not let that happen any more), but I think restaurant flings are interesting. It's best when they happen between two sides of the house that don't have too much contact.

A fling between a cook and a waitress is all good until it goes all bad--the waitress has got to pick up her food from the kitchen 100 times a night. A fling between two waiters is common (after all, they're cut from the same oversexed, money-loving, snakeskin) and better when it goes bad because they can ignore each other on the floor (they've got their own sections to worry about, after all) but the communal drinking that goes on after work between waiters can be sort of awkward when two of them have just finished with each other. A fling between a waiter and a bartender is relatively uncommon--bartenders are usually too busy scoring with the drunk girls sitting in front of them to bother with the waiters. Besides, bartenders see it all, and probably don't want to hook up with a waiter who's already been passed around town.

Hooking up with this boy at the Very Prestigious Restaurant was a catalyst for a lot of reasons. I'd never gotten together with a coworker before; but more importantly, I'd never had a one-night stand before. Call me naive, but having someone seem so interested in my every thought and action, only to completely ignore me the next day was absolutely shocking. This slap in the face produced a lot of bad behavior on my part, and I moved to San Francisco shortly thereafter.

Seeing this boy at the bar wasn't the dramatic scene that I know Lukka was hoping for, but we were cold to each other. I guess I was pretty cruel to this boy after he spurned me, but although I didn't want a relationship with him, I was hurt by his absolute disregard for everything about me after he'd gotten what he was after.

I know plenty of girls who agonize over, "Why hasn't he called????" when the truth is he just doesn't respect her after she immediately falls into the sack. I won't rail on about the antifeminist double-standards that exist in our culture here, I'll just quietly sit back and have a Scotch (that's the manliest drink I can think of) and realize that all the drama's in our heads, anyway.

A Day in the Life

Instead of slobbing around in front of the laptop in my pajamas drinking coffee all day, stopping only for an hour of yoga somewhere in the middle, yesterday I decided to go up north for some manual labor in Healdsburg. I was called late the night before that by the owner of a.Muse gallery on 18th and Alabama, who I'd met at the soft opening of my friend Brandon's new spot, Luau. She was going up there to help harvest and crush two rows of Syrah as the guest of chef/blacksmith/Sicilian about town Angelo Garro and his young apprentice Jeff Burwell, who is one of her artists. I'm from Healdsburg, and I hadn't been up there in way too long (ever since I let DPT keep my car after one tow-job too many) so I agreed to keep Lori company on the drive and in the fields.

We arrived at 11am to join a jovial crew of artists and Europeans (including Angelo's cousin from Sicily, Jeff's cousin from Belgium, and an independent filmmaker from Slovakia who was mostly sick because she had put on a nicotine patch in order to kick her 15-year habit) sweating away, sickles in hand. We jumped right in and picked the two rows pretty quick (well, we only picked about 3/4 of a row, having been late). After putting everything through the crusher/de-stemmer it was time for a swim in the young apprentices parents pool while Angelo cooked lunch: wild boar ribs (which is almost common food in the Dry Creek Valley), a delicious pasta, crostini with cheeses, tomatoes, figs, and Angelo's own prosciutto, and lots of wine (jug wine from Preston, which is next door to the house and Angelo's syrah from last year).

More swimming and sunning followed lunch, and then Jeff and Lori and I headed down to the Barn Diva (where I worked and was fired from three times in 2004-2005) to see the general manager, who is a dear friend of mine (hence the re-hiring) and a friend of Jeff's as well (Healdsburg is a very, very small town). We quickly polished off 2 bottles of Roederer Rose (it's good to have friends who manage restaurants) and called it a day. It was 6pm and time to head back to the city; after promising the GM that I would return to Healdsburg next summer and stay in his empty bedroom (which has been empty for a year ever since his hippie chef left to get married in Santa Cruz) and clean for him and see how many more times in one summer I can get fired from the Barn.

**

I drove back to the city and dropped myself off on Cesar Chaves, which was the location of yet another Ghetto Gourmet (which I weaseled a seat at and a ticket to, through my hard work as a waitress on Sunday night. Thanks, Jeremy!!). The food was interesting, and you'll have to wait until next Wednesday to read more, somewhere in the actual printed-word world.

Following the "underground dinner," Michael Hebberoy, his lovely girlfriend Holly (who'd flown down from Seattle for a long weekend), the photographer who's documenting the dinners for his book, two friends of theirs who live in the Mission, and I headed over to Nopa for more wine and dessert. I like the food at Nopa very much, and the three other city-dwellers (we were joined by a friend of Holly's, who was jokingly peeved we were at Nopa at all as she'd wanted to surprise Holly with dinner there tomorrow night) agreed that the food was good but were in disagreement over the mural. I love it (it's an artists rendition of the Western Addition, complete with a hipster walking little dogs in Alamo Square, and I think I can see my old house), they hate it.

Dessert was two baskets of fries (I think Nopa has the best French fries in the city, served with a spicy harissa aioli), chocolate ice-cream, and spiced doughnut holes with a rum-caramel sauce. The fries were gone in a blink and we all picked at the desserts (they were very good but I think we wanted something saltier to accompany the two bottles of Nosis (where's the "G"? Anybody?) verdejo that Michael picked, yum. The two Blue Bottle espresso martinis went down easy, too, which was maybe not such a good thing as several shots of espresso right before bed atcually *do* make for a sleepless night.

The Ghet Gets Vegetarian

Last night's Ghetto Gourmet at the top-secret location in North Berkeley took place outdoors under the stars and the icicle lights in the back garden of two lovely folks who'd attended a few dinners and hosted one this summer (which was recorded for NPR).

The menu, which was entirely vegetarian (and nearly vegan) was full-fledged late-summer/fall bounty. A hot and cold salad of confit tomatoes, little sea plants, and chrysanthemum fronds led the way to a minestrone-like soup with all of the vegetables distinctly flavored and textured. It's so easy to turn vegetable soup into a hearty mush (which I always seem to do), that the cranberry beans and patty-pan squash pieces floating in an herbed broth, seemed like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And normally I don't even like cranberry beans because it seems like they're on everyone's menu this time of year.

The main course was a butternut-squash lasagna, with thinly-sliced layers of the squash itself acting as noodles interspersed with black and white chanterelle mushrooms, white corn, and parmesan. The lasagna sat atop a puddle of red sauce and was adorned with arugula and more crispy parmesan. Dessert was little chocolate cakes with homemade caramel ice cream and crispy little pieces of vanilla bean.

The Ghetto Gourmet is a BYOB type event, so the communal tables (there were 30 guests in attendance) were filled with pens and wine-openers, all the better to take down names, doodle in gastronomic frenzy on the menus, and open bottles. Musical entertainment was provided by Jeremy's roommate on classical guitar, and some hippie chick from the East Coast wailing about the Mother Earth. Mostly I couldn't take my eyes off of her glittery, tasseled, white Sherpa boots, and the boxer dog who lived there put in a decent effort at hooking up with them a couple of times through the night.

**

Although it was a Sunday night, I should have known this wouldn't stop the roving band of bohemian culinary outlaws who'd just returned from a weekend spent 24/7 drinking Macallan 12-year scotch with Gore Vidal. The boys hadn't slept much and were loopy from a weekend of amazing conversation, food, and company (I knew I should have pressed them to let me be their waitress-in-residence!), so of course I took them out. We met up with Matt Dillon from Sitka and Spruce, who was in town from Seattle trying to get away from the pressures of being the town's most recent four-star chef (and on GQ Magazine's Top 5 Hot List for restaurants this fall), at the 500 club for a few and then moved on to the Lucky 13 until closing time. Fueled by cigarettes, adrenaline, and skyy citrus vodka, we headed over to Baker Beach (which took me 40 minutes to find from Market Street as I never drive in the city) so that the photographers could jump into the ocean while I did headstands on the beach (a yoga instructor told me last week that inverting myself for a minute every day would combat the stresses of waitressing all night. She was right!)

I woke up this morning feeling strangely refreshed after my second night of bohemian debauching in four days, and realized that my theory must be true: it doesn't count as being a lush if you're in the company of other artists. I'm like Kerouac, baby!

A Study in Anthropology

Friday night was my last night at the foundering ship, and I am certainly glad to be done. I'll save the bitching about mis-management and abusive kitchen staff for my ex-coworkers over a shot of Fernet Branca with a beer back, and talk about the differences between cooks and waitresses instead.

As I may have mentioned, the foundering ship had an entirely new staff when I came back from South America. There were no more Mexicans cooking, instead the place is now being run by 22-year-old "culinary school hotshots" who are too big for their britches. The kids can cook all right, but the attitude that comes across the line with the plates was just too much for me. Too much for everyone that still works there, in fact; at the bar last week, two of the bar managers plotted how to get one of the cooks alone, outside of the building, so they could jump him and punch his face. This kid has a propensity for muttering snide comments under his breath, and their rage was warranted. I talked them out of it.

This huge attitude is compounded by the fact that most of the kids are decently good-looking. There is one cook, however, that we all called either "The Cute Cook," or "The Nice Cook," because not only was he the yummiest to view (over six feet, pretty roses tattooed on his forearm in place of the ubiquitous swallows or pin-up girls, hipster glasses, hot hot hot), he was the one who actually said hello to the front-of-the-house staff of his own accord and didn't look at you like you'd just crawled out from under a rock and asked what year it was like the other cooks do. Also all of the other cooks all have a variation of the same name and his is different, so nobody could remember it.

I can understand why cooks have this bad attitude--they put in three times as many hours as waiters do and get paid less than half as much. Now for me, this didn't make sense after one year of cooking at a fancy-pants restaurant when I was eighteen, so I got a job as a busser right quick. Some people are crazy enough to want to cook in restaurants for their careers, and I commend them for this. I have a great respect for cooks, I just wish they would be nicer to me. And I'm not some clueless waitress that just wants to go out and get drunk and go shopping the next day; I do this work because I'm passionate about food, and it generally confounds a line cook even more when I actually know all of the ingredients in Romesco and Rouille, and how these sauces are prepared.

I'd found out before the shift that the Cute Cook's long-distance relationship was no more, so I gave him every opportunity to ask me out on my last night at the foundering ship. Unfortunately, he did not pick up on my subtle clues, like when I asked him if he was going to come and visit at my new spot... "Blank," he responded "What the fuck is a Blank?" More promisingly, when I explained what and where a Blank was, he sort of ogled me and said "How could I NOT come and see you?" in an extremely sarcastic tone. I think working in restaurants has lowered my standards in men.

Liberace and debauchery

A couple of days ago I got a call from my friend Jeremy, who does the Ghetto Gourmet in the East Bay. For those of you who've been living in the dark in regards to the underground restaurant scene this last year, the Ghetto Gourmet is basically a dinner party in someone's living room. Jeremy has roving chefs come to town and cook, artists musicians and writers giving performances, and great salon-type conversation.

Jeremy's call went something like this, "HiEllait'sJeremyihaveafriendintownwhoscookingforfamouspeople
outofanairstreamtrailerandhe'swritingabookaboutundergroundrestaurants
youshouldmeethimIalreadygavehimyournumbergottagobye."

Well, I like meeting new people, especially other restaurant people who are writers, because we are few and far between. Michael Hebberoy and I made plans to meet at Ti Couz for a cocktail and a crepe, and I knew we were going to get along when I texted him, "On my way. Brown hair, blue eyes, six feet tall. Bicycle," and he responded "Long hair blue eyes big truck likes Barry Manilow and walks in the park."

So I threw on my Barry Manilow t-shirt (yes, I really do have one! I only wear it on special occasions because it's very old and for some reason I always wind up getting really drunk when I have it on) and away me and Barry went. I thought I was just going to meet some chef. Who I met was a guy starting a cultural revolution. Hebberoy (or "Hebb" to his friends) is a well-known Portland resterateur who is going through a "very hard break-up with that city," and to get out of the public eye he decided to go around the world and cook for interesting people. His philosophy is philosophers, and in telling about me the sorts of dinner parties he's hosting (at other people's houses), I was reminded of nothing more than the literary salons hosted at the Paris home of Gertrude Stein and her partner in the 1920s.

This weekend, Hebb is going down to L.A. to host a dinner party at Gore Vidal's house. The impressive guest list includes well-known literary and musical figures; not the type you see in (my beloved) Us Weekly, but the type who are quietly doing what they love and believe in and have gained recognition for their work along the way. The guy who started the Sex Pistols is going to be there, as is Madonna's sister.

Hebb's book-in-progress, "Kill the Restaurant," will focus on three groups building culture through feeding people on the down-low: the Ghetto Gourmet here in the Bay Area, a guy in Seattle who serves only the things he grows on his 10-acre farm (except for flour and sugar, although both crops went in the ground this year), and a group in New York. He'll be attending the upcoming Ghetto Gourmet dinners on Sunday night in North Berkeley and on Wednesday in the Mission. I'll be there, doing what I do best: bringing the food out of the kitchen and putting it down in front of people who want to eat it.

**
Also last night I attended the soft-opening of my friend Brandon's new venture (aside from the newly-minted Avenue G), Luau. The bar is on Lombard between Franklin and Van Ness, and I vaguely remember driving by there in my Bridge and Tunnel days. A vague memory of last night is all I posess as well. I know that there were lots of people I didn't know when I got there at 10:30, and then lots of people I did know starting around 12:30 or 1am who began to trickle in as they finished their shifts. I'm pretty sure I was yelling and throwing pretzels by the end of the evening, and was trundled into a cab with my bicycle poking out of the trunk and sent home. I received an email from the esteemed Hebb this morning, which went something like:

"apologies for my sheer drunkiness last night. ended up losing my phone somewhere to boot. i think maybe it is kickin around the bottom of that fuckin truck. it is dangerous to drink heavily with a blog queen...- liberace"

All in all, a successful opening!

Your Hair Affects Your Tips

Really. After a week's worth of taking no effort with my hair (a taxing move, looming story deadlines, and general stress have all been factors in this sad lack of effort with the way I look), I decided to do an experiment on Friday and run a curling iron through my shoulder-length locks for the first tim since they've grown out a little longer, which produced an effect similar to Madonna's new 70's-inspired retro flip, but without the hard edges. I received eleven compliments (seven from co-workers, four from my tables), and made literally twice the money I had made the week before, with the same amount of customer covers. I wonder if this phenomenon is the same for men? I mean, men can't change their appearance as readily as we women can; in the last year I have really discovered the joys of make-up. It's like playing dress-up! I was a nerdy tomboy and really never learned how to properly apply the stuff until I became an urbanite. I'm beginning to understand why so many women take hours to get out of the house.
Tonight, though, there's a buyout, which means the restaurant is closed to the general public, I'm slingin' hors d'ouvres for a couple of hours, and I'll receive a set rate for my tie-clad services. High-placed worker bun it is!

The Heroes Return

Having been called out by a critical friend of mine posing as an anonymous blog poster for a sense of entitlement, I will do what any good writer would do and bask in my glorious hubris, celebrating my heroes return to The Restaurant. Coming back to work has been great, and I've been warmly welcomed by all of the staff, especially the other waiters. Although the summer months are slow in the city when all of us urban dwellers head out of town up to the wine country or the mountains, I'm making enough to live on, thanks to the ever-blossoming freelance gig, seems more editors these days want to print Restaurant Girl's entitled commentary on cheese, wine, and important chefs.

I got up early enough this morning to visit the farmers' market down at the Ferry Building, an unusual occurrence since I've already established that I, along with most other waiters, am a total vampire. My friend and fellow waiter Boozely heads down there every morning, but he's an anomaly; he works at a neighborhood place in Pacific Heights where he's off by ten every evening, and then he gets up early and rides his bike all day, taking a pre-shift nap before he heads in to work in the evening. I did this when I first moved to SF, but dating a bartender sort of quelches that. It's no fun to get up at 8am and go ride bikes when you've got a sweet Valentino under the covers, protesting noisily in his sleep if you try to throw them back and carpe diem. So I usually just carpe coffee instead.

Which brings me to my final and most pressing point: waiting tables vs. physical fitness. As a collegiate waitress, I didn't have time for exercise, studies, and earning a living. Eating a rich family meal every night at 11pm and then going out drinking to alleviate the stress made Restaurant Girl a chubber. Luckily when I left the biz and started racing bikes the beer weight dropped off, and I managed to maintain my reputation as a somewhat-athlete. But now I'm waiting tables and NOT collegiate, so I have no excuse and no motivation. Does the restaurant suck all will to do anything non-restaurant-related (like grabbing coffee, eating out, drinking beer, or writing about restaurants) out of the poor waiter? Is he left a shell of his former-waiter self, simply a Perrier-sipping, wine-talking, cheese-eating foodie?

Restaurant Girl's Return

Fickle Restaurant Girl has returned to the OG restaurant. The problematic general magager was let go after a six-month reign of terror, and morale is high on Market Street! While the OG crew (and the three crews after that) are now gone, the peeps who work there are a nice bunch and responsible for the most part. I forgot how much I went out after work when I worked there, Round One. At the Other Restaurant and at The Bistro, I scooted the second my shift was done--I didn't really want to be around the buildings or the people who were either ready to throw me under a bus if it made them look good to management or there to slowly die of old age, bitterly.

Having no manager presents a bit of a hectic element to working on the floor. There was a "management trainee" who seems nice (although extremely green) and duly bought the waitstaff Fernet Branca shots after the shift, but I think we're all a little wary after having an abusive drug addict "manage" us (who is now, I am told, seating people at a mediocre hotel restaurant downtown).

It's interesting that the people we'd all really want to take the job have turned it down. It was offered to a couple of different waiters (including me), the expediter (who is the real backbone of the restaurant), and the new-guy-who-is-now-the-wine-guy. Everyone's answer was pretty much, "Oh, hell no!" so now there's a Management Trainee.

Floating Free

In true restaurant form, I have suddenly left BOTH of my jobs. I gave two weeks' notice at The Restaurant, with the watertight excuse that I will be heading off to Bordeaux to stomp grapes all summer. I had planned to stay on at The Bistro until I leave, especially since I'm moving just 5 blocks away on Thursday but with the sunny weather today and the fact that The Bistro has chosen to remain open tomorrow (Memorial Day) and I'm scheduled had a lot to do with my knee-jerk decision to leave.

It's not just the weather, though. I only went to work at The Bistro because the chef is amazing and my best guy pal is the head waiter. I didn't realize that it was an elephant graveyard for old, bitter waiters, and I'm just not there yet. The owners tell me they "really like the energy I bring to the place," and offered me more shifts a few weeks back, which I graciously declined. What really made me want to leave is an episode that happened on Thursday night. I was happily covering shifts this week (which meant I worked doubles all week) for a waiter on vacation, because I'm a nice person and a team player, and another waiter broke one of his fingers so there were just two of us.

I was the closer, which meant I came in at 6:30 and was supposed to stay until we stop seating (at 11pm). However, all of my tables were wrapped up and gone by 9:30 and I was absolutely exhausted. I asked the other waiter if he would mind closing, since he'd just been triple-sat and would be there until eleven, no question, anyway. His response, "Fuck no! I've been here since 4pm setting up this restaurant and I'm not closing!"

Not, "No, Restaurant Girl, I really don't want to stay that late. I'm pretty tired myself and you are the closer, after all."

Also, he'd been there since 5, not 4. And I know from personal experience that what he really did was put down about four knives, complain about having to be at work, eat most of the family meal before anyone else even saw what it was, and head over to the drugstore for a soda pop.

I would have closed for him had the situation been reversed. So, it's Carnaval, and I'm heading over to the Mission with some girlfriends, some roller skates, and a bottle of champagne to celebrate!