🚀 go-pugleaf

"JC Dill" in  news:d8l320dspoce3slskueffcfcgj3ipjgp5b@4ax.com...
>  "Max Hauser" wrote:
>
> >but even in the SF Bay
> >Area alone there are something like 14,000 restaurants
>
> IIRC, that's the number of restaurants (# determined by those listed
> with the health department?) in SF alone.  I remember reading a story
> some years ago in the Chronicle [1] about how it would take $bignum
> years for a single resturant reviewer to eat at all of them ..

Back when we had a central index online in the Bay Area about 14,500 were
listed.  It may have excluded fast food etc..  What was remarkable was that
nearly half of them were in the city of San Francisco, which has less than
20% of the population of the eight contiguous counties.  SF serves as the
de-facto downtown for the adjacent counties (as a wine-tasting friend put
it, who is a senior professor of humanities at some school in Palo Alto and
a shrewd observer of the Bay Area since the 1960s).  When I dined in SF in
the 1980s with the Popes (not the popes, the Popes -- ba.food's Steve Pope,
for one) it was remarked that SF's seating capacity for restaurants exceeded
its own population by about 20%, which still does not help you get a table
for lunch at Tadich Grill.

A great bit of memorabilia on that old restaurant, by the way, reproduced on
P. 106 in John Briscoe's 2002 book about the Tadich (ISBN 1580084257), is
Herb Caen's column from 17 Feb 1970 in which Bn. Philippe de Rothschild
became impatient waiting for lunch there (after asking to be taken to a
"place that's typically old San Francisco") and said to his host "I dislike
doing things like this, but perhaps it would help if you told them who I
am."  "I dislike telling you this," his friend replied, "but I did, 15
minutes ago."

Since I'm on history here, youse gastronomes surely recognize the name
Katherine Golden Bitting.  Her 1939 _Gastronomic Bibliogaphy_ is the
standard US work of its type (competing with a few others if not the
towering Vicaire, 1890).  But what's important is (1) the book was based on
the Bitting collection of cookbooks in SF, later forming the nucleus of the
Library of Congress cookbook section; and (2) an address in Palo Alto houses
considerably more cookbooks than the Bitting Collection did, and most of
them are for sale, some of you may know it already, but if you are seriously
interested _email_ me and I'll put you in touch.

Finally, to return to Popes, I was researching the _history_ of wine
information online -- I may post some of it later, but I am always looking
for good wine Web sites, feel free to post or mail suggestions (the best
known in WWW may be those of the Wine Spectator, erobertparker.com,
burghound.com, and westcoastwine.net; I post to the last of those).  An
unexpected upshot of the historical research is that the original wine
commentators online (since 1983, keeping newsgroups alive, fending off
shutdowns and mergers and divisor-newbies over the years) seem to be Mr Pope
and me.