national convention in 1920. Maurice Baring, the British author and
globetrotter, goes into raptures over the cooking he discovered in a
Pine street restaurant. Read his Round the World in Any Number of Days
and satisfy yourself that a sophisticated observer from London town can
become as ecstatic as a Gaul in the presence of soup a l'oignon. There's
a diversity to the restaurants of San Francisco that makes it difficult
to single out any one type. French and Italian restaurants appear to
predominate, but the number of other places, including Spanish, Greek,
Mexican, Hungarian and Slavonic--not to mention Chinese--makes the
array a long and polyglot one. In the vicinity of Broadway, Kearny and
Columbus avenue, streets that penetrate the heart of the Latin Quarter,
and along upper Montgomery street, there are sufficient individual cafes
to keep any explorer after atmospheric epicurism busy for many days.
Neither Soho nor Montmartre is plagiarized in these places. They are
foreign in tone, but they belong very much to San Francisco. What
affectation and posturing there may be in Greenwich Village are not in
evidence here. Joy was at times given boisterous expression in the days
before the great drought came upon the land. But the eighteenth
amendment and its restrictions have not deprived any of these places of
their inherent buoyancy, even though they may not be as noisy as Coffee
Dan's.

Table d'hote courses are customary not only in the French restaurants
but in most of the Italian as well. Some of these places combine or
interchange the menus of French, Italian and Swiss chefs, a piquant
entree, or shellfish served bordelaise, being followed by a paste like
lasagne, spaghetti or tagliarini, or by those geometric ravioli whose
delights are in inverse ratio to their square. If you want fare of the
realm the dining rooms and grills of the hotels are at your service, as
are the restaurants along Market, Powell and other streets. The