The Great Cafés: Café de La Presse, San Francisco Here you get to converse with everybody who’s anybody
 
I live in San Francisco and, so, would hope that this lovely city is a haven for great cafés. You'd think that was the case, given San Francisco's famously European look, its reputation for artfulness, its sophisticated population and renegade, colorful politics. But it's not so. There are more individually owned cafés per capita here than in the usual American city. (Corporate-owned cafés are never great, and Starbucks is just as ubiquitous here as elsewhere.) But even the privately owned cafes for the most part are run-down, although there often appears to be an intended marketing choice in this tattered look, as though you have to be poor and beat up to enjoy a proper cup of coffee. But then there’s the Café de La Presse, at the corner of Bush Street and Grant Avenue. When I'm at lunch in this place, I remember the bistros in which I dined in Paris when I lived there . . . the long rooms with a marble or dark wood bar, high ceilings, many small tables lining long windows with white cotton curtains that looked out on the descending rue Moufftard or the summery rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile. These bistros are noted for the simplicity of their menus and the care with which the food is prepared, and they usually have a superb wine list. There is a festive manner about the way things are done in such cafés, so that you feel elegantly entertained and fed in an informal fashion that simply engenders well being. So it is at the Café de La Presse. The menu is small, but features dishes of great complexity and taste. The wine list is large, mostly French, all excellent. The ambiance is simply intended for conversation. You do not have to shout to be heard at this café, and the waiters and waitresses seem to wish that you'd stay on for a while and enjoy the talk you're having with your friend. But none of these is the actual reason that I go to the Café de La Presse. The importance of a café is often determined by other factors than fine food, wine and comfort, although all of these are required for a café to be truly great. But the telling factor may lie in who owns the café . . . or who owned it. What conflict-ending pact was agreed upon here? What was that short story . . . the one by Katherine Anne Porter . . . that was written here? Isn't this the place where Gore Vidal, in an attempt at disguise in that pair of Saint Laurent sunglasses that made him so glamorous in the pages of Esquire, was photographed in a smooch with Tennessee? I imagine that some notable people have dined at the Café de La Presse, or had a glass of wine. But I don't know that for sure. It could be that the clientele has always and ever been the European tourists who daily celebrate the café's obvious debt to Parisian bistros, or the local business people and itinerant voluptuaries such as myself who come here all the time. But ideas and art swirl around this café nonetheless. During a recent visit, I found pronouncements by some very fine writers, examples of graphic prowess by some of the most well-known artists, photographers and film makers in the world, and a certain precipitous level of discussion from world leaders the likes of whom seldom gather together in a single place. I saw Mick Jagger here!, although it was on the cover of Zoom magazine. His right hand was on his chest. He was looking pensively into the café, a bit sadly actually, as though all those drugs had not amounted in the end to much. His hair was good, though. Elton John, natty in a red jacket with a gold lamé collar and green-plastic-rimmed sunglasses seemed, as always, ready for yet a worse outfit. He was here with the much more conservatively dressed editor of L'Uomo. George Bush appeared a little embarrassed on the front of Mother Jones . . . as though he'd been asked a question of some kind. There was even a conversation . . . well, an exchange of caustic disagreements over what it means to be truly French . . . between Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal. The King of Spain was there, too. This is something one doesn't get in every café. The best for me, though, was a conversation with Moliere, stylish in the manner of a Sofia Coppola movie, that dealt with his cover shoot for the French magazine Lire. All these voices and hundreds more could be heard in the comings and goings of the conversation in the place because the Café de La Presse is renowned for its magazines and newspapers. In many different languages, they serve the tourist community as well as the crowd of locals who speak all those languages and have lived in San Francisco for years. The café is a trove of contemporary European culture, not all of it refined, but certainly worth looking at. The management seems unperturbed by people looking through the magazines, so that there are many copies slightly dog-eared. But this is a sign of good, thoughtful management, and you can always get a pristine copy of the journal you want simply by looking toward the rear of each display bin. The moment that defines the real greatness of this café is when you sit down at one of the tables that look out on Grant Avenue, take up on your fork the first morsel of the superb croque monsieur (or the croque madame if you want an egg on top), or maybe the cabillaud grenobloise (a pan-seared ling cod with lemon condiment and wilted spinach), perhaps a salade d'asperge with egg and Serrano ham, or sip from a glass of French tannat cabernet . . . and turn the page that opens the magazine before you. (teryclarke@hotmail.com)
Terence Clarke: Books, Art, Music, Film, Style
Thursday, April 5, 2007