Travel
San Francisco: An Offbeat Guide
There's more out there than the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman's Wharf. Next time get a Japanese massage, play Lo Ball poker, or nibble some Sushi.
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The Mission District is an area of San Francisco that has traditionally been inhabited by the somewhat poor, by Latins, by pensioners. It is almost never visited by travellers, rarely visited by San Franciscans who live in other parts of the city, but the Mission has readily apparent charms. It survived the 1906 earthquake more or less intact and there has not been too much new building there, so the streets are lined with beautiful and idiosyncratic examples of Victorian architecture, though some are a little the worse for wear. The weather is the best in the city, often blue skies and sunshine when everywhere else is ridden with fog. And on the side of a dingy storefront on an obscure corner of an obscure street, exposed to the ravages of wind, rain, sunlight, and the felt markers of passersby, is one of the best paintings anywhere in the city.
The painting, untitled so far as I know, is approximately 15 feet high by 60 feet long, incorporating not only the wall's overlapping slats but also a sliding garage door and its iron runners. It is divided into a series of panels, like a cartoon, and the people represented are caricatures with dog's faces and cartoon-like, angular limbs and bodies. Each panel portrays an aspect of Latin life in the Mission: Men and women stand in line waiting for food stamps, others dance to a band of saxophones and timbals; men in overalls, dog mouths grinning, walk arm in arm from a factory; cops load a group of downcast hounds into a paddy wagon; families wait patiently at a community health clinic; a sharpster, cigarette dangling rakishly from his canine jaws, saunters by flipping a gold coin. Turn from the painting and, if you're lucky, you may see those same scenes happening around you. The painting with its strange mixture of realism and caricature, with its brilliant yellows and reds and oranges and with its somber blues, is an expression of both the vitality and the desperation of the culture that inspired it. Trapped inside a museum, isolated from the street life it portrays, the painting might not seem so natural or so elegant as it does on its obscure wall.
Michael Rios painted it. He lives in San Francisco. His work is on the southeast corner of 23rd Street at Folsom.
The Secret Rites of Sushi
SUSHI IS A JAPANESE DISH that doesn't look like much, just a piece of raw fish (the mind at first recoils: Raw Fish?) resting on a two-bite-sized rice cake with a thin layer of Japanese horseradish in between. Once the rice has been prepared, which is done in huge batches well ahead of time, making a plate of assorted types of sushi takes about a minute. But making sushi, simple as it would seem, is in fact a disciplined study learned at the feet of a master and practiced through a long apprenticeship. What the pupil learns is not for the rest of us to ask. The important thing is the eating; there's a difference between good sushi and passable sushi that's apparent even to someone who's never before had either one.
In San Francisco the finest sushi maker is Katzuo Wada who runs the Waraku Sushi Bar. His is probably the plainest restaurant of any note in the city: a formica counter, a few nondescript tables and chairs, and really nothing more. This, too, is fitting, for there is nothing pretentious about eating sushi; in Japan sushi bars provide the same kind of quick, cheap lunches and late night snacks that hamburger stands do here. But there is that discipline behind the sushi-maker. Mr. Wada, a short, barrel-chested man about the size and shape considered desirable in guards on football teams, may treat his customers politely, with indifference, or rudely, or with a rapidly changing combination of the three. Mr. Wada is no doubt secure in the knowledge that in his own country he would be considered an artist.
Artist or not, he makes good sushi. Part of the trick is preparing the rice so that it will stick together in the small cakes while remaining light and pleasant to taste. It takes several hours to prepare, requiring cycles of heating and cooling and the addition of such condiments as sugar, rice vinegar, bonito, and seaweed (which is used to flavor the water the rice is boiled in.)
The fish, though raw, is carefully dressed and seasoned. At the Waraku a $2.50 plate of assorted sushi, a good first step for the novitiate, will include among others shark, octopus, sea bass, tuna (delicious enough to save for next to last), and shrimp.
Waraku Sushi bar, 1716 Buchannan. Open 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Sushi is an excellent appetizer. After the Waraku, if you've gone around dinner time, it's nice to float a few doors up the street to the Hisago at 1762 Buchanan for a Japanese meal. The decor here is almost as plain as the Waraku's, but the food is excellent, the service expert, and there always seem to be interesting people to look at sitting at the other tables.
Poker at Artichoke's. Artichoke's?
AGONY OF AGONIES! IN SAN Francisco at last, airplane taxiing to the terminal. But what's this? A long face? A gnashing of teeth? Then the muttered explanation; Merely making a connection. An hour and a half to kill, but how? From the airport, it's half an hour into town, half an hour back, six to ten dollar cab fare each way. Hardly worth the effort or the money. Apparently all that remains is a long wait in the airport, while just a frog's jump away lie all the beauties, indulgences, hot spots, depravities, Chinese restaurants, foggy streets, obscure shops, and well-lighted bars of the Pacific's less than virginal princess.
Well, one thing to do instead of hanging around the airport is play poker. Directly across the freeway from the airport, less than a ten minute ride except during rush hours, lies the small town of San Bruno. It has, in accordance with California law, exercised its local option to allow poker parlors within its corporate boundaries. This decision, to the surprise of those with apocalyptic visions of what happens when you're soft on sin, has not produced a strip of gin mills, honky tonks, and clip joints; rather there are a few clubs dotted along the main street of this rather quiet, middle-class town. Among these clubs by far the best is the Club Artichoke, more commonly known as Artichoke Joe's. There is a club and there is a Joe, but stories vary about the Artichoke part. Seeing Joe, a bullet-shaped, burr-headed, stubby-fingered Maltese gambler, makes one realize that questions of such magnitude are not asked casualIy by strangers.
Until a year ago, Artichoke's place was a remarkable old barn and stables. The barn is now a pretty good bar with the original barn floor and beams and long wooden pegs in the walls holding ancient bridles and saddles and wagon rigs. The stable area used to hold the poker tables. Today the bar is the same, but Artichoke has built a new connecting building for poker. Huge wooden beams line a high-roofed, bright room about two-thirds the size of a basketball court and with a basketball court's polished wooden floor. Sixteen round green tables, each of which can accommodate eight players, are surrounded by a wooden rail surrounded in turn by gawkers and by players waiting for a seat, two indistinguishable types. A cage against one wall for buying and cashing chips; the rising wisps of tobacco smoke; white-shirted runners carrying silver trays with beer mugs and sandwiches; the constant tik-tik-tik-tik of chips; the floormen whose denim aprons are filled with money, chips, decks of cards; and the air slightly heavy with the psychic ozone of casual, controlled poker player's tension. Go just to have a drink and watch even if you don't want to play. But this is how the playing works.
They play Draw Poker and Lo Ball there. Lo Ball, in which the lowest poker hand wins, is the more popular game and is played, at Joe's, for higher stakes than Draw and with freewheeling and reckless abandon. At the cheapest table ("the baby game") a minimum buy-in is $20 although most players think an original stake of at least twice that gives them a better chance. At other tables the buy is higher, sometimes much higher. Lo Ball is always dealt by a house dealer who also rakes a small percentage of the pots for the house.
The minimum buy for Draw Poker is $10. The deal is passed around among the players. The house takes no money from the pots but charges each player 60 cents every half hour.
Both Lo Ball and Draw are table stake games. You must bet or fold before the draw; after the draw, you may check without folding. Checking and then raising is specifically allowed. Other house rules are more esoteric and both the floormen and the other players will patiently explain them. And, as the sign says, "Ladies Welcome."
Artichoke Joe's, 676 San Mateo Ave., San Bruno, Calif. Take San Bruno exit west off Bayshore Freeway. Since poker players do not take kindly to being disturbed for anything short of Armageddon, Artichoke Joe's has no telephones. Open 10 a.m. to 2 a.m.
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