Displaced

Apparently, they’ve located his final play…or something like a play…or a stack of printer paper. Whatever. The more Beckett, the better.

Amendment: Since this review was published, I have been asked by the owner not to use some of the tables during lunchtime. As there were other readers/writers at similar tables, I assume this has to do with the frequency with which I visit the cafe and the duration of my visits (usually around two hours). I stand by my general comments below but retract my recommendation of the place as friendly to writers and hanging out. They are clearly more concerned about one-time spenders on busy days than steady repeat business, so I’m striking Momi’s from my list of regular haunts.

The most hospitable café in the Hayes Valley neighborhood for a warm cup of tea, low-end food and a place to take your laptop or the Sunday paper. There are other cafes but they are on busier corners or have odd clientele that make me nervous or annoyed. (Prime example, the otherwise serviceable café on the corner of Page and Laguna where you are likely to be overwhelmed by a crowd who have just had to sit quietly at the Zen Center across the street for God only knows how many hours. Beware.)

Momi Tobys serves excellent bagels (for San Francisco) which are toasted right up to the edge of burning and are not swamped by cream cheese (see Noah’s Bagels). Try onion or multi-seed, both happily salty. Their coffee is pretty bad, sitting in pots on burners as it does, but they have espresso drinks and a great selection of teas, some juices and both wine and beer, nice options in the evening. The menu is basic lunch stuff – chicken Caesar, soup, baguette crostini with pesto and a small selection of sandwiches – none of it superb but all of it solid. (If a tasty lunch is your sole object, head around the corner to Frjtz or a couple blocks down Hayes to Arlequin. Neither place is conducive to hanging out, but the food is superior to Momi’s.)

The main reason to stop by Momi Toby’s is to read for a while, to write for a bit or to hook up with friends for a coffee. (Don’t go overboard with the friends: none of the tables will accommodate more than three people comfortably.) Depending on who’s working, the music varies in quality and volume, but it’s generally interestingly circus-y alternative. (The chick who used to crank up the insane metal-meets-Muzak tunes has disappeared from the staff rotation, thank God.)

I write there regularly. The crowd’s there studying or reading themselves, so you get the friendly atmosphere without a lot of distracting, jerks who have something to prove on cellphones, the reason for abandoning a café closer to my apartment.

Trade up to Chelsea and get rid of those permanent spring breakers, Jenna and Barbara.

This town encourages defection, at least of my high-powered, ambitious friends. In the last three years, I have lost two friends to Dallas, one to Florida, one to L.A. and, as of this morning, two to London. They have all left to move on with their lives, lives which were in sleepy limbo while in San Francisco.

I know that there are many defenders of San Francisco, but none that I have met are ambitious. Some are opportunistic (there is money here, after all, if you are willing to wait for it) and some are energetic, but none are ambitious. This city is the geographical equivalent of molasses. If you are seeking a place away from the madding crowd because you want to recover, raise a family, write a book without interruption or are a student, a stoner or a surfer, or even because you are famous and want to hide out, this is the place for you.

Nothing will push you here. The customer service is slow. The traffic is cautious. Even the ubiquitous homeless are slow-moving and under-motivated. It is a city that hopes for sun, basking when it’s out, huddling in restaurants when it’s not. It hikes and hangs out, it skis and sips wine, but it does not drive for the finish line. It’s about changing the world through hemp rather than heft. It encourages contemplation – yoga, therapy, knitting, Buddhism, hallucinogenic drugs – but it does not have any particular aim in mind besides live and let live, man.

It is a city of slow principles and slow growth and slow change. This is no place for those on a mission and moving fast. Hence the defectors. Someday, I will be among them. This town is no place for a New Yorker. For now, I’m running as lightly as I can over the surface of the molasses. Come visit for the views but don’t stay for the ambition.

Cole Valley Bakery, corner of Cole and Parnassus, open 7-7, closed Monday

Cole Valley Bakery has a full range of tarts and pastries and breads for breakfast or pick-up. They also serve sandwiches, salads and soups to a lunchtime crowd.

Their croissants are, in all respects, real French croissants. This means that they are light, flaky and NOT the size of my head. They have a slightly crunchy exterior and plenty of room between the million interior layers of butter and magic dough. This would be reason enough to head to Cole Valley, but it’s not the only one. Their coffee is first-rate. It’s not stale or boiled or overheated or pumped full of Starbucks steroids. It is rich, straightforward coffee and the perfect base for their perfect café au lait.

Other highlights include their canelés, which I have seen nowhere else, and their panniers (or elephant ears, as we American’s have thuddingly dubbed them) put all others to shame.

Lunches are bigger than you would expect, so don’t over-order. Even their small garden salad is sufficient for a light lunch. The only flaw in their superior bakery line-up is their baguettes, which are tough. The mini-baguettes are the base for their numerous, pre-wrapped sandwiches, which are still worth getting. Be prepared to chew fiercely. Selections include Gruyere and ham, saucisson and cornichon, aoili turkey and cranberry and a superb tuna salad complete with bits of apple.

Their soups range from the very bland to the truly excellent, so make sure to ask for a sample before ordering.

I went early, eager to get to the produce and beat a retreat before the yuppies had strapped their offspring into their Audis and started their weekend errands. I didn’t beat anyone. Yuppies are early risers. I was going for oranges and tomatoes and lobster, oh my. Little did I know that even Whole Foods does not stock cooked lobster meat. Crab, yes. Shrimp, yes. But their pincered brethren are kept alive in a tank and you have to buy them as such. I am a Boston born and bred hypocrite as far as lobster is concerned: I’ll eat ’em but I won’t kill ’em.

Saturday was my day: the bearded young fellow behind the counter said that not only would they steam one for me, they’d crack it and pack up the meat as if the nasty murder had never happened. Excellent. We made an appointment that I’d be back for my magic in two hours and I trotted home to brag of my good fortune to R.

Skip to three and half hours later. I approach. The bearded guy goes into the back and returns to say that he, “Hadn’t gotten to it yet.” What could he have possibly been checking on? His crack team of lobster gnomes?

At this point, I should have cut my losses and left the shellfish slaughter for a less busy day but Beardy says if I can wait fifteen minutes, he’ll do it immediately. Fifteen minutes is no big deal, so I go get some sushi and read the paper. I return in twenty minutes. Nothing doing. I return twenty minutes after that. Still nothing doing. I would leave but I’ve already paid for the lobster, by the pound, pre-steaming.

A full hour after I arrived, the lobster appears. I am furious and Beardy can tell. Perhaps it’s the foam at the corners of my mouth. He looks scared. I open my mouth to say that I will take it and crack it myself but Beardy starts his work. Three hours after it was supposed to be done, I am at home with, as far as I can judge, half the meat the lobster should have yielded for the bargain price of $26. The handful of fresh shrimp he has thrown in and his assurance that this is a “bad day” do little to make me feel better about the chunk of my Saturday that will not be recovered.

Appalling, stoned-out San Francisco customer service strikes again.

I know we’re in the holiday off-season right now, but I wanted to hearken back to those happy winter days when you can’t find an airline ticket to save your life, manic shopping is ruining traffic patterns and a striking MTA is shutting down New York. Ah, Christmas. Despite all of this, I love Christmas. There is no stopping me. I love it…well, I love it like this.

Go to Wikipedia.
Look up “Emma Carlson.”
Check out the second result: Luke Wilson. Relevancy: 6.2%.

Nice. Me and Luke are 6.2% relevant to each other. Now that’s good news. My day is looking up.

I hear the amount of time they spend preparing dinner is decreasing. Perhaps this is why.

This is my first destination film festival and I expected two things. First, challenging films. Second, rough production quality. Neither proved to be true and the official opening night film, Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, was no exception. It prompted me to locate the single descriptive adjective I stuck with for the rest of the weekend: palatable. The plot follows a man as he copes with the death of his wife and re-starts his life. The man is played by Robert Carlyle and the re-start is played by Marisa Tomei.

I loved Robert Carlyle in The Full Monty. However, while it catapulted his career forward, it has forever undermined his credibility as a ballroom dancer. There is not a moment he spends on the dance floor when we do not expect him to disrobe. It’s a too bad for him, but there it is and it does this film no favors. His equally redundant sad sack widower/menial laborer status matches up with Tomei’s semi-abused (one unexplained black eye which we are meant to believe she received from her stepbrother), pouty but feisty re-dux of all her other movie roles. Don’t get me wrong: I have a soft spot for Tomei’s less than stellar movies of the last decade (The Paper, Only You), but the same pursed lips, the same hand gestures and the same New Jersey inflections eventually get old even for me.

Typecasting is an unfortunate fact for actors but it serves directors well. It’s that much less story they have to tell. Everyone in the audience knows that Harrison Ford = there’s a bomb/terrorist/booby-trap/simplistic happy ending on the plane/in the White House/under the temple/in the cinema. This is understandably frustrating for Ford and requires him to really reach (e.g. Frantic) and keep reaching, even when movies fall flat at the box office, until he re-trains the audience. In Marilyn Hotchkiss, the director was fortunate enough to get actors whose known images could stand in for a substantial or complex plot. It worked fine but I guarantee that within a month, I won’t be able to remember anything about the movie except that I saw it.

The secondary plot relied equally heavily on stereotypes. John Goodman, choosing to speak in an inexplicable near-falsetto due to abdominal damage sustained in a car accident, tells the backstory of his tenure at Marilyn Hotchkiss’ school in grainy flashbacks to a cleaner better time in America when little boys hated little girls, all the children got together after school to play gender-specific games, and all the mommies wore gloves and drove wide cars. It was like an ad for the AARP or the Republican Party and everyone in the wealthy, 50+ audience ate it up like sepia-tinted ice cream.

The director explained after the film that the flashbacks were pieces of a student film he did ages ago. While incorporating them into a feature-length film may have been unique and satisfying for him, it did no favors for the sentimental and under-developed film that was the result.