San Francisco’s a tourist mecca, with this summer’s season yielding a plethora of visitors from the far corners. We’ve so far done our bit for the local economy, with visitors from Europe creasing our guest towels for the last several weeks.
More welcome, and less taxing, visitors this last weekend were my sister and brother-in-law, doubtless come up to see we are not treating their son and our gallery colleague Jack Tremper with an inordinate degree of abuse. On several previous visits, my brother-in-law had asked that we go for dinner to The House of Prime Rib, the long-established dinner house on Van Ness, fondly remembered from his childhood as the place to go whenever his family was transiting through. It had been over thirty years since I’d been there myself, and our recollections coincided with the spot as sort of the archetypical 1960’s vintage fine restaurant. They seem to be doing something right, at least ostensibly, as 1) they are still in business and 2) we had been unable to book a table on any recent Saturday save after 9PM.
This last Saturday, Jack booked a table for all of us at 7PM, and we arrived promptly. It was busy, and we waited a half hour or so to be seated. I always find this kind of wait suspect, as it follows another old restaurant tradition- keep’em in the bar to pump a few drinks in them. We didn’t do that, but waited I thought patiently for a table. When we finally got seated, it was, it seemed, in the most crowded place in a generally crowded dining room, with the table wedged between banquets and other smaller tables. Not surprising, we wanted something better. The none-too-friendly hostess told us bluntly that this was all she had and it was either take it or wait and take our chances she might come up with something better. When Keith remonstrated that we had booked in several weeks earlier for the evening, the hostess looked, at most, nonplussed, but gave us no further rejoinder. With no other alternative, we all sat down at the table.
I wish I could say that the meal was redeemed by the food and/or service but it wasn’t. Clearly, the menu items and their method of service were vestiges of former practice, but, for instance, the ‘chilled’ salad fork is not chilled, or at least ours weren’t, and the salad bowl spun in a bowl of ice ostensibly to keep the salad crisp could not be performed at tableside as in the olden days- this old bit of theatricality subordinated to the desire to cram more tables into the place.
At more than $40 per person, plus a $50 bottle of wine, the meal was certainly not cheap. Was it good? Trying to cast my mind back to what we ate at restaurants during my, pardon the pun, salad days, made me think that the food we had was also sort of vestigial- similar, but in a gloppy, mass-produced kind of way. Evocative, but basically in only sufficient measure to mask the fact that it was crappy and expensive.
As the poet says, you can never go home again, and our dinner last Saturday was a dashing of our nostalgia, certainly. The House of Prime Rib I would characterize as now a tourist trap of the first water.