The Elegant Art of Dining: Bohemian San Francisco, Its ... - iMedia

Now go a little further to the corner, cross the street and enter the store of the
Costa Brothers. It is a big grocery store and while you will not find the sausage
and mystifying mass of food products in such lavish display and profuseness,
as in the previous place, if you look around you will find this even more
interesting, for it is on a different plane. Here you find the delicacies and the
niceties of Italian living. At first glance it looks as if you were in any one of the
American grocery stores of down-town, but a closer examination reveals the fact
that these canned goods and these boxes and jars, hold peculiar foods that you
are unaccustomed to. Perhaps you will find a clerk who can speak good English,
but if you cannot either of the Costa brothers will be glad to show you the
courtesy of answering your questions.
Turn around and look at the shelves filled with bottles of wine. Now you feel
that you are on safe ground, for you know about wines and can talk about
Cresta Blanca, and Mont Rouge, and Asti Colony Tipo Chianti. But wait a
minute. Here are labels that you do not understand and wines that you never
even heard of. Here are wines whose taste is so delicious that you wonder why it
is the whole world is not talking about it and drinking it.
Here are wines from the slopes of Aetna, sparkling and sweet. Here are wines
from grapes grown on the warm slopes of Vesuvius, and brought to early
perfection by the underground fires. Here are wines from the colder slopes of
mountains; wines from Parma and from Sicily and Palermo where the warm
Italian sunshine has been the arch-chemist to bring perfection to the fruit of
the vine. Here are still wines and those that sparkle. Here the famed Lacrima
Christi, both spumanti and fresco, said to be the finest wine made in all Italy,
and the spumanti have the unusual quality for an Italian wine of being dry. But
to tell you of all the interesting articles to be found in these Italian, and French
and Mexican stores, would be impossible, for some of them have not been
translated into English, and even the storekeepers would be at a loss for words to
explain them.
This is all a part of the Bohemianism of San Francisco, and that is why we are
telling you about it in a book that is supposed to be devoted to the Bohemian
restaurants. The fact is that San Francisco’s Bohemian restaurants would be
far less interesting were it not for the fact that they can secure the delicacies
imported by these foreign storekeepers to supply the wants of their people.
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