If there is one restaurant that I wish could visit again it is Jack’s in San Francisco. It had a long run, almost a century and a half. Some people miss other fine places, my parent’s loved the Blue Fox. In Los Angeles Scandia would head the roster of fondly remembered places. In New York there are many restaurants people recall with nostalgia. These special and favorite places keep passing on, this month the famous Cafe Des Artistes closed after almost a century. It is cherished as much or more for its pastel murals of delightful carefree arte deco nudes as for its food, a unique blend of French, American and Hungarian dishes. It was if nothing else, a deeply romantic place.
The first time I went to Jack’s in San Francisco was in August 1965 when a few of us got together to treat a friend who was about to report for duty in the Army. Even then Jack’s was a very very old place. The building was a weathered shabby three story brick building put up right after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. It was just up Sacramento Street from Montgomery Street, at the point where hill began its climb. Sacramento was a narrow side street that marched straight up and over Nob Hill. It was August in San Francisco, the weather lived up to Mark Twain's famous comment, “The coldest winter I spent in California was my summer in San Francisco.” This night was cool & foggy. When you turned off Montgomery Street, you caught a blast of misty air right off the Pacific. You entered through double beveled glass doors into a brightly lit room with a hand laid black and white hexagonal mosaic tile floor, dark wood paneling with beveled glass mirrors on the walls and a very high ceiling covered in sheets of patterned pressed tin. The dinning room was long with a bar across the front window. There were large round tables on the far wall and smaller square ones in the center and near side, all draped in stiff white table clothes. The staff was as elderly as the surroundings. After standing at the bar, without bar stools just a dinged and tarnished brass rail to rest your feet on, we were led to a stout table against the near wall and hung our rain coats on dark metal hooks screwed into the paneling. We were two or three decades younger than anyone else in the dinning room, although like them we all wore dark suits and white shirts and ties. The waiter handed each of us a menu, another relic from the nineteenth century, it was printed daily on stiff white legal size stock. It was all small black type, no art work and not even simple prose describing anything, just the names of items in French or English, a long long list of what was available printed on when inked metal type pressed directly on the paper on an antique letter press. In the 19th century Jack’s had begun as a French restaurant and still had some very old french dishes on the menu, although it was very much an American restaurant that didn’t go in for fads or much else that had not been listed since the place was reopened after the 1906 earthquake.
An oddity of Jack’s was the way drinks were served. Due to the very advanced age of most of its waiters, simple drinks and cocktails like Old Fashions, Gin & Tonics, Martini’s and Manhattans were made at the bar then poured into tall water glasses, put on the waiter’s tray with an empty cocktail or old fashioned glass for each drink. When he got to the table the elderly waiter set down stemmed cocktail glasses and then poured the cocktail into it, leaving the depleted water glass beside it. The same for whiskey, whiskey & soda and gin & tonics which arrive in the bottom of the glass with a few pieces of jagged ice chipped off a ice block at the bar. The waiter then topped off the glass with a small bottle of club soda, quinine water or with water from the pitcher of ice water on each table. This added an extra layer of ritual and intensified the antique aura and slow tempo of the restaurant.
In the evening Jack’s served a set dinner that hadn’t changed in decades. Indeed this Edwardian meal continued to served into the 1980’s. An appetizer course was followed by bowl of soup, then a salad, followed by a fish course, the entree and finally a dessert. In progressed in the long accepted sequence of a proper meal at a very traditional restaurant. You began with a cocktail while your read the menu, then ordered a bottle of white wine with the appetizer and perhaps another with the fish, then a bottle of red wine with the meat entree, and finally cognac with the coffee at the end of the meal. Since you were in San Francisco you knew when you left the restaurant sometime between nine and ten you would step out the door onto Sacramento Street and a sharp blast of foggy cold air right off the Pacific Ocean would hit your face like punch.
You chose one item from each course on the list. The appetizers included shrimp or crab cocktail, home made pates, pickled pigs feet, marinated tongue, and other items rarely if ever seen on menu’s today. Then there was a choice of soups, beef or chicken consumes, vegetable soup of some kind, scotch broth (lamb and barley -- my favorite) and a cream soup. The salad was a straight forward mixed greens and sliced tomatoes in a white wine vinaigrette with or without Roquefort crumbled on it as you prefered. That was the only salad dressing offered. The Fish Course presented a choice of local fish like petrale, rex sole, hatchery trout, and sand dabs served “dore” or “mineure.” Finally you reached the entree, the red meat course. It was a choice of that evening's roast meat & fowl or their house special marinated rump steak. The rump steak was long marinated and cooked medium rare. Dense solid meat , no fat, bone or gristle. This steak was chewy with a zippy tang from the spices and vinegar and a deep base baritone beefiness. It was served in a rich bordalaise sauce. The potatoes and vegetable were served from small platters. Desserts were simple enough: ice cream, sherbet and apple pie. A cheese platter was also available.
It took at least two hours to march through this menu. A century ago, before radio or television, it was considered civilized to spend two hours at the table for an evening meal. Each course was like a round at prize fight with a ten minute intre’act between to savor it and clear the palate for the next. The sequence of courses was that of a proper 19th century French meal with the appetizers acting like the overture of an opera: tasty tangy salty items to wake up your taste buds. A large basket of sliced crusty sourdough bread and a bowl of salty butter stayed on the table. The size of the courses was appropriate to the meal, with portions smaller than we expect today in a two or three course dinner. The appetizer was served on a leaf of lettuce and only four or five savory bites. Next the soup was served in a small bowl, but it was more than the little cup you often get today. This warmed you up. A California restaurant, at Jack’s salad came next following the Iberian custom, not the French. All the salads except Crab Louis (a favorite local lunch dish) were served with a classic white wine vinaigrette. At Jack’s it had a good sprinkling of Roquefort cheese crumbles. Next came the fish course. Here again this was one whole fish or two or three fillets of a larger one. The fish was not accompanied by a starch or vegetables. Finally came the entree or main course. While most people had the marinated rump steak in bourdelais sauce, others had roast beef or lamb or half a roast chicken. Pork was sometimes offered, also roast mutton -- a rich manly dish rarely served at all today since the flavor is a bit like game and it is chewy and earthy. Finally came the desert course, but most of the time I ate there we would get the cheese platter. One of the cheeses was a strong soft cheese and a sharp hard cheese plus a large slab of fresh creamy Monterey Jack where the middle of the slab was so fresh it was spreadable and sweet and salty. I seem to recall a few apples or pears on the platter, but that be an error. At this time the old time family Italian places offered one dessert, a slab of fresh Monterey Jack cut from a large wheels, not rubbery square blocks from a supermarket. At Jack’s sliced sour dough bread was available through out the meal.
The wine list was large, ranging across the dozen or so important California wineries of the day and a selection of mainly French imports. This was years before the wine boom and establishment of dozens and then hundreds of small ”boutique” wineries. If my memory is accurate, we usually drank a Livermore Valley Sauvignon Blank from Wente or Concannon with the fish and a Cabernet Sauvignon from Beaulieu, Chas. Krug, Louis Martini or Inglenook or perhaps a reserve Pinot Noir with a bold red stripe diagonally across the label indicating its rare status from the long gone Almaden Winery in the Santa Clara Valley whose vineyards have disappeared under today’s Silicon Valley. If we drank French wines it was usually a white Burgundy followed by a velvety Chateauneuf de Pape from the Rhone Valley. Even if we could pronounce their names we were too young to appreciate and too poor to afford the great reds from Bordeaux and Burgundy.
All this food, drink and wine for four people might cost $60 including a tip, all laid out in cash on a small white plate with green stripes around the rim. Credit cards were a new thing then and the older San Francisco restaurants were slow to adopt them. At good San Francisco restaurants full dinners were five dollars at this time and the huge set piece dinner at Jack’s was around eight dollars, the same for bottles of good local wine. At this time three dollars would buy a hearty meal and house wine at the family places like the New Pisa, La Pantera and the San Remo. At fine Italian restaurants like Paoli’s, dinner began with a vast antipasti spread that cover the entire table with small plates and platters, then soup, a light salad, a small pasta course and finally the main dish. Cocktails were less than a dollar in San Francisco back then and our larger coins were still minted in real silver and a new VW beetle sold for about a thousand dollars and a brand new Ford Mustang for $2,000.
Jack’s dated back to the Gold Rush, I believe it was officially founded in the 1850’s. It was a French Restaurant which at that time meant it not only offered food in the French style, on it’s second and third floor it also provided “les chambres separees.” That is private rooms where meals were served to discreet couples. In addition to the main entrance through the bar and dinning room on the ground floor, a separate side entrance allowed ladies and gentlemen to enter and leave the second floor unobserved by the dinners in the ground floor restaurant. When my mother was a student nurse in San Francisco in the late 1930’s she and her classmates were given stern warnings about French restaurants and their private rooms, specifically Jack’s. When I first went there in the 1960’s the upper rooms had long since been converted into private dinning rooms for business meetings. Seduction and adultery had been replaced by tax avoidance and sales meetings while “the pill” had loosened up sexual mores for my generation.
The principal reason for Jack’s unchanging menu and a dinning room that looked as it had in 1910 was that it was owned by a real estate tycoon who ate lunch there almost every day into his nineties. His heirs continued on for a couple decades after his death. Today it has been modernized into a more or less authentic French bistro and the main dinning room only has hints of it’s former Edwardian look. A perfectly respectable place, it retained the name, but it is not in any way the old Jack’s of fond memory. It was a miracle that it survived as long as it did.
As I wrote at the beginning of this chapter it was widely acknowledged to be a historic anomaly when I first went there in the early 1960’s. It was like eating and drinking in a museum where the menu was authentically as archaic as the decor and aged waiters, all of whom were at least seventy even then. Time passed very slowly at Jack’s and it had a large following who liked it that way. It had great gravitas and an almost preternatural longevity.
On the a la carte menu it offered a wide array of fish, steaks and chops and it’s signature dish, Chicken Jack’s: a sauté of half a chicken in pieces with mushrooms, onions, garlic, artichoke hearts and flavored with fresh herbs,spices and finished with sherry. Before the 1960's and large poultry companies like Foster Farms and the others, chicken and turkey were relatively much more expensive than today and most menu's reflected this. At that time fish was much cheaper than today and since Catholics and many other denominations had to eat it every Friday or on designated Lenten and fast days, fish was a far less exalted main course than today. Jack's was also famous for asparagus with hollandaise sauce, celery victor and leaks vinaigrette. It served entrees accompanied by their traditional classic french sauces, mushrooms in a Madeira sauté, Lobster Thermador, and California’s unique and now all but unobtainable beloved specialty, the essence of simplicity and the sublime, a ten inch wide Abalone steak d’orée. Today when culinary innovations and unexpected if not eccentric transpositions of Asian and European cooking are almost required at better restaurants, Jack’s seems to be a time warp. It was in many ways. It carried on far longer that anyone could have expected but not as long as it’s loyal diners might have hoped.
There was an almost antiquarian liquor store not far from Jacks on Montgomery Street that was my university for learning about wine. It is still there, John Walker & Sons. They carried a solid collection of the leading California wines and a wide selection of European wines. There I discovered French and German wines, especially the great reds from Burgundy and Rhine wines, in particular the great Rhinegau wines like Steinberger, Schloss Volrads, Schloss Johanisberger. I also found the Gewertztraminers of Alsace from the French side of the Rhine. These wines at their best were and still are like bottled sunlight. The legendary 1959 vintage were still available when turned 21 and could buy and drink them. That was the year of the century, annis mirabilis, as far as the Rhine and most French wines were concerned. The French reds of that year were big round and had wonderful rainbow of tastes. Both 1964 and 1966 were fine years also. I also discovered fine Ports and Madeira's from Portugal and the Gran Reserva Rioja reds, then aged at least until they were 10 to 15 years old, and Sherries, real Sherries including the bracing dry clear slightly salty Manzanillas from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Because of the high post WW II dollar, the Rhine wines were not much more than their pale California counterparts while first rate, not grand cru but very good, French reds were not much more than very good California wines. The dollar fell from it’s pedestal at the end of the decade and fine European wines became a stretch for those of modest means.
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