Luncheons with my Father

The first business lunch with my father was in North Beach at Enrico's.  The year was 1968.  I was 30 and my dad was 56.  We called them business lunches because I had reached that age of acceptance for a father, where we could engage in a conversation as peers of the business world.  He had his own business and I knew it well from years of listening at the dinner table as he unwound over the cocktail of the decade; martinis when he was younger, scotch as he mellowed in midlife, and wine after he retired.  I was able to comment intelligently because I had worked for his company half a dozen summers as I grew up, starting and staying at the bottom of the totem pole.  I had my career and it was a new field, computers.  He saw that their magic would transform the world.  We often ate at Enrico's over the next fifteen years and we always had the same thing, a Salisbury Steak on sourdough, and two tall gin and tonics, one before and one with the meal.  I never liked gin, but this was the right drink for the occasion.  He didn't just order gin, too plebian, "Tanqueray and tonic, please, … tall."

Enrico's was a favorite because it was a sidewalk café and we watched the pretty girls walk by on Broadway and Montgomery.  Hookers and hippies in outrageous clothing and I was in the middle of it with my involvement in Champagne Taste on Upper Grant Avenue.  My father got vicarious pleasure out of the social side, Carol Doda walking by and saying, "Hi, Peter."  He was based in San Jose, what many then considered a small town, and I was up here with the movers and the shakers.  I was working for an investment company that was responsible on some days for a significant percentage of the activity on the NYSE.  I was a consultant to the mutual fund manager, Bob Brown, in the trading room.  I would bring my dad tips and we would talk about the stock market.  The market was like gambling for him, just short term investments.  I would relay advice from Bob Brown.

My jobs changed like a light bulb over the next few years and there were gaps, like when I went back to graduate school.  When I moved to England, these luncheons stopped for good.  I was infrequently in San Francisco, and after I returned and he was too old to travel from his retirement in Carmel just for lunch.  So, the seventies define these luncheons.  These years spanned an extremely active period of my social life, many women, houses, parties, and other events.  He would avidly listen to my tales of adventure in the wilds of the San Francisco seventies.

We tried to eat at other places whenever possible.  Enrico's was a bit far from the Financial District and when I was busy with work and thought about what those two G&Ts would do to me, I redirected us to Sam's or the Tadich Grill.  Tadich's was our number two place.  Dickie always had Sand Dabs there.  I always had the Dover Sole, one of his favorites, but not at this restaurant.  Here I drank a glass of white wine.  It's funny how you pick up traits from your parents.  I follow in my father's footsteps.  I still always order the same thing at a restaurant; chicken livers at The Village Inn, Salmon at River's End.  Usually we would take a table; if we were feeling frisky, we would sit at the bar where one of the two of us would be successful in striking up a conversation with a babe.

We didn't miss many restaurants over the years.  I dragged him to a Japanese place on Montgomery where you had to take your shoes off.  He loved everything Japanese, so it wasn't much of a fight.  He liked Sam's, famous for fish and for curtains across the private booths.  I took the whole PEMEX team from Mexico there one time for a celebration and they loved it.  He also loved Jack's, although they always embarrassed him by forcing him to wear a tie.  We only ate there a few times because I didn't like the food.  I thought it was an old gentleman's club that was pretentious and stodgy.

I was only able to drag him a few times to Vanessi's on Broadway.  It never came off as well for lunches as it did at dinner time.  I was fond of the place when I returned to San Francisco after graduate school.  I had an apartment up the hill on Montgomery Street.  I would stop in on my way home from the Financial District.  Facing yet another 300-foot climb, I would decide to defer this until after a nice meal and a glass of wine.  I always sat at the counter where you could watch the Genoese saute chefs putting on a display of knife and pan tossing at the live gas flame grills.  There was always a special and I took it.  I always added a Zabaglione for a dessert.  This has disappeared off the menu of every American restaurant.  These days it is available only as an ice cream treat that is awful.  A web search finds it only at one restaurant, and that in New Zealand. 

The chef would start with a copper half globe bowl that he could hold over an open flame.  In would go the whites of several eggs, some white wine, and some sugar.  All these ingredients the chef seemed to just toss in randomly.  That was it, simple.  He wire-whisked it over a flame until the egg white began to froth up.  The chef then served it hot from the pan into a sundae dish; the extra coming after you had spooned in the first few mouthfuls.  It's a wonderful dessert but requires preparation when you are ready to eat it and that doesn't fit with today's restaurants.

My father and I did the luncheon thing because it excluded women.  I was a raconteur only because I was my father's son.  He lived vicariously through me in those years.  When we met at night, there were usually problems.  I don't remember how he roped me into it, but one night he dragged me to a dinner with an "investment prospect."  She was younger than I was and trying to market jewelry.  She was as embarrassed as I was, and she and I tacitly agreed to end the evening as soon as possible.  Worst case was when my parents and I were sharing an apartment on Nob Hill.  Late one evening, I went over to Blum's in the lobby of the Fairmont for coffee and a dish of ice cream while I read the next morning's Chronicle.  The sounds of a piano bar pulled me into the lounge and lo and behold, my father was sitting next to the piano.  "What are you doing here?" I asked.  Just then a hotel man came up to us, "Here is your key Mr. Andrews.  The lady is already up in the room."  What was there to say?  I left.