Bohemian San Francisco

In 1914, San Francisco was America's most seductive city: a place where Chinese dim sum houses shared streets with French grills, where Hemingway-type artists argued over absinthe in North Beach basements, and where a young food writer named Clarence Edwords set out to eat his way through the entire culinary map. This book is his deliciously eccentric record of that journey. Edwords dines with master chefs who reveal secrets now lost to time, samples dishes that no longer exist, and captures a city on the eve of transformation. The recipes scattered throughout are fragments of a vanished cuisine, instructions from the golden age of San Francisco dining that will make modern readers yearn for a time machine. Part restaurant guide, part love letter to a city that burned and rebuilt itself, part culinary time capsule, this is food writing that happens to be historical document too. For anyone who has ever wondered what dinner tasted like when the city was young.