The Gastronaut

Leisurely wake up and breakfast, but then it’s time for a spot of work: we have to prepare our presentations for the meetings we have set up on Monday – we go through a few revisions and a final honing which take us to early afternoon and then we’re ready to grab the car and go sightseeing. We want a panoramic tour, so first we head towards Lombard Street at Hyde, reputedly the steepest in San Francisco and featuring a series of hairpin bends. Yes, another tourist’s delight and the cars line up on top of the hill to negotiate the bends, but hey, it’s fun! We try to bounce up and down the SF hills as in a film car chase, but tone this down after we discover our Magnum has a low wheel base and risk tearing the exhaust off…

Haight-Ashbury is next: a district of Victorian houses and pretty gardens much beloved by 1960s flower children. The area still holds a certain feel of that age: shops selling clothing in psychedelic colours, smoke stores, bookshops, many bars and street cafés. We stop by a Mexican taqueria – El Balazo – and enjoy a bong beer and a burrito with chicken, salsa, rice, beans and guacamole which must be about the best I’ve had this side of Tijuana!

We then drive up yet more hills up to the highest of them all: Twin Peaks. From here the view on this glorious autumn afternoon is sweeping: the neat rows of houses on the SF hills; the straight line of Market Street pointing to the gleaming downtown skyscrapers; the fog starting to roll in from the Pacific Ocean towards the Golden Gate; the blue waters of the Bay stretching round to Oakland and beyond. Cameras click and videos whirr, and I happily join the lenspointers to take a couple of panoramas.

The afternoon draws on and we want to see the ocean! We drive down from Twin Peaks through the appropriately named Sunset District to the Great Pacific Highway. Alas, there is no sunset to admire as a grey mist begins to envelop us, but still it’s an experience to walk onto the broad sandy beach, dip a finger into the cold waters of the Pacific and think: next stop – Japan! There are only a few surfers around us, paddling out towards the crashing waves, ignoring the warnings of strong currents and severe undertow!

Time to head for the Golden Gate Bridge! This icon of 1930s engineering is probably the most photographed bridge in the world. I have made my little contribution to this record! Not much chance to admire the scenery on the drive over to the North side, as traffic is heavy: apparently over 100.000 cars a day cross the bridge, despite the $ 5 toll! More photo-ops on the North Plaza of the view across the Bay to San Francisco in the fading light.

We drive along the shore to Sausalito, and are pleasantly surprised by this beautiful little town reminiscent of a Mediterranean resort. The main street is lined with cafés, restaurants and upmarket stores and nearby a large marina attracts my colleague’s eye. He is a keen sailor and as we hop from one pier to another, he explains the finer points of each boat. Not that I understand much – they all look large and expensive to my untrained eye!

Well, at this point the sun has long set and we are getting tired, so it’s over the Golden Gate Bridge and back to the Omni hotel.

San Francisco – arrived here very late on Friday night – 11 pm SF time, working out to 1 am Chicago time. Fortunately the bags arrive quickly and Hertz get me a Dodge Magnum with a huge Hemi engine to drive the way to the city centre.

A sidenote: I have taken the Tomtom satnav with me on this trip, and I noticed that it gets rather confused by the sudden location changes as I travel across the continent. I turn it on as I leave the airport but it takes ages to get a satellite fix, so that I am halfway to downtown before it springs to life and guides me to the hotel. Maybe it’s suffering from jetlag too!

The Omni San Francisco is just the right kind of place I want to stay the weekend: an upscale four star with excellent service, a great room with a very comfortable bed and good location in the financial district just next to Chinatown. Not to mention that it also offers very good prices over weekends when the usual business customers are at home!

Saturday morning I wake up at a leisurely hour. Yes, I want to go out to explore, but I also need some rest and recuperation after my to-and-fro travels last week. After an excellent breakfast (blueberry pancakes with lots of maple syrup – yum!), I set off up the hill of California Street towards Chinatown. Right outside the hotel I see my first San Francisco cable car of the day! These trams moved by underground cables were apparently common in many cities even in Europe, but only in SF have they survived replacement by buses, and have now become the icon of the city just as London’s double-deckers. It’s a glorious sunny day, starting off fresh, but soon I have to take off my leather jacket. Chinatown is a three by five block rectangle of streets crammed with restaurants, dim sum parlours and little shops selling not only cheap chinese artefacts, but also expensive furniture and jade and ivory carvings. Suddenly to the sound of beating drums a long red paper dragon comes round the corner, followed by other costumed dancers in a long parade. It’s some kind of celebration, presumably with political overtones as then several men with rather serious faces appear, waving Taiwanese (?) flags, escorted by San Francisco’s Finest appropriately riding Harleys.

I continue walking into the North Beach area on the way to the harbour. Here China gives way to Italy, instead of dim sum we now have pizza and gnocchi, and street cafés offering espresso coffee. Quaint touches of an old Italian community abound, there’s even an Alfa Romeo garage with 1970s Spiders being serviced!

From North Beach I walk down to the waterfront: Fisherman’s Wharf is an obligatory stop for SF visitors. Yes, it’s one giant tourist trap, with dozens of souvenir stalls, and “I escaped from Alcatraz”-T-shirt shops, but the view makes it all worthwhile: the blue waters of the Bay with bobbing sailing boats, Alcatraz Island with its white prison in front of the hills of Marin County, the orange span of The Golden Gate bridge to the left. Here too, plenty of restaurants: San Francisco offers the most diverse cuisine in the whole of the US! I stop at one of many crab stalls and enjoy a wonderful crabmeat roll with a Bud to drink.

I walk along to Pier 39, which features the highest concentration of tourist tack, but also a unique attraction: a sealion colony that established itself right here sometime in the 1990s occupying three wooden piers and then refused to go away. Apperently they find the spot congenial for rest and recuperation after dodging the sharks in the Bay! The crowds are getting thicker still, but this is no ordinary Saturday afternoon: it’s the “Navy Week”, and the pilots of the “Blue Angels” squadron are about to start a show over San Francisco! A free airshow is not a thing to miss, so I watch the F/A 18s roar in and perform their evolutions over the water and the city.

Time to go back to the Omni to get the car and pick up my boss at the airport. He’s come in direct from Milan via Frankfurt – claims to be awake and well after the 11 hour flight, but that’s a tad optimistic. We head for a restaurant nearby the hotel and by the time he’s finished his steak, he’s already nodding off!

I have to wake up before dawn to catch my 7am flight to Chicago. I get to the airport on time, check in (not an easy process, US airlines these days expect you to it all by yourself, at a machine just like an ATM!) and then face a line of hundreds at security. I eventually arrive at the head of the queue. hand my papers, the TSA guy scans them and says: “OK, you’re a four-S, come with me!” Now I have no idea what a four-S is, but I can only guess Squarci Selected for Special Scrutiny, as I am then led into a area cordoned-off for screening Enemy Combatants from innocent businessmen. I get a hand search, my bags are searched with swabs put though an explosives detection machine, but as I’m not in the habit of carrying Semtex, I pass muster and am waved through.

Arrival in Chicago. The I-90/I-94 from O’Hare to the Loop is perennially congested despite the 10 lanes, so it takes over an hour and a half to get to the McCormick Convention Centre where I am visiting an exhibition. I meet all my contacts and customers then get back to the Loop to check into my hotel. This is the Allerton, right on the Magnificent Mile, one of the world’s grandest shopping streets. Nearby the hotel are Neiman-Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, and Macy’s and… an Apple Store right in front! A paradise for shopaholics!

I rest awhile and dinnertime arrives. Where to go? Chicago has innumerable choices, I can certainly recommend the Chicago Chop House for excellent steaks, but I had steak yesterday so something different is called for. Why not combine dinner with another Chicago institution, the Blues? So I head for Buddy Guy’s Legends, just a short El ride away from the hotel on South Wabash.

Legends is Buddy Guy’s Blues Club and museum of assorted bluesy memorabilia that aficionados will appreciate. But it’s also a great place to enjoy southern Cajun soul food: I tried as a starter the fried okra with honey-mustard sauce and as a main course the Legendary étouffé: crawfish tails and vegetables in a red roux, served with rice and cornbread. Excellent stuff, washed down with plentiful Goose Island Honkers Ale, a malty bitter Chicago beer. A Key Lime pie rounded off the meal.

At 9:30 the music began! The performing act tonight was Eddie Shaw & the Wolf Gang. As my more experienced friends will know, Eddie Shaw, Howlin’ Wolf’s sideman, is a fine vocalist and sax player, and is accompanied by Lafayette “Shorty” Gilbert on bass and Vaan Shaw playing a triple-neck guitar. I’m no expert, so can only say “wow!” – a great gig that had all the audience rocking on their seats, especially when Buddy himself came on for a cameo appearance. A wonderful evening and great value at $ 10 cover charge.

Minneapolis – yes, a city of hard-working Lutheran Scandinavian immigrants. That is the cliché, and maybe it’s true. Certainly in the crowds at the airport there is a high proportion of fair-skinned blond people and there are ads for the “Lutheran Investment Funds”…

The Minnesotans I meet are a friendly and easy-going lot, open-minded and conversational. Maybe the long hard winters (fishing through a hole in the ice is a popular sport) have made these mid-Westerners particularly social people.

So it is with pleasure that I accept their invitation for dinner – my first proper meal since arriving in North America! We go to Redstone in Eden Prairie, a suburb to the south west of Minneapolis.

This is a hip, trendy place, set beside a lake and full to the gills – on a Wednesday night! The cuisine here is American grill, so I know just what to order: a large New York strip steak, cooked rare, accompanied by asparagus and potatoes. I am not disappointed,this char-grilled steak is succulent and tender.

To follow, a yummy pumpkin cheesecake – a very seasonal dessert and one that would be very hard to find outside the US!