San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A brief timeline of Italian food in the Bay Area
1850
After immigrating from Italy via Peru, Domingo (Domenico) Ghirardelli opens a general store at Broadway and Battery that became a chocolate company in 1852.
1852
Frank Bazzurro, from Genoa, opens a restaurant inside the abandoned ship Tam O’Shanter, where he serves lots of Dungeness crab.
1859
One of San Francisco’s earliest Italian restaurants, Campi’s opens and serves multicourse meals for 25 cents, which includes coffee and a bottle of wine.
1874
The Colombo Market, one of the city’s first produce markets, is established by Italian American vegetable gardeners on Davis Street near Front Street, in an area that eventually became the city’s main produce district.
1886
Fior d’Italia opens on the site of a bordello, serving “linguini and meatball” and chicken parmigiana for 10 cents each. It would move five times and close briefly in 2012, only to reopen once again.
1896
P.G. Molinari opens his Italian deli on Broadway. After the 1906 earthquake and fire, it moves to Columbus Avenue.
1910
Of San Francisco’s population of 416,912, more than 16,000 are Italian immigrants, mostly from northern Italy. Italian truck farms — in Colma and other nearby towns — produce crops worth roughly $19 million.
1911
Ambrogio Soracco of Genoa opens Liguria Bakery as a full-service bakery; it later specializes in focaccia.
1922
By the 1920s, the rise of Italian cuisine is well under way in San Francisco. Local food writers of the day take note — including Mrs. Belle De Graf, editor of The San Francisco Chronicle’s Cooking Information Page, whose cooking advice is syndicated in 50 Pacific Coast newspapers. In her 1922 cookbook, “Mrs. De Graf’s Cook Book,” shares a recipe for Spaghetti al’Itallienne. A straightforward but deeply flawed recipe, it instructs home cooks to boil a half-pound of spaghetti for 25 minutes. Any modern cook who makes pasta at home knows that this amount of cooking time will result in a mushy mess far beyond the ideal al dente. Nonetheless, the directions then say to combine the pasta with a tomato and onion sauce (dried or canned mushrooms optional), and concludes with a command to mix the two, and add cheese.
1930
During the Great Depression, a Chronicle essay explores the cuisines of Europe, describing Italian cooking as “the most consistently appetizing, wholesome and satisfying in present-day Europe.” In a tumultuous decade that leaves the nation reeling, many recipes featured in the newspaper during that period seem to focus not only on simplicity but on being highly economical. Take, for example, the following recipe featured in a story titled “Fancy Cooking Is Easy, but Good Cook is Plain Cook.” Far from wholesome (or appetizing, for that matter), The Chronicle recommends using Heinz products to dress up leftovers: “Heinz Cooked Spaghetti is an ingredient that is really a combination of many rare ingredients, and is always ready to clothe leftover meats with color and high spirited flavor.”
1946
Say so long to the bare-bones cooking of the 1930s. In Genevieve Callahan’s “The California Cookbook” (1946), the Bay Area author — who in the previous decade helped revolutionize a little regional magazine called Sunset — includes nearly two dozen Italian recipes. The book demonstrates America’s increasing demand for Italian recipes while it emphasizes an Americanization of Italian cuisine.
1952
Caffe Trieste opens in North Beach, serving as the first espresso bar on the West Coast.
1958
The 1950s era sees the rise of an indigenous Italian American cuisine. “There are Italian dishes that are prepared here much the way they are prepared in Italy, and there are Italian dishes that are prepared only here — in North Beach,” writes Chronicle food editor Jane Benet in her 1958 book “The San Francisco Cookbook.” She writes that a true San Francisco North Beach meal might consist of minestrone, green salad, Parmesan zucchini, crusty bread, steak with deep-fried potatoes, and, of course, hearty red wine. For dessert: fresh fruit and Cafe Royale (coffee, brandy, sugar cube, citrus peel).
1963
Thanks to culinary influences like Julia Child and White House chef Rene Verdon, French cuisine reigns supreme during the 1960s. As such, even Italian recipes in the pages of The Chronicle have similar leanings. Cannelloni are featured in Morrison Wood’s “For Men Only” column in 1963, and in that same year, Jane Benet shares a recipe for artichokes a la Florentine. It might sound Italian, but “a la Florentine” is actually a culinary hybrid with French roots, a type of dish that usually features spinach and Mornay sauce.
1975
The practice of combining vegetables and cream carries over into the next decade, perhaps most famously with pasta primavera. Commonly believed to be the creation of Sirio Maccioni, the legendary restaurateur behind New York City’s Le Cirque, the dish of pasta tossed with fresh spring vegetables, along with a generous amount of butter, cream and Parmesan cheese, goes on to dominate the decade — and well beyond.
1982
In Berkeley, Paul Bertolli begins working at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Restaurant, helping to make Italian techniques and ingredients integral to what would later be called California cuisine. Bertolli would go on to open Oliveto in Oakland.
1984
Joyce Goldstein opens Square One. Not only did her restaurant — and subsequent cookbook, “The Mediterranean Kitchen” — break ground by exploring a wider range of dishes from throughout the Mediterranean region, Goldstein’s deep dives into regional Italian cooking goes on to inspire the next generation of chefs.
1996
Rose Pistola opens in North Beach, and there, chef Reed Hearon celebrates specialities of the Ligurian region. It is named the best new restaurant in America by the James Beard Foundation.
1998
Craig and Annie Stoll’s Delfina opens in 1998, and it could be said that this is the restaurant that sparks the NorCal Italian revolution that would soon dominate San Francisco. Over the next two decades, many restaurants — Incanto, Perbacco, A16, SPQR, Quince, Cotogna, Beretta, Flour + Water and Che Fico — open their doors, each offering their own uniquely Northern California take on Italian cuisine.