San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
BLESSED BE THE OLD SCHOOL.
Gold Mirror on Taraval a constant for 50 years in a changing city
Maureen Hurley has been coming to Gold Mirror on Taraval since she was 8. She can point across the dining room at her cousin, Sheila Birmingham, a twice-a-week regular who has lived across the street from owner Josephine Di Grande for more than four decades. The Italian restaurant has become the place where Hurley’s Irish Catholic family comes together for confirmation parties and graduations. Her kids have brought dates here, attended by waiters who have received a discreet call beforehand with a credit card number.
Three months before the Gold Mirror’s 50th anniversary, only San Francisco itself seems to have changed. The back wall is still painted to mimic the facade of a stone-walled villa, its center an arched wooden doorway flanked by red lanterns, barricaded windows (well, “windows”) and an inset statue. The iron chandeliers would not look out of place in a Medieval Times outpost. Over the mirrored bar, where red lights frame the liquor collection, is a cutout of a 17 century carriage with a photo of a toque-carrying chef — founder Giuseppe Di Grande — at its center.
On Friday and Saturday nights, the waiters thread with the agility of toreadors through herds of diners who have come to the Gold Mirror, night after night, decade after decade. You’re welcome to have Che Fico and Flour + Water, they argue. Here, new San Franciscans, is where the rest of us belong.
When Giuseppe Di Grande, now 78, moved to San Francisco from Augusta, Sicily, at the age of 15, America didn’t present him with college scholarships or career counselors. “It was either work in the shipyards or work in a restaurant,” son Roberto says. The Sicilian newcomer learned how to cook then-chic Northern Italian cuisine at Orsi’s, where he encountered a couple of partners who joined him in buying an old cocktail lounge in the Irish-dominated Parkside neighborhood, which they redecorated and opened, keeping the same name. (For a look at the original gold mirror, check out the NSFW painting next to the bathroom.)
Giuseppe returned to Sicily to marry Josephine in 1973, and she moved to San Francisco and bore four children in quick succession. When they were little, she says, she was afraid to leave the house, even to chase after the kids, until one of their grammarschool teachers gave her English lessons. She had to dispense with all timidity after 1984, when Giuseppe bought out his partners, purchased the building, and made Josephine his business partner.
From then on, Giuseppe oversaw the kitchen by himself, starting at 8 in the morning and finishing 16 hours later — no days off, not even Christmas or Thanksgiving — while Josephine ran the dining room, coming home after service to keep the books. All four children, naturally, grew up in the restaurant. (We were conceived in the kitchen, Roberto says, and his mother cackles.) “Better bring your kids here in the night or else they’d be in the street,” the couple decided.
“I started working when I was 10 years old,” Domenico says. “By the age of 12, I could bake, I could butcher meat. At 15, I was already 6 feet tall and looked like I was 18. I was working the pantry.” Two of their siblings moved on, but Dom, now 42, and Roberto, 39, returned to the restaurant after college, taking over a decade ago as Giuseppe stepped away.
The brothers shop at farmers’ markets and spend more time choosing their wines. They’ve started importing products directly from Sicily. These days they close on Christmas and Thanksgiving, too, and add specials to the menu that Giuseppe might never have imagined customers would want. Yet they still make the crepes for the veal cannelloni the way their father taught them and still fold their own prosciutto tortellini — Roberto likes to set up an iPad in the kitchen and watch episodes of “Rescue Me” while he knocks out batches.
Domenico and Roberto have hired a young Italian cook to ease the pressure on their three-cook line, but also to give them the space to think: How can they bottle up what makes the Gold Mirror so special? Their front of house manager, Emily Patterson, and her husband, Connor, who owns a restaurant group on the East Coast, have joined them to look for a second location.
There’s only so much the younger Di Grandes want to change, or can: This is a place where regulars request a dish that has been off the menu for 20 years — Chicken Romana, Veal di Parma — and the brothers can pull together the ingredients to re-create it.
“Since the early 1980s, the neighborhood has changed 10 times over,” Dom says. It has become more Chinese and less Irish. The homeowners with families have moved away and now rent their old houses to young couples who work in tech. Each new wave makes its way to the Mirror. And then they come back.
Sunday night, the families still come in — it’s not unusual to have more than 10 parties of 10 in one night. On Friday and Saturday nights, the vibe is more akin to a party. Regulars arrive early to stand at the bar, migrate to a table after a drink or two, and return to the bar after their meal. They walk back into the kitchen to say hello to Dom and Roberto.
There’s something about Italian restaurants — the old-school kind, not the ones where you have to chase a reservation — that engenders a ferocious loyalty. As good as the Mirror’s calamari steak or the chicken piccata are, according to the regulars, the dishes feel homey, generous, unpretentious. So does the atmosphere, stone faux finishes and all. “Italians, we are warm-hearted,” says Josephine, now 71, who recently resumed spending a few shifts a week in the dining room. “You have pain, but you smile all the time.”
“When we come here, the hostess is the same, the waitstaff gets to know you,” says Shane Brentham, a once-aweek regular for a decade. “They don’t treat you like customers.”
Maureen Hurley says she runs into everyone she knows at the Mirror. Even more common is to start chatting with someone at the bar. “We know we have something in common, and we don’t know what it is,” she says. They run through all the possible points of connection: neighborhood, high school, parish, children. “Then we find it.”
To be a regular, regulars explain, means slipping in after a long workday and claiming the same spot at the bar. It means greeting Dean, the bartender, who reaches for the ingredients to make your perfect rye manhattan. It means the waiters write “for Amy” on your steak order, and Dom and Roberto know to cook the beef extra rare. It means cracking wise with the staff, the way you do with your co-workers or friends, or even texting with the waiters off-duty.
“It’s open and inviting. No one is standoffish,” say Julianne Hunt and Mike Dunne, who have come here for 50 years. They still spend an hour at the bar, charming customers in their 20s, before taking their customary seats, where they can surveil the entire dining room as they eat. “This is the best restaurant in San Francisco.”
Gold Mirror: 800 Taraval St., San Francisco, (415_ 564-0401, https://goldmirrorrestaurant.com. Open for lunch Monday-Friday and dinner 7 days a week.