San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tosca Cafe had a spectacular culinary moment — now, stick to cappuccinos
The historic bar-turned-restaurant in S.F. was a must-visit favorite. What happened to it?
There’s a tall tale in my family about the first time my mother went to Italy, in the ’80s. She was scandalized to see Italians drinking cappuccinos so early in the morning. What a country, what a lifestyle! How did they get any work done with such a boozy start to the day?
To my mom, a cappuccino was synonymous with North Beach’s Tosca Cafe, and it wasn’t a coffee drink at all. Instead, bartenders would coax steam from the hulking imported espresso machine, frothing milk and stirring it into chocolate and brandy. The drink was supposedly a lifeline for the business, which opened in 1919 months before Prohibition went into effect. Nothing to see here, officer, just some paesani enjoying their cappuccinos.
Despite the “cafe” part of the name, Tosca has always first and foremost been a bar. By the time Jeannette Etheredge purchased the business in 1980, the kitchen had been closed for nearly 30 years, and it remained shuttered throughout that legendary era. Whatever Lars Ulrich, Sean Penn and Robin Williams were consuming in that back room, it wasn’t food.
Tosca Cafe is now a fullfledged restaurant, and although it’s possible to cobble together an acceptable meal, the kitchen is wildly uneven and the dining room so loud on weekends that it helps if you read lips. It’s a spot you go to for vibes and revelry, not for the food.
None of this would surprise any of Etheredge’s regulars. It’s only noteworthy because for a few years, Tosca Cafe was one of the best restaurants in America.
In 2013, Etheredge was served an eviction notice by her landlord, and acclaimed New York chef April Bloomfield and her longtime backer Ken Friedman stepped in to save Tosca. After 60 years as a bar, it was suddenly a restaurant — and an incredible one at that, landing on Bon Appétit and Esquire’s lists of the best new spots in America. Michael Bauer raved about the Marsala chicken and the mushroom-topped grilled polenta. New York City’s local paper ran a review. It could take upwards of an hour to get a table during primetime, and yet I dutifully gave my name to the host whenever I visited San Francisco. Between Bloomfield’s food and the energy and history of the room, there was no restaurant in America where I would rather be.
It was short-lived. In 2017, Friedman was accused of sexual harassment by numerous employees, some of whom also alleged that Bloomfield had not done enough to protect them. Bloomfield severed ties with Friedman, but the damage was done. Her Tosca closed in 2019.
Restaurateur Anna Weinberg, chef Nancy Oakes and designer Ken Fulk, three heavyweights of the San Francisco culinary scene, stepped in to save this slice of San Francisco history. With Oakes at the helm, we had hope that the kitchen would maintain its excellence. A 2019 Chronicle article announced the change in leadership and mentioned that Oakes “envisions writing a menu each day that will include dishes like rabbit cacciatore, Dungeness crab cioppino and artichoke stuffed with shrimp and lemon mayonnaise.” But Oakes has not been involved with Tosca since the pandemic, and that vision is not the current state of Tosca, where I noted the menu remained static over the course of six weeks. There’s no nod to seasonality, with springy peas, winter chicories and summery basil all bunked up together.
Which would be fine — not every restaurant has to be seasonal — if the classics were well executed. Often, this is not the case. The pesto pappardelle ($28) was violently undersalted.
The lumache cacio e pepe ($27), while tasty in the way that cheesy pasta tends to be, was gloopy and clumpy, the sauce not properly emulsified. Oakes left behind her recipe for Tuscan fried chicken ($35), but I wonder if she would recognize it. Some bites were completely without seasoning while others were notably spicy thanks to a final drizzle of chile oil, despite there being no mention of it on the menu. For someone with a sensitivity to heat, that dish would have been a game of Russian roulette.
At Boulevard, where Oakes made her name and the cooking is still assured, the pork chop never leaves the menu, and so I guessed Tosca’s pork chop saltimbocca ($42) might be a smart order. One night it was, juicy with a shimmer of pink. On another visit, it was a slog to finish more than a couple of bites of a thin, overcooked chop. What was consistent was the miserly use of prosciutto in a dish where it should be a headliner. Instead of a slice of cured ham wrapped around or draped over the pork, there were motes of prosciutto freckling the otherwise flavorful sauce.
Not everything is a sad trombone. If you roll the dice and end up visiting on a bad-porkchop night, the accompanying crispy marble potatoes, drizzled with salsa verde, will console you. They remind me of the pork-fat fried spuds from the Bloomfield days, and they can also be ordered as a side ($12). Spaghetti and meatballs ($28) were nicely done. And there is reason to hope: Weinberg is bringing in a new consulting chef later this month.
The weekend crowd is not there for food anyway. Tosca seems to be the preferred spot for large parties of hot girls to lay down a base coat of pasta before a big night out. On a Saturday in March, each new arrival to a large birthday party was met with a cascade of shrieks and a glass of Champagne poured from a magnum. The month before, a bachelorette party — I could tell because of the sashes — strutted around the tables to the back room. Later in the bathroom, I listened to someone discreetly throw up in the next stall.
But on a recent Tuesday evening, I walked in and easily found two spots at the bar. The music, inhospitably loud on my two previous weekend visits, was set to a reasonable volume. My martini was very cold, and I had no complaints about my fried calamari ($18) or spaghetti. The bartender was kind — would we like him to take our photo? — and the host helped us identify all the famous faces in the new mural facing the bar.
Tosca’s moment as a culinary player was a short one, a blip in its 105-year history. But it remains a great bar. And the cappuccino? Still very much worth ordering.