THE 24 HOUR BUFFET

Last night I finally realized why I should live in either New York or Hong Kong. Or subscribe to a food-delivery service with horrible surcharges. Reason being that here in San Francisco a decent meal at around midnight is far away, difficult to get to, and probably in the company of drunken marketing executives. And the distance between there and here is filled with cold weather. Mid fifties. It would have required a fur coat and mukluks.

This blogger doesn't do mukluks.

And I'm too ornery to settle for pizza.

In the old days, San Francisco never slept. Which is remarkable, considering decent coffee was rare. As was good food. I have a cookbook with recipes by local society hostesses from that era with some truly frightening things in it. Combinations of several cans in a saucepan, dash of sherry, and iceberg lettuce leaves. No wonder so many of them died in their forties, they needed gallons of plonk just to stomach dinner.

Many people slept till noon and woke up hung-over.


This was followed by the Hippie years, canned spaghetti, fruit salad with kool wip, teevee dinners, chafing dish cookery, and an eruption of fast food. So it was still a gustatory dark age, and while the city is nowadays no longer a disaster zone in that regard, good luck finding something decent to eat in the night time fog. Let alone appealing.
Most restaurants are closed after nine.

Paris is out of the question, of course, because my French is fragmentary. New York uses English as a common tongue, I've heard, and I practically food-dream in Hong Kong Cantonese. Hence those two metropoles being mentioned.


Surely, you will say, a man with a kitchen and a microwave is not helpless about food at odd hours? Well, yes. My apartment mate was asleep, and banging pots and pans at two o'clock in the morning would have been rather inconsiderate, and the microwave is in the hallway (because it's convenient there) right outside her bedroom door. The only opening or closing microwave noises after her bed time are her warming up a slurf (microwavable heating pad) in the middle of the night. And while there is a tonne of stuff in the deepfreeze, I didn't wish to root through there to find the gourmet stuff at that time. It would not have been practical.


When I woke up long after nightfall to visit the powder room, I realized that for some queer reason I had forgotten to eat anything since lunch time. Must have been too busy.



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