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15.174 White Clam Chowder (in a Sourdough Bread Bowl)

By katch4246 on 27 June 2024

Cycle 15 - Item 174

27 (Thu) June 2024

White Clam Chowder (in a Sourdough Bread Bowl)

4.0

at Chowders

-San Francisco, California, USA-

with the Family

Summer Holiday in the San Francisco Bay Area (Day 2 of 11)

Day 1 (15.173 Sauteed Pea Sprouts with Garlic)
Day 2 (15.174 White Clam Chowder (in a Sourdough Bread Bowl))
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11

In San Francisco. With the Family. Their first time ever in Northern California. The immediate objective is to escort DJ and three of his friends to compete in the finals of a global logic competition at Stanford University, while taking advantage of the opportunity to show the family my hometown, including San Francisco and Berkeley, and visit my best friend Hahn, who lives in Los Gatos, maybe even drop by my childhood home in Saratoga. The itinerary is packed, nearly every hour scheduled with activities. Stay tuned.

BREAKFAST

Up at the crack of dawn (except IZ), we went out for breakfast. A Denny's happened to be a couple blocks down the street.

Back in college, we would often go to Denny's late at night (open 24 hrs) to cram for an exam the night day. Can't recall ever ordering anything but breakfast (served 24 hrs).

Build Your Own Grand Slam: hash browns (3.0) + English muffin (1.0) + scrambled eggs (3.0) + sausages (2.0)

For 3 of us, the bill came out to $96.28. If IZ had joined us, the projected cost would've been $128.37 - $48.37 over the allocated $80 breakfast budget. At Denny's.

SHOPPING

My interest in designer goods began in 1997, the inevitable outcome of 3 converging forces: (1) having recently graduated from college, I was working my first real job, as a paralegal, so I had money - not a lot of money, but steady + (2) being in San Francisco, at a big law firm, I was surrounded by many affluent gay men with expensive tastes, and fashion was a frequent topic of conversation at work ("Oh, honey, that's a faaabulous necktie - Armani?") + (3) the office was located in walking distance of Union Square, the luxury shopping district of San Francisco, all the high-end boutiques and department stores within several blocks of each other. I was helpless to resist.

Saks Fifth Avenue, on the other side of Union Square (as seen through a third floor window of Macy's), is where I'd purchased that first pair of Prada shoes.

In a prior post, I'd recounted the story of buying my first pair of Prada shoes (see 15.112 So Yangnyeom Wang Galbi) - this is where it happened, 27 years ago.

June is Pride Month, with the annual San Francisco Pride Parade - arguably the largest in the world - scheduled for this coming Sunday; flags are flying everywhere, including department stores (here, Bloomingdale's).

LUNCH

Chowders is an American restaurant. Specializes in seafood, most famously clam chowder, served in sourdough bowls. Founded 1987.

When Dan and I were at Cal, whenever we had guests from out of town, our first priority was taking them to lunch at Chowders.

At the time, the business had been operating for less than 10 years.

It was much smaller then, as I seem to remember, more like a food court stall with a few seats on the side, not really a full-on restaurant.

Now in what would seem to be an expanded space, plus patio seating in front and out back.

Apparently, clam chowder in the sourdough bread bowl is now a San Francisco institution. Researching menus of seafood restaurants in the area for dinner tonight, all of them seemed to offer the dish. Walking down Pier 39 on the way to Chowders, every seafood restaurant seemed to advertise it in their windows. Even the small café in the lobby of our hotel had it. According to Chowders's front signage, theirs is "the original sourdough bread bowl;" this very well might be true, because no other place had the dish back in the day, as far as we knew, which is why we only went to Chowders - good on them.

The dish, as well as sourdough bread more broadly, was described with immense fondness in a prior post regarding Fog City International Café, a restaurant operated by an American expat hailing from San Francisco (see generally 3.015 Clam Chowder in a Sourdough Bowl).

Back in the day, they didn't have much of a menu beyond clam chowder, certainly nowhere near this extensive.

Can't recall ever ordering anything but the white clam chowder in the sourdough bowl (except one time, when Hahn was visiting from LA, we tricked him into getting the red clam chowder, just to see what it was like - "But wait, I wasn't even curious about it to start with!").

The dish was every bit as awesome as I remembered. Creamy soup, seasoned spot on, with loads of luscious potatoes and sweet clams. But ultimately, as ever, the star was the sourdough bowl, perfectly chewy and tangy, in perfect synergy with the chowder.

While the family really liked the soup, they didn't quite get the point of the bowl. Scraping away the remnants of the chowder, and leaving behind the bread, they asked to order another one, but I refused, unless they finished the bread, which they didn't.

Fried Zucchini (3.5) + Fish & Chips (3.0): both made with sourdough breadcrumbs!

In planning out meals for San Francisco, this had been priority number one.

I was so gratified to find the business doing so well, after all these years - clearly, their success is well-deserved.

TOUR

After lunch, we took a ferry from Pier 33 to Alcatraz Island, home to the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary - aka "The Rock."

Located in the middle of San Francisco Bay, as seen from Fisherman's Wharf.

With extremely fond memories of taking the Alcatraz tour when I was a kid, it was the first tourist activity scheduled for the trip (not counting the cable car ride from Union Square to Fisherman's Wharf this morning, which I'd failed to document).

In the past, scheduled group tours were led by a uniformed/badged ranger from the National Park Service.

Now, everyone is given an individual headset, available in various languages (including Korean), for self-guided tours.

Unable to determine when the change occurred.

In the 1996 Michael Bay film The Rock, the tour is shown to be led by a park ranger.

The cell of inmate Frank Morris, who escaped from Alcatraz in June 1962, along with accomplices Clarance and John Anglin, by using spoons to expand the ventilation shaft into the utility corridor behind the cell and leaving a papier-mâché head to fool the prison guards making their rounds - to this day, there is no concrete evidence whether they survived after swimming out into the frigid waters of the Bay.

No doubt, I found the audio recording to be far less compelling than a live narrator, especially one who could answer questions from visitors.

The very last menu, breakfast on 21 March 1963, the day that Alcatraz closed down as a prison.

To this day, I remember the ranger explaining how the warden had insisted the food at Alcatraz to be of the highest possible quality, one reason why the cost of the operating the prison had been so high, eventually leading to its closure; the recorded audio also emphasized the point, in the final part of the tour.

DINNER

The plan had been to eat a seafood dinner at Fisherman's Wharf, upon our return from Alcatraz, but everyone was so tired that we went back to the hotel for a nap.

Located on 801 Mission Street, about 480 m from the hotel, directly across the street from Denny's.

Mel's Drive-In is an American restaurant. Offers a wide range of diner fare, from breakfasts to burgers. Founded in San Francisco in 1947 as the city's first drive-in restaurant, eventually expanding into a chain - currently 8 locations in Northern and Southern California. It stood in for the central Burger City location in the 1972 George Lucas film American Graffiti.

The lasting image of the American diner is believed to be perpetuated by Mel's decor, which maintains a 1950s vibe.

Mel's once had a location in Berkeley, where we'd occasionally go in lieu of Denny's, though I have no specific memory of any visit.

As a last-minute substitute, Mel's seemed like a great place for dinner, in light of its history as a San Francisco landmark eatery and its proximity to the hotel.

Mimosa + Firestone Walker Brewing Company California Blonde Ale.

Alas, the food was disappointing. Largely, we all ordered poorly - rather than tried and true staples, like breakfasts or burgers, we ended up with fringe items that were probably placed on the menu just to make the selections look more diverse on paper; when DJ asked for the Grilled Fresh Atlantic Salmon, the server seemed to do a slight double-take, like "Really?" And we were still exhausted. And partly because we were exhausted, W had a meltdown about being under-appreciated and stormed out, so we had to go out and convince her to come back in. Not a great meal in any sense.

Homemade Turkey Dinner (1.5): my selection, everything was dry and flavorless, even the mashed potatoes and gravy.

Including tax and tip, the final bill of $148.63 was absurdly high, given the nature of the restaurant and the quality of the food, but nevertheless $51.37 less than the $200 allocated for dinner - sorta making up for the overpriced breakfast at Denny's.

ENTERTAINMENT

Again, we went to The Escape Game after dinner. This time, we did Gold Rush. Again impressed with the production.