Category: San Francisco
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103 Things to Drink in San Francisco, 1855
I am reading the 1855 book Land of Gold, Reality Versus Fiction by Hinton Helper. You can find it online here. It talks a lot of smack about San Francisco and I love it. San Francisco was a brand new city in 1848 when gold was discovered in Sacramento, but by 1855 the population was…
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Speaking at the Museum of the Eye Dec 28
I’ll be giving a short talk at the event “Celebratory Bubbles, Not Eye Troubles” at the Museum of the Eye in San Francisco on December 28th. It’s an annual New Year event. My talk (probably a short one of 20ish minutes) is “Eye-Openers, Corpse Revivers, and Anti-Fogmatics: The Medicinal Morning Cocktail.” It’s based on stuff…
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Did the Original Cocktail Sauce Contain Angostura Bitters?
I am researching Prohibition and a search for “cocktails” in the San Francisco Chronicle turned up a story from 1920 on the origin of the “oyster cocktail” that I think is what today we call “cocktail sauce” that is used more on the shrimp cocktail. (I am a 30+ year vegetarian so I could be…
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Bartender’s Ketchup is Back on the Menu in SF
I wrote a story for the SFStandard about elderflower liqueur making a huge comeback. It was so popular when the brand St. Germain first launched in 2007 that it was given the nickname “bartender’s ketchup.” It’s so back, but now bartenders are using a wide range of products. Read the story here.
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50 Year Time Capsule from the Transamerica Pyramid
There’s a new exhibit at the Transamerica Pyramid from a time capsule buried 50 years ago. I checked it out. The building was completed in 1972- the time capsule is from 1974. Before that, from 1853-1959, it was the Montgomery Block that hosted the Bank Exchange Saloon. The Bank Exchange was the home of the…