The Gallery Café
Hidden by the cable car museum on Washington and Mason is another museum of sorts: the museum of pre-startup San Francisco.
It is not advertised as such.
In fact, it is not advertised at all; Google “The Gallery Café San Francisco” and beneath the rubbish heap of Yelp one finds its glorious, 1994 website. I don’t think anyone seeking to write a classic review of the place could do it; it is an experience, a stubborn rebuff of all that is tech, and clean, and optimized, bound up in a place serving a mean breakfast sandwich and chocolate bombs (two shots espresso, whole chocolate milk over ice).
It cannot be praised as or made out to be a great tourist place. In fact, it is the opposite: a dim, cluttered, cash-only café, the home of an owner who glowers beneath Godzilla on eternal loop and, when asked by wandering tourists if there was a gluten-free menu available, replies: "Anything we buy that doesn’t have gluten in it, we add gluten.” He was kind enough to direct them to another café on Columbus which did not make such additions to their menu. “But you'll have to wait in line, there.”
Patrons sit about in sundry chairs, few of which are alike. There is an immediate sense of camaraderie which enwraps you as you sit down and look at Everyone Else — stemming from either the fact that your tastes were refined enough to come here or that the owner did not kick you out. You have been counted worthy to sit among the sci-fi posters, the posed figurines, the electric train set, to ask meekly for the bathroom key attached to a massive rubber ducky.
The café is not the antidote to the rash of all-the-same, over-optimized, brightly-lit, health-enabling, tech-enabled cafés that infest the nearby Financial District — it would not last there a second — but maybe it is a bit of San Francisco so healthy that it has resisted infection. Sitting within one forgets words like Twitter, or Facebook, or Salesforce, and best of all the café does not beg you to remember them. Far from being customer-obsessed and other LinkedIn truisms, the café does not give a damn.
Those who sip a coffee or nibble on a spicy breakfast sandwich seem to enjoy this implied passive war, the minor victory which occurs each time Patagonia-wearing innocents enter and immediately feel awkward, standing in the middle like conquered men. Tech bros’ sighs of "Maybe we’ll just go to Starbucks” upon seeing the “cash-only” sign seem to me the tinny retreats sounded on kazoos by a humiliated oppressor.
The race to this season's current idea of perfection is a bland one, only to be replaced by an even lower common denominator with the next Big Thing. But the Gallery Café remains true to only one ideal, which seems to be itself. I will certainly return — if the owner lets me.
