Day 2: Fisherman's Wharf

Sandy and I spent our first morning in San Francisco wrapped around each other, caring nothing for the world outside.

Actually, we spent it ironing. Great city to see, and do you actually think we’d do it wrinkled? As Raj would say, Eeew! We primped and took turns with the travel steam iron I’d brought. Of course Mr. Morocco said the night before that he’d bring up an iron, but then he didn’t say anything about showing up to work that morning three hours late.

Dressed & pressed, we set out for our highly anticipated first item of the day: breakfast at one of the most delicious parts of town.

Every native San Franciscan I’ve ever met, every tour book I’ve ever read, every well-seasoned traveler of the city all say the same thing: stay away, away from Fisherman’s Wharf! It’s a tacky, it’s a tourist trap, and it’s the armpit of an otherwise glittering metropolis.

In a way, I have to agree with them. It is super tacky and it is a tourist trap, that’s for sure, as are most places with a Madame Tussaud’s. The streets are lined with old fashioned candy stores, jobbers selling unofficial Alcatraz t-shirts, and vending machines on every corner you could possibly spit, tempting you with the miracle of turning a regular penny into a cable car coin.

Why on earth would we want to go somewhere so predictable?

For the food, that’s why. Sure, Fisherman’s Wharf is carnival-ish and weirdly eccentric, but it’s also home to some of the best food you’ll ever have the pleasure of eating. You can visit a restaurant or buy it right off the street, market style, where the trademark sandwiches are so fatly stuffed with lobster, crab or shrimp, they give you a fork to eat some of the fish out of it, before you actually bite into the bread itself.

Sandy and I are creatures of habit. What’s ours is ours, and we snarl if anyone comes too close to our water bowls. However, being that we both love taste and all different kinds of food, with one another we do nothing but share. I guess that happens when you’re with the right person.

Me and that right person paced through Guardino’s, The Crab Station and Sabella before settling on a crab sandwich, calamari and deep friend clam strips with seafood sauce. There are no tables around there, and so we took our grub across the street to the gigantic, light up Fisherman’s Wharf sign shaped like a boat steering wheel, and chowed down standing up.

I have eaten thousands of meals in my lifetime, as have we all, but very few are so memorable that I can recall them years later. Chips twisted up in a newspaper in Piccadilly Circus; sharing a Big Mac in the car with Oli while on a road trip to the university where she would eventually get her Master’s Degree; gelato from a total hole in the wall in Venice, that we only found by accident because we were lost.

Some will argue that it’s all about the fine restaurant, the linens, the candlelit ambience, and that’s good too. But in my opinion, and in my experience, nothing, nothing can take away from the moment of cheap, hand-held foods in faraway places that become, more often than not, some of the most delicious meals you will ever have.

That was a new moment to add to my list, standing beside a gigantic boat wheel sign with Sandy, and eating street-bought seafood. He was feeding me, I was feeding him, and we both fed the fat pigeons that clustered around our feet. It was absolutely delectable, and I was very happy he liked it.

Somehow, I’d known he would.