Outside this achingly authentic French Restaurant, Cafe Central advertises its signature dish. Cassoulet comes from Southwest France, and there is more than one version. Photo by David DeVoss. New Orleans is not the only French city in America. In the early s, French people were the most numerous immigrants in San Francisco. Why did they make the long trip from France to the West Coast?
Some of his paintings, mostly from the s and s, are on display at the Palace of Fine Arts. The Gold Rush, she explains, took place at about the same time as the Revolution of The trip was not easy — it involved a four to six-month voyage around Cape Horn.
One of the migrants was Isadore Boudin, a baker whose sourdough bread came to be called French Bread. Today, Boudin bread is still popular, and Boudin cafes are known for their signature lunch dish, a hollowed-out French bread bowl filled with a choice of soups. They still use the original mother dough, called the starter. Etienne Guittard, who learned chocolate making in France, started his artisanal chocolate company in San Francisco in the mids, and five generations later, the family still runs it.
The Wall Street Journal declared Guittard chocolate chips the best for making brownies. One of the most elegant places to have lunch or an early dinner, The Rotunda Restaurant, with its landmark stained-glass dome and skylight, is on the 4th level of the Neiman Marcus department store. Built as the City of Paris, the land was purchased in by Neiman Marcus.
Despite a city order, the building was demolished, but the dome was saved. Today it is a calm and elegant place to have lunch and enjoy the view of Union Square. Photo by Jacqueline Swartz. Another early immigrant, Felix Verdier, opened a department store he called the City of Paris. Felix arrived in the SF Bay in , on a ship stocked with silks, lace, wines and champagne. Miners and others came in rowboats to buy the goods, some with gold dust.
