Kuleto's cioppino

Kuleto's, on Powell Street, doesn't have Cioppino on the menu, but there it was, a huge bowl of it, and another in front of Akasha. Two steaming bowls of seafood sampler in a tomato base. Crabs, mussels, clams, fish. The local speciality. Why was it here, where they don't serve it? Good story.


We'd met up here the day before with my Cousin Terri, who works in the neighborhood. I hadn't seen Terri since 1976, when I was eight and the family was out on vacation. So I looked her up, and we talked for a while in Kuletos, and as it does, the conversation turned to what we were doing here in San Fran. I said we were looking for Cioppino, and hadn't found it yet. She said go up to North Beach, or Fisherman's Wharf, maybe, but wasn't sure. So we asked the waiter. He said Fisherman's Wharf, but he was hesitant. He was a food person, and he hated to send us up there for food. We don't have it ourselves, he said - it's tourist food.



A few minutes later, he came back, and said the chef was willing to cook us some, but we'd have to come back tomorrow. We thought it over. The calimari we'd had with Terri was excellent - lightly breaded, tangy. Akasha had the clincher - it the chef was willing to special order food for us, we were pretty much obliged to show up and eat it.

So we showed up around eight, hesitant but eager, and sat down to eat. We started with the Tuna ahi crud - a beautiful hash of raw tuna mixed with basil and lemon, served with wafered bread crisped up in butter. In a bit of irony it looked as though it had been formed up in a tuna can... small and round like a puck.

Then came the Cioppino. A massive steaming medly of seafood. We stared at each other, giggling, and dove in. For half an hour we slopped around in the tomato-y sauce, pulling out mussel after clam after prawn, sucking each bit down with the tangy sauce, dipping bread and coming up just long enough to take down a gulp of beer. The waiter was right - I could see how this was tourist food, all right. Just a pile of stuff, and in the wrong hands with cheap ingredients easily butchered to by-products in tomato soup.

We were nowhere near done and had no prospect of finishing when Akasha said, we're giving the rest of this away to the first homeless man we see. Again, she was right - this was an accidental bounty in a restaurant far to spendy for us. I won't say how much it was, but it was more than I've ever paid for a meal, enough to keep a frugal family in groceries for a week. So we boxed it up, thanked the waiter effusively, and headed up Powell street where, soon enough, a man asked us for change. Akasha handed over the box, and we went on our way. It was a good night.