Shoot the Breeze #5
Mill Valley Film Festival & Rudest Waiter
Hi Friends!
It’s time once again for a special edition of California Mishegoss’s Shoot the Breeze for paid subscribers. If you want to get this semi-so and so extra newsletter just sign up for a paid subscription. I always have the coupon ready to redeem for a substantial discount.
I can say I have been to many a restaurant, especially in New York City with rude servers. Amazing how these servers still expect a tip at the end of a meal. I have never met a rude server in San =Francisco, but I guess sooner or later it will happen.
Sf Gate and Madeline Wells wrote about the Oriental restaurant Sam Wo who had the rudest waiter. It was all about verbal abuse on the side.
Here’s the story…
This San Francisco restaurant used to be home to the ‘world’s rudest waiter’
The century-old San Francisco Chinatown institution was known for having “the world’s rudest waiter.” Edsel Ford Fung, who customers “came to see and be verbally abused by,” was infamous for “flirting with girls, rudely criticizing customers and reminding people about tipping him,” chef and writer Shirley Fong-Torres wrote in her 2008 book, “The Woman Who Ate Chinatown: A San Francisco Odyssey,” per the LA Times.
Edsel Ford Fung passed away in 1984, but he’s been immortalized in the writings of both San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and author Armistead Maupin, who made him a character in “Tales of the City.”
Do you love Italian food as much as I do? Well, hearing the word dumpling one would think of all types of Oriental dumplings and restaurants. Now think gnocchi and ravioli. That’s just an Italian dumpling in disguise.
SF Gate and Margot Seeto seemed to have found an unexpected city for Italian dumplings.
Here it is…
An unexpected city for some of the Bay Area's best Italian food
Through a chance encounter, I met Annamaria Di Giorgio, the outgoing director of the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, an arm of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before San Francisco, her post since 2019, Di Giorgio did stints in Berlin and Rome. She was getting ready to move to her next station — Barcelona — when I caught her for an Italian dumpling meal of her choosing.
She wanted ravioli. Why not gnocchi?