1906 A Bachelor's Cupboard

A BACHELOR'S CUPBOARD Mexican and Creole Cooking mous San Franciscan artists and where writers, mu- sicians, and painters met to drink Chianti and eat spaghetti, ravioli, and frittura, and through their smoke wreaths admire the w^onderfully suggestive frescoes re- calling Gelett Burgess and his " goops," Jack London, and other celebrities whose names were lettered upon the border together with those of " Maisie," " Isabel," " Murger," " Verlaine," and other good Bohemians who know how to live — and to die. The restaurants of Chinatown passed by, there was that of one Matias in the Telegraph Hill region which was unique of all eating places in the West. For it was a Mexican res- taurant over which Matias, an Austrian, presided proudly, and served his few^ patrons in the two clean, shabby little rooms that smelled of garlic and were decorated with colored prints all the way from Spain, showing glorious bull fights in every stage from a hand- some, lone matador, calmly awaiting the onslaught of Taurus, to the gory finish with rivers of blood; and from without, coming through the open windows, all the clattering tongues of Italian and Greek, Mexican and Portuguese, denizens of the " Barbary Coast." In the little alcove kitchen in the rear of the first room stood Matias's w^ife, a handsome, liquid-eyed Mexican woman of thirty, busily cooking the " Albun- digos," " Tamales," stirring the " Chili con carne," and rolling the " Enchiladas " for the Senor who sat in the next room drinking of the heavy, puckery Mexi- can wine.

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