Outside's Go Magazine - Travel and Style for Men

You have to love Paul Arenstam's job. As Chef of the Americano Restaurant at the Hotel Vitale., a luxury boutique hotel on San Francisco's Embarcadero (and the only waterfront hotel in the city, surprisingly enough), the Massachusetts native has won high praise for his rustic Italian menu. He selects the best in local ingredients, combined with just the right amount of imported Italian accents, to create dishes that make you believe you've been transported to Umbria or Tuscany....that is, until you glance up and see the Bay Bridge towering overhead.

What makes his job especially great—and he'll be the first to admit it—is that all those fabled California ingredients are just a short walk across the street at the San Francisco Farmer's Market.

The SFFM sounds like something that's been around forever, or at least since Alice Waters first stuffed a leg of lamb with fresh rosemary. In fact, it's only been around since 1992. As the man says, I've got a dog older than that.

Though there have been a couple SF Farmer's markets in the past (Heart of the City was started in the early eighties), it wasn't until the early nineties that SF's politicos (notably led by then-mayor Diane Feinstein) realized the importance of the local food movement and encouraged the creation of a farmer's market on the Embarcadero. According to Sibella Kraus, the market's founding executive director, in her forward to the San Francisco Farmer's Market Cookbook, the real impetus came following the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Hitherto, the Embarcadero had been effectively cut off from the city by an elevated freeway. Following the earthquake, this freeway was condenmed, and city began to look for ways to utilize the waterfront. Thus, the current SFFM began at a series of sites up and down the Embarcadero.

However, the real prize was the Ferry Building. In 1999, according to Kraus, the city invited proposals for redeveloping the building, with the result that the Market was eventually invited to call the landmark building home.

It was hard to imagine, walking with Chef Paul among the throngs of shoppers on a Saturday morning that the current market location has only been around since 2003. It feel like an institution that's always been part of the city.

On this particular morning in early June, Chef Paul and I were captivated by the abundance of stone fruit available. Though his executive chef had been by earlier in the morning to shop for the Americano, Chef Paul couldn't help creating a few new menu additions in his head as we sampled extraordinary apricots, cherries and peaches. I could only fantasize on what awaited me for dessert at the Americano that evening.

Chef Paul could only take about a dozen steps before he ran into other chefs on similar quests. "Really, one of the pleasures of coming to the market is seeing other chefs and connecting with some of your favorite farmers," he told me. "The social aspect is amazing."

Chef Paul had to head home to Piedmont to begin cooking for a family birthday party, so I met up with a friend and we did a second cruise through the market, as well as hitting up our favorite stores in the Ferry building. A couple hours later, laden with bags containing stone fruit, artesenal cheeses, baquettes, dried mushrooms, a couple bottles of pinot noir from Napa's Carneros region, smoked duck sausages, small containers of truffle salt and other assorted goodies, we headed over to one of the market's street stalls where they were offering up lunches of roast chicken and pork. The long line caused us to dip a bit into our cheeses and fruits, but we finally got to the front and ordered up a plate heaped with fragrant meat. We walked around to the back of the ferry building and located a little table for our lunch. We opened up the wine and then laid out the bounty we'd found at the market. We ate and drank until we nearly entered into a food coma. We reclined in our chairs and watched the afternoon sun glinting off the water of the bay.

It was a beautiful day.