At Vivande, consider the oyster

Posted on August 13, 2003 by editors
Vivande’s pasta with pesto and fried oysters

By BONNIE WACH
SF Weekly

Even here in the inventive food capital of the world, where unusual couplings are not merely accepted, but hoisted high on diners’ shoulders and paraded around like conquering cuisine heroes, a chef can once in a while go too far. We are indulgent, but we do have to draw the line somewhere.

So when my friend on Fillmore called and invited me to try fried oysters and pesto pasta at Vivande Porta Via, at 2125 Fillmore, I agreed reluctantly. I am not a huge oyster fan to begin with, and the combo sounded at best intriguing and at worst like a Pepto-Bismol moment. Then again, it was Vivande, Carlo Middione’s 23-year-old house of superb Italian gastronomy. How bad could it be?

Over the years Middione has brought us some of this town’s most inspired regional Italian cuisine — authentic classics that span every culinary inch of the “boot,” from the calf to the tippy-toe. This dish, however, isn’t rooted in a centuries-old Ligurian tradition; it’s one of a handful Middione invented.

“One day I sat down and was going to have a bowl of pesto, and I saw two oyster sandwiches go out, and I thought, ‘Hmmm … I want those,’” explained Middione. In a moment of stomach-growling indecision, he resolved to have both. “It’s really out of character for me. I don’t like to mix and match. But one bite and I knew I had something.”

Back at the table, my first expectations of the meal were shattered upon delivery: It arrived with a half-dozen midsize Tomales Bay oysters, breaded and lightly fried, circling a mound of ribbon pasta — not tossed together in a giant pile of earth ‘n’ surf as I’d envisioned.

The rest of my preconceived notions were dispelled with the first bite. The combination was surprisingly light, with flavors that danced around each other in perfect rhythm. First the breaded oysters — delicately crunchy on the outside, soft and airy on the inside — played countertempo to the piquant pesto; then the feather duster ­light house-made fettuccine took the lead, picking up the pace with a tangy walnut herbiness. Lemon wedges between the oysters cut the heaviness of the fried shellfish, and the hint of pecorino and parmigiano in the pesto gave weight to the paper-thin pasta strands.

Midway through this tango, I looked up at my friend, eyes sparkling, and mumbled, “Mmmm hmph mmph!” (Read: “Dang, this is good!”) He nodded and smiled knowingly. Another convert. Later, Middione told us that the dish’s popularity has spread almost entirely by word-of-mouth. It’s been one of his top sellers for 18 years.

“I’ve invented five dishes in my time, and this is one of the most inspired. For one thing, I like the look of it. It’s a nice visual experience, and that’s an important basis for all my food,” he said. “People hear about the oysters and pesto pasta from somebody else, customers bring friends in and say, ‘I know this may sound different, but …,’ and they always end up trying it and loving it.”

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The constantly creative Bill Shields

Posted on April 2, 1989 by editors

Self Portrait by Bill Shields

LOCALS | DAVID ISH

It is a misleading moniker to call Bill Shields a neighborhood artist. He is indeed an artist who lives less than a block from Fillmore Street. But his work and his life have extended well beyond the neighborhood.

Although born in San Francisco in the Presidio, where his physician father was director of Letterman Hospital, he grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and lived for 12 years in New York and Connecticut, where he was a top flight editorial illustrator for publications including McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Time and Fortune.

Prodigious, prolific, fertile and fecund, the constantly creative Shields has often produced more work in a year than some other artists have in their entire careers. And his work, like Picasso’s, is marked by sudden, abrupt discontinuities in style, rather than slow, evolutionary refinement. He finds himself both the victim and the executioner of total departures from his previous directions.

If anything underlies the quantum leaps that have taken him from style to style, it is a deep mastery of craft, a mastery found in the Pine Street house he bought in 1976 and remade through the years with his wife, Denise — to their own delight and the delight of the numerous photographers dispatched by magazines including Sunset, Better Homes and Gardens and Architectural Digest.

Bill and Denise bought the house in 1976, about a year after Bill returned to San Francisco, and just before housing prices had begun their first ascent into madness. The small house — “a shambles,” Bill called it — had an even smaller garage, which faced Wilmot Alley. Bill leveled the garage and put up a new structure housing his studio on top, plus additional studio space he rents to other artists. There is also a two-car garage at the ground level of the studio building.

Standing in the small, bright, skylight punctuated main house, looking out from the copper potted kitchen to the studio across the courtyard, it is impossible not to get the feeling that what lies just behind the studio is not Wilmot Alley but the rocky, raw, pounding Mendocino coastline. The entire effect of being in the house, the courtyard or the studio is of being in the country. Enter through any door and you have moved magically and deeply into the countryside.

Next to the unshakeable feeling of country living, the next-most astonishing thing about the house is the great sense of light and spaciousness. The source of light is most understandable — skylights abound over almost every room and major area. The sense of spaciousness is harder to account for, since the house — which seems to ramble on in all directions, with room after room — is incredibly small and compact.

The sense that flows from the Shields’ house is the same that flows from his work: a sense of abundancy, of overflowing, of constantly more, and more to come, of something happening everywhere and on every level of surprise, of detail, of a full and rich and deeply appreciated life. And of even more. And more again. A tap on some deep inexhaustible, constant source of creativity.

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Great Old Houses: 1901 Scott

Posted on February 1, 1988 by editors

1901 Scott Street | Drawing by Kit Haskell

1901 Scott Street | Drawing by Kit Haskell

LANDMARKS | ANNE BLOOMFIELD

Observe at the corner of Pine and Scott a low brick fence, a hedge and a row of cypresses. Nothing can be seen behind them except more trees and hints of a rather large white house, an excellent Italianate specimen, it develops.

No, we are not out in the country, somewhere in idyllic Sonoma County or down by old Pescadero; this is San Francisco. And house, garden and driveway, surrounded by the L-shape of Cobb School playground, comprise a real estate entity that, while now exceedingly rare, was once a standard sort of thing: a 50-vara lot.

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Great Old Houses: 1900 Pierce

Posted on November 1, 1986 by editors

LANDMARKS | ANNE BLOOMFIELD

A year after the Queen Anne house at Pierce and Pine was built — we’re talking 1887 — it was photographed for a newspaper series titled “Artistic Homes of California.” Except for minor details, the picture might have been taken today: It shows the same sinuous brackets at the entry and in bay windows, the same unusual fern relief in gables galore, the same elaborate roof with wavy dormer, and so on.

The house lost a tall brick chimney along the way (probably in ’06), a rear porch, square upper sash panes on the parlor’s bay windows facing Pine Street, stained glass in an adjacent window and a few entry details. But what would you expect in a century and more? Meanwhile it’s managed to acquire a flagpole, fire escapes, basement window bars and the wrought iron fence on Pine.

Aesthetics here, security there: A house walks somewhat in step with changing times.

Now with that photograph from 1887 came a quaint description of the interior, a sort of architectural laundry list. “The main hall is nearly square, finished in redwood, with wax polish. The hall fireplace cuts off the further right-hand corner. The chimney-piece, supported on Corinthian columns, is very effective. The staircase rises from the left. The dado is paneled, with a circle in each square. The side walls are terra cotta, and the ceiling is marked off by deep mouldings. The staircase makes one turn and then is walled in.”

The 1887 picture and text reveal changes at the entryway. Originally there were double front doors with little squares of leaded glass, and on either side of the marble steps the porch had a long bench sheltered not only by the gabled door hood, but also a pair of L-plan balustrades.

This inglenook effect, and the curious brackets, adventures-in-roofing and unpainted redwood interior relate 1900 Pierce to turn-of-the-century Craftsman houses by Julia Morgan, Bernard Maybeck and lesser architects. Basically a Queen Anne, but designed on the cutting edge of style for 1887, it draws these new elements to its bosom with flair and a good feeling for continuity. 1900 is complex, but not too busy for its own good.

This article originally appeared in the November 1986 issue of the New Fillmore and is included in Gables and Fables: A Portrait of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights by Anne Bloomfield and Arthur Bloomfield.

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