Cheap Eats
By L.E. Leone
No Athletic Footwear
YOU CAN'T take me anywhere. Take Le Colonial, this fancy-pants downtown Vietnamese restaurant. Can't take me there. My pants aren't fancy enough. They're black blue jeans biked to threads down on the right leg cuff, and my shoes are sneaks, or "athletic footwear," as the doormanperson put it.
"Do you have reservations?" he said, and Crawdad said yes.
"Didn't they tell you?" he said. "No athletic footwear." He pointed at my shoes, but he could have pointed at almost any part of me is my guess. The jeans. The badass black stocking cap, my all-around stubble. Dirty corduroy coat – which I slyly unbuttoned so he could see that my shirt was tucked in.
Shit, I thought, while Crawdad muttered something about going inside to find the friends we were supposed to meet. I'm in big trouble, I thought. You can't take me anywhere. Shit. Shit. Shit.
But the doormanperson decided to go easy on us. "Well, if they didn't tell you," he said, waving us in, "I suppose it's OK. Just remember for next time."
Like there's going to be a next time! Even if I absolutely loved the food, which I did, I can't go around eating at a place where I can't exactly wear sneaks. Can I?
Sure you can. You can wear your dress shoes, Danny Boy. You have a pair. You have ties. You even have a suit, for crying out loud.
True, true. It's true I'm the proud owner of a superslick three-piece suit, in fact, and a pair of fine Italian shoes – but that getup's for getting married in. You can't wear that out to a restaurant. Can you?
Sure.
Yeah, you can, you mean, because you're probably not going to spill rice all over yourself and everything else. I am. You can't take me anywhere, like I said. Fancy-pants food, good as it sometimes tastes, takes too long to happen, and by the time it does I've had way too much wine. As a rule, I'm going to spill something, and last night at Le Colonial was no exception. I fumbled and dumped the whole bowl of sticky, steaming rice all over everything, including the table, the floor, the wine, and the company, but especially it got all over my dirty corduroy coat and my sneaks, so good thing I wasn't dressed up is all I have to say.
Rice is not easy to clean. It's sticky. And then everyone's going to step in it and it turns to glue on the bottom of your shoe and picks up everything on the floor and the sidewalk and takes it all home with you. Hold on, let me see what I got ... a leaf, a gum wrapper, some stones, Weirdo-the-Cat hairs, a straw, sunflower spits.
Man, you can't take me anywhere.
I should point out that this isn't a review of Le Colonial. That place is way over my head. The food was fucking out of this world (except the rice, which is still veer much in this world, in general, but especially in the grooves of my corduroy) – but all in all and anyway I'd rather be at Barney's. The burger place.
It's "gourmet" burgers, true, and it's a chain, sure, but it's a local chain with four East Bay locations and two here in the city, and it's damn great burgers for not too terribly much money. The regular third-pounder is $4.25, and the half-pounder is $5.25, or you can go with one of the eight or nine hundred googy burgers they offer, with ingredients like guacamole, avocado, eggplant, zucchini, pesto, cucumbers, chow mein noodles, and of course artichoke hearts. So that's where the "gourmet" comes in. Oh, and chicken burgers, turkey burgers, veggie burgers, and – blech – portobello mushroom burgers. Blech!
Oh, but you're going to have to pitch in extra for your fries, which sucks. But at least they're great. They're curly fries – $3.50 for a huge two-person basket of them – and they're fried hard and brown and crispy and perfectly seasoned, so don't worry about the nonincludedness. It's a beautiful day! You can sit outside and drip ketchup on yourself.
I'm talking about the Barney's in Noe Valley, by the way, on 24th Street. I never even saw the inside of the place. But the sidewalk patio outside was great. It was outside! And the burgers, I'm telling you, were perfectly cooked. I only got a third-pounder, because I was going to play soccer afterwards, and it was as big as some places' half-pounders. And it was flamey outside, bloody rare in the middle, just like I wanted it, even though the menu said, "Sorry, We Do Not Serve Rare Hamburgers."
Which sucks, but at least you can wear sneaks.
Barney's Gourmet Hamburgers. 4138 24th St. (at Castro), S.F. (415) 282-7770. Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Takeout available. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.
L.E. Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).
April 28, 1999