By Paul Reidinger

EATING IN SAN Francisco restaurants gives one a strange sense of our immensely variegated world. On the one hand there's the experience of enjoying the planet on a plate, or a series of plates; on the other, there's the one-dimensionality of restaurants – their overwhelming similarity to one another, notwithstanding their differing menus. A French restaurant in San Francisco, say, is likely to be hung with those turn-of-the-century advertisements for Vichy water or railroad journeys through the Pyrenees; its menu is likely to use (terrifying) French terms, and its staff might even number some actual French people. But such a restaurant isn't French, not really: it doesn't, it can't, provide the sense of immersion that is the true cross-cultural experience.

A neighbor told me about the family-style Sunday lunches at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco. You pay $20 (in cash), she said, and you sit at a long table with all sorts of other people, families and friends and whomever, and the food starts arriving in big bowls and on big platters, and the supply of wine is constantly replenished. That last detail, of course, particularly caught my ear, but I had already been fascinated for some time by Basque food life – and not just because of the connection to Spain (which has an underrated food culture and is a land whose language and history I studied extensively in high school) or pleasurable experiences at such city restaurants as Ramblas or the recently deceased Basque. A friend, well traveled in Spain, had told me over the summer that most Basque men belong to eating clubs, to which they repair several times a week for long, groaning board-style sessions. The Basque Cultural Center event held out the promise of something similar, though presumably not stag.

Not quite stag, as things turned out. Just mostly. There was the odd tot loping about, sometimes meeting up with a fellow tot to stage a breakout attempt from the huge hall, which, lined with several rows of long tables, would do very nicely for wedding receptions or veterans-association meetings. We saw no tots actually get away, because, despite the preponderance of middle-age and elderly men among those gathered, the crowd also included a fair number of vigilant mothers who knew all too well what kind of nonsense their two- and three-year-olds could get up to.

One such vigilant mother made sure my wine glass was always topped off, accompanying each pour with a torrent of rapid Spanish that made my ears ache and at the same time was hugely satisfying; it was as if, by talking so unselfconsciously, so exhaustively, to me in Spanish, she was fanning the embers of my own memory. The wine? French, Père Patriarche red and white table wines. My friend expressed muted surprise (in English) that French wine would be served at an event with so many Spanish speakers (though the wine, red and white, was flawless in that muted Gallic way), but it wasn't really surprising, since much of the Basque country lies north of the Pyrenees, in France, around the city of Bayonne.

Anyway, we were too busy eating – and eating – to ponder the point. Meal opened with a carrot-spinach soup, passed up and down the table in large stainless-steel tureens and accompanied by hard rolls. And wine. Then salmon filets (served individually) sauced with an herbed cream and settled atop a sauté of diced celery root and oyster mushrooms.

That alone would have made a decent lunch. But even as we enjoyed the fish, the big cannon were being wheeled into place: vast platters of garlic-roasted, thin-sliced lamb were soon circulating, along with platters of what appeared to be pale green flageolet beans, boldly amended with garlic and given counterpoint by roasted tomatoes; and broad bowls of what were, beyond doubt, the best french fries I've ever had – long and sinuous, like Fourth of July snakes, with plenty of salty, golden snap and just a whisper of creaminess inside.

I inquired of the man beside me whether he thought lard ("manteca") was the magic ingredient in the papas fritas. "No lard," he said in English, before launching into a celebration, in passionate Spanish, of "ajo crudo" – raw garlic – apparently the secret ingredient in much Basque cooking.

"If you cook it, it's no good!" he told me with a smile. And poured more wine for both of us. All around. Sí.

Still more food. A simple green salad and a plate of dry-jack cheese were the run-up to dessert: a pear tart and plenty of brandy. More Spanish, along with smatterings of French and snippets of an exotic tongue we supposed was Basque.