WITHOUT RESERVATIONS

Snail call

The times might not exactly cry out for yet another food guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area, but if we must have one, let it make use of a funny snail icon. This is the memorable detail of The Slow Food Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area (Chelsea Green, $20, paper), by Sylvan Brackett, Sue Moore, and Wendy Downing — the snail being, of course, the symbol of Slow Food USA and Slow Food being the organization founded in Europe in the mid-1980s to protect the Old World's food cultures from McWorld.

The guide deals with restaurants fancy and not, as well as food and wine sellers, bakeries, taco trucks, drinking emporia, and coffee and tea parlors, and the names it names tend to be very much those of the usual suspects. What is unusual is the snail icon — not just the fact of it but the mysterious and rather arbitrary way in which it pops up in the pages. The authors note at the outset that they award snails to "those establishments that go above and beyond in their support of sustainability" and so on and so forth. What "above and beyond" means, I cannot tell, and the contextual clues aren't much help.

Why, for instance, is Tartine Bakery awarded a snail and Noe Valley Bakery isn't? And how is it possible not to give a snail to Café Niebaum Coppola, which sells — and serves — not merely organic foodstuffs but foodstuffs produced on Coppola's own properties? That is very much the Italian country-family way, and we should recall in this connection that the founder of Slow Food, Carlo Petrini, is Italian. The guide tells us that Petrini likes to eat at Campton Place when he's in town, though the claim that "today [we] will find Swiss chef Daniel Humm at the helm" of that eminent restaurant's kitchen is notably out-of-date.

Factual errors, in fact, are not as rare here as one might hope. The book insists on calling the San Francisco neighborhood of Forest Hill "Forest Hills," while the Asian supermarket chain 99 Ranch turns up as Ranch 99. The name of A la Turca, a fine Turkish restaurant in the Tenderloin, is misspelled. None of these glitches is fatal in and of itself, and of course book production does proceed at a snail's pace, but the aggregation of boo-boos does raise the question of who is minding the store.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com