Me: Where has California been all of my life?
Friend of Crescat: Patiently waiting for you to discover it?
Me: Apparently! But why did it have to be so coy?
Friend of Crescat: Perhaps the correct question is why it took you so long to notice her hints?

Mark Bittman reports in today's New York Times about San Francisco's Tartine:

I don't know the reason — the quality (or quantity) of the butter? Ms. Pruitt's touch? the beguiling nature of The City, as they call it? — but this is my favorite bakery in the United States.

There has been quite a bit of blogging about the Ninth Circuit's decision on Los Angeles's law against sleeping in the streets. (Steve Vladeck, Orin Kerr, Doug Berman, and collected links from Howard Bashman). I confess that upon consideration, it seems rather implausible to me.

I am willing to concede to history and logic that there are probably constitutional limits on the governnment's ability to punish involuntary status instead of conduct. But of course sleeping on a street is conduct. So I'm dubious of the move to say that Hobson's Choices aren't choices at all. And all the more dubious in this case, since sleeping in a public way (as opposed to other public property) hardly seems an "unavoidable" result of not having a private place or shelter to sleep in.

Put differently: Suppose people can only sleep 1, in homes, 2, in public shelters, 3, in public streets, and 4, in public non-streets. I take Wardlaw's decision to decide that for people who are too poor for 1, in cities that don't provide 2, it is "cruel and unusual" to force those people to pick 4 rather than 3. This seems very odd.

[I also don't think that the conduct-not-status principle derives, if anyplace, from the Eighth Amendment but more likely as a judicial prophylactic rule necessary to implement the procedural promises of the Due Process Clause, but that's a less important quibble. For an alternate, non-constitutionalized regime, see Robert C. Ellickson, Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces (discussed here).]

Cardinal Levada has directed Catholic Charities of San Francisco to stop placing children in need of adoption with homosexual couples. In response, the board passed a strongly worded resolution condemning the Cardinal and his policy. (The text of the policy is here.) As my girlfriend predicted, Catholic Charities has not been obeying Levada's directive.

Now the Thomas More Law Center has filed suit against the city of San Francisco, suggesting that their resolution violates the establishment clause because it impermissibly "disapproves of" a particular religious belief. I haven't read the complaint, but at that level of generality the case seems pretty unlikely to get off the ground.

But presumably the goal is not victory so much as tarring the city of San Francisco as anti-Catholic in the public eye, and I confess that some of the phrasing in the original condemnation seems unduly nasty. Does it matter that the "meddl(ing)" Vatican is a "foreign country"?

[Thanks to Marty Lederman for the text of the resolution.]

UPDATE: And here are some further thoughts on the last point from Eugene Volokh.

My previous posts on San Francisco omitted other things, like the cranberry-orange brioche french toast at Mama's, the Filbert Steps, Chow, the perils of Yellow Taxi, and so on.

And this is to say nothing of things omitted because we didn't even go there-- sushi, Taqueria Castillito, the Ferry Plaza market on a Saturday instead of a Tuesday, a day-trip to Marin County, etc. My itineraries are always more full in theory than in practice. But at the very least, I thought I should mention the french toast.

Yesterday (Wednesday) involved a series of errands around the city, many of them food-related. We went to Mama's up in North Beach for its famously yummy brunches. My salmon-caper-leek omelette was yummy, although it could have done with less salmon and more capers and leeks. (My girlfriend thought it should have been runnier, but for once I disagree; it was holding enough stuff that runniness would have just turned my plate into an incoherent mess.) The grilled red potatoes were also astounding.

From there, we worked to acquire provisions for lunch. In addition to our cheeses from the day before, we acquired focaccia from a store that sold nothing but focaccia-- just two oldish women in a small barren storefront bringing out pieces of bread from the back room and wrapping them in white paper. Parisians and New Yorkers would approve. We then proceeded to Lucca at 22nd and Valencia, home of the famous "spicy coppa" (or "hot coppa", as one regular customer before us called it) as well as some equally yummy hot salami. Both are fatty, pork-based lunch meats that have been living in spices for a long period of time. We got some for our picnic and I got more for my plane-ride today.

After a few more interludes (to buy shoes, Quicksilver, and a new summer hat) we caught a bus to the Golden Gate park where we were offered illicit foodstuffs while greedily devouring our picnic. The crescenza from the Cowgirl Creamery was a revelation. All of this took long enough that we never got to see the park's main attraction's-- the de Young museum and the bison.

In the morning, we made another stop at Tartine, where I finally found out what I had been missing by not having a morning bun. Yeasty, buttery dough glazed with oranges and fresh sugar. We got another one to take on the train to the airport.

The St. Louis airport was something of a culinary wasteland, and the B terminal didn't even have a coffee shop, but I am now safely ensconced in Indiana for the next few days eating my father's ever-delicious cooking.

"Normal" blogging, and a roundup of correspondence and the like, will resume shortly.

Basically, we walked, ate, walked, sat, walked, ate, walked, sat, walked, sat, ate, walked, and ate today. Stops included:

Breakfast at Tartine. It's a bakery, but fresh bread is unavailable anytime on Mondays or Tuesdays or before 4 any other day. You would think that this spelled doom, but actually the place is great. The coffee was strong and fresh; the pain aux olives (which is to bread what quiche is to pie) full of tasty gourmet meat and olives was salty and enlightening; the gruyere gougere was simple and mademe feel inadequate about my attempts to bake popovers. Deciding that coffee and savories were not going to be enough to sustain us through the walking, sitting, and eating we had planned for the rest of the day, we went back for bread pudding (full of tangy local goodies and the mysteriously ubiquitous tasteless apple) and pain aux chocolate. This took about twenty minutes of dithering to do, though, and I still wonder if the frangipane croissants or the morning bun were wrongly neglected. (There were also cakes, but why be extravagant?)

Oh, and there were also the first delicious-looking croque monsieurs I have ever seen, involving asparagus and fromage blanc, but I forbore.

Eventually, we made it to the ferry plaza farmer's market and related shops, where we filled up on free samples. Mediocre olive oils, too-sweet granolas, unpleasantly gamey honeys, too-sweet balsamic vinegar were all disappointments. The grassy young olive oil, and the loads of dried unsulfured fruits (white peaches taste better sulfured; bing cherries taste better un-) were successes.

And the cheese. I have been looking for real fromage blanc since one honeyed dessert in Paris in 2001, and the Cowgirl Creamery has the real stuff. We also acquired a sort of sampler's array of fresh soft cheeses (cottage, ricotta, marscapone, and something called crescenza that tastes remarkably like really really good butter) but haven't tried them all yet. Apparently they have a specialty crottin, too, but luckily we left before I could figure out which of the half-dozen crottins available it was.

The all-important dinner was at the local Dosa, which serves slightly trendy South Indian food. Dosas are hard to find in New Haven (and we were hungry from, inter alia, a half-hour wait) so we feasted. Normally, inexpensive Indian food falls flat, but this spice blend was less ham-handedly chosen. The tiny green chiles cooked into my onion rava didn't hurt either. These were the best part of the meal, but beforehand we had some sort of lentil donut bathed in spicy yogurt, and a pair of cocktails made with soju, a sort of korean barley vodka that I had expected to be tasteless but had a surprising tang. My only major complaint is that the menu has both a cheddar cheese dosa and a calamari appetizer, which surely exist only as traps for the unwary.

In addition to the eating, walking, and sitting, we played on the "widely reviled" Vaillancourt Fountain, which is a cool jumble of concrete blocks with stairs and water strewn about. [I thought it would have been cooler if it had been dripping with lava and included in the Dungeons and Dragons Red Box, but one can't have everything.] The rest of the Embarcadero looks disturbingly like downtown Baltimore but one can't have everything. And the bay smells nice.

I might move to Berkeley.

Food first. We had lunch at the Chez Panisse Cafe, since it seemed like the thing to do. I know some people think Alice Waters's schtick is overrated or passe, but they should eat here first before being so hasty. I had my first cardoon (a relative of the thistle, apparently) which is a lot like what an artichoke heart dreams of being. I also had not-my-first goat cheese, but it accompanied what might have been the tastiest leaves of lettuce I can remember eating. It was hard for the second round of food to top that-- my spaghetti carbonara was very good, and the peas were fresh but crumbly. Her polenta was buttery and tasted like real corn, and the chanterelle mushrooms were dark and sweet (but a little too heavily sauced). The sour cherries in the crisp were also a revelation, but mysteriously stretched with some not-in-season apples.

And the bread! My relationship with my own bread is growing more dysfunctional. Now when I eat a truly delicious tangy-sweet loaf with a perfect crust I find it vaguely depressing, knowing how far I am from being able to imitate the feat. (Ex-co-blogger Raffi has provided a great deal of much-needed first aid to my loaves, but they still fail to retain their crunch more than 12 hours out of the oven.) So it wasn't perfect, but it was delicious. All expensive meals should be this good.

On the way back down Shattuck we stopped into some faceless grocery store for a few necessaries, but I quickly got lost amid the free samples of citrus fruit. Rows and rows of delicious cheeses, curious olives, and some funny-looking vegetable that I will only fully identify when I eat it tomorrow. I sort of wandered from aisle to aisle, mouth agape. This must be what refugees from the Iron Curtain felt like upon first arriving in Manhattan.

And books. At Blackhawk Books I picked up a heavy burden of used literature I had long been hunting for (Strange Pilgrims, Good Bones and Simple Murders, Lectures on Literature); at University Press Books I saw what might have been the best selection of legal books for its size ever. (And I say this not only because they are the first bookstore I have seen stock David Currie's Constitution in Congress). Jacob Levy once made fun of me for suggesting I couldn't live permanently in a place without bookstores as good as those in New York or Chicago. I may have uncovered a contender.

All of this getting wrapped up in books meant that we nearly missed our scheduled tour of the Scharffenberger Chocolate Factory, which was interesting but could have done with less lecturing and more staring at the loud creepy chocolate mish-mashing machines. I'm still not sure why they were quite so insistent about keeping us from wearing open-toed shoes (luckily they have spares on hand) when they were willing to let several dozen people mill confusedly around some very dangerous machinery. While our tour guide was quite enthusiastic, she was also "punchy" (as she described herself) by the end of the day; I still have not decided whether she was high, or simply Californian.

After returning to San Francisco I sampled something called "spicy koppa", but hopefully that will be a story for another day when I return to the source.

It's been a full (fun) day with plenty of work for my flat feet. We checked out of here, acquired very yummy cornichons and deliciously stinky taleggio here, learned more than we ever wanted to know about peanut milk from the very friendly proprietor of this place, and examined fancy furnishings here and here and (yuck) here.

The two stops today of the greatest note were a trip to SF MOMA to see the Surreal Calder exhibit, which was nice (as Calder always is) but rather odd. Much of the strength of Calder's mobiles and stabiles is the shadow-play that comes from bright focused lights and bare white walls. But while a few of the mobiles were beautifully placed and carefully lit, the vast majority were haphazardly dazzled or stuffed up on pedestals. It was as if the whole place had been curated by two different people, assigned the exhibits by lot. (The actual point of the exhibit was supposed to be to highlight the "surrealist" roots of Calder. But true as that may be, the exhibit didn't particularly establish any new propositions.)

And regular readers know to expect a restaurant review. We both came down with ravenous appetites on the BART back to our neck of the woods for dinner, so went dashing from the station to the highly-recommend Taqueria Can-Cun, where we acquired burritos. As my griflriend put it on the phone to her parents, we didn't even realize that burritos could be like this. I think the secret was the heavenly tortilla, which was very fresh and (I assume) packed with yummy lard. But the avocado-chile salsa might have had something to do with it too. I have heard rumors that there are burritos this good someplace in Chicago, but I never found them.

Tomorrow: Berkeley.