San Francisco was where California cuisine, which kicked off the entire U.S. craze for the fresh, the regional, the free-range, the organic and the eclectic, got started. But the people who can afford to support this are driving it into the ground. Patricia Unterman, longtime food critic and owner of the long-lived and much-loved Hayes Street Grill, wrote in the Examiner that "cooks who have spent $30,000 and three years on a culinary education can't afford to make $10 to $15 hour on a cooking line, which is all most restaurants can pay ... The pool of labor for traditional restaurant jobs gets smaller and smaller as rents escalate. Newcomers to San Francisco are lucky to find a room, even if they are willing to rough it. But what if a cook, a good cook, has been working 10 years in a good restaurant, and he or she wants to start a family?" The result, Unterman writes, is that "cooks rightfully begin to question their future in the profession. They leave cooking because it doesn't pay enough, or they move way out of town or they take another job to supplement their income. Pretty soon, the other job ... designing Web pages, becomes the main job." Demoralized by making less money than almost all of the people they serve, Unterman writes, skilled cooks quit and are replaced by beginners -- and your food isn't as good.

Remembrance of things past: Part 3

My best friend who died of AIDS moved to San Francisco in 1976. It was through his then-girlfriend that I met him back in Wisconsin, for he was still living as straight. He moved to San Francisco in part because I was around --- and in part, I now realize, because he needed to come out, and San Francisco was where he knew he'd be able to do it. I remember the day we were trying to decide which apartment on Russian Hill he should pick -- the studio or the one-bedroom with the views of Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge and the kitchen with the black-and-white tiles, for the slightly more expensive price of $300 per month. We had time to decide; I urged him to go for the beauty one. And until he moved back to Madison to die there he remained, in the place where he could sit in his director's chair and brood out the window for hours, drink bad white wine and, when the spirit moved him, paint good pictures and make room-enhancing sculptures. All supported through groveling at tables less than 30 hours a week, which gave him the free time to explore San Francisco --- which in his case meant both its art worlds (he took me to the first performance piece where I saw people wearing black) and its gay worlds (it was at a diner in the Haight where over dinner he finally came out to me because he had finally toppled for someone).

But the dot-com revolution has threatened to destroy the gay community. As Brian Bouldrey wrote in the Bay Guardian, a local alternative paper, "Young people can no longer move to San Francisco to be queer anymore, not unless they have a college education and know how to design a Web site ... The fantasy of San Francisco as a gay paradise is over ... How much does the Web affect the vitality of the gay and lesbian community? ... Face it, gays and lesbians are abandoning 'the community.'"

It's true. A friend who belongs to an organization of gay journalists tells me it can't seem to engage the interest of the younger writers who have jobs with online publications -- they have no political or cultural gay identity and are only interested in their stock options and job-hopping.

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