Thursday, July 22, 2004

The Crepe Cycle

Apparently calling things the new black is the new black.  Memepool has said as much and I’m sure as hell not going to argue with them.  But I’d written in my little notebook a few weeks ago another “new black” that doesn’t appear on the lists - crepes.  There is suddenly a crepe glut in this francophilic city, with deflated pancakes popping up everywhere stuffed with everything from salmon roe to ratatouille to nurtella.  There are cool funky french places in the mission and hi-teq futuristic places in stylish retail zones and even on my very own Clement Street there is a japanese grocery/crepatorium.  We recently dined at a lovely middle-eastern crepe place.  If you can eat it, it seems someone wants you to cram it in a crepe first these days.  And that’s okay with me. 

With proliferation comes decay, and naturally some of these new creptastic refectories were going to fold - but I didn’t want Cafe de la Terrasse to be one of them.  It was thus with an overcast heart that I saw the series of signs on their storefront on my little stretch of Geary. 

The first is hard to read, but I know it says “Natraj,” the name of a strange little Indian restaurant that mouldered there, underutilized, for many years.  Their dark walls, sticky carpet, and ungainly tables and chairs discouraged diners, but somehow they hung on for a decade or so.  But after they went the way of all flesh their sign remained in place, partly spraypainted a rusty brown, defaced but still bearing witness to the street. 

The shop was empty for some time, but then reopened as a bizarre grafting of computer gaming arcade and creperie.  Overbright and post-industrial, bare of decorations and furnished with uncovered tubular steel tables and chairs, they offered fresh sweet-n-savory crepes to whomever could stand to be in the room, which echoed with simulated gunshots and explosions and tire-squeals from a rank of about 20 computer terminals in a connecting room up a few short steps and through a wide passageway in the back.  There was nothing anywhere to baffle the pounding noise.  We stopped there once and had an entirely serviceable crepe or two, but the environment was garrish, the lighting was ghastly, the noise jarring and the furniture uncomfortable.  We let them go their own way. 

Within a year or so the CyberCrepe Cafe had put butcher paper up over its windows and scaffolding over the storefront.  When these masks were eventually removed, the CyberCrepe had been sent back in time.  The outside was a rich deep crimson-maroon, a color that bespoke confidence and heritage.  The signage (not the Natraj marquee, which still hung dusty and ignored) was painted in discrete Latinate capitals, gold in color, generously proportioned: CAFE DE LA TERRASSE.  Sidewalk Cafe.  When I peeked indoors I saw they’d made a huge change there as well: they’d plastered the walls thickly and painted them to look like stone with medieval doorways and eaves, murals had been painted on side walls to replicate a scene in an old and charming city.  The place suddenly looked as if it had been there for centuries, wedged between ancient buildings that had never actually existed on Geary Boulevard before.  The tables were wooden, appropriately solid and cozy, with comfortable wooden chairs on a weathered hardwood floor.  They’d also gotten rid of the computer grotto in the back and turned it into a dining room, all faux stone and bogus beam but still a comfortable and inviting environment.  Definitely, a lot better than it had been before. 

We visited and had a nice crepe (really you have to screw up pretty badly for me to rate your crepe as crap), listened to relaxing world-beat music, conversed quietly and easily as the street rolled past outside the windows.  This place had potential.  And soon they sought to maximize it by advertising on their front window that they they were also glatt kosher, the highest level of kashrut, guaranteed by rabbinical inspection.  In my ‘hood, that’s appropriate niche marketing for all the orthodox jews we see walking to shul on a saturday. 

The sabbath, in fact, was their achilles heel, commercially - La Terrasse closed early on friday, didn’t open again till late saturday afternoon.  Kel was wondering why they didn’t just hire a crepe-goy but that’s not really the way it’s supposed to be done, and so that’s not they way they did it.  The key weekend hours, prime time for them to grow their business, were cut in half.  Maybe it hurt them commercially. 

Soon they put up another big sign: “Organic/Vegetarian.” That preserved their kosher aspect but made a bigger play for us typical San Fran softheaded one-worlder types.  “What does a person have to do,” Kelly asked in amazement, “to sell a crepe in this town?”

Whatever it is, Cafe de la Terrasse didn’t do it.  They went from dingy to sterile to old-european, from Indian food to crepes to kosher crepes to tree-hugger crepes.  And now there’s a new sign on the window: For Lease, Blatteis Realty. The shop itself is empty, the kitchen dusty and stripped, the plaster-stone walls abandoned and dusty.  I usually don’t care when one of the neighborhood shops folds, but I really wanted this one to survive.  They tried so hard to make it work.  I guess with so many new outlets now, the crepe market is just a little too flat.