Taste tyranny proves San Francisco stereotypes

STEREOTYPES ARE slippery things. Take your average San Francisco yoga class, for example. And take it you might well do, considering that it is regularly offered at what is called the community rate of $12 for an hour of very good teaching.

Otherwise the yoga class is pretty much as any Dublin yoga fan might have predicted, except that the pupils are very young and the teacher is a middle-aged man. He pats you on the back when you begin to tire. He is remarkably encouraging.

“I love that you’re resting,” he says.

But actually you are two slow inhalations from a coma. Never mind.

In the lobby, mad with endorphins, you float past the sign which warns about all the armed robberies that have taken place in this area at night. Right after the yoga classes that take place in this very building. So much for the warrior poses one, two and three.

But perhaps it is around food that the San Francisco stereotypes are sharpest.

In last Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle there were instructions on exactly how to dry your herbs – no, not that herb – as well as a two-page feature on the closure of a sustainable egg farm.

In Mill Valley, over the Golden Gate Bridge, when you’re in the local branch of Wholefoods on a weekday afternoon, you can see that an awful lot of the women here do yoga.

Wholefoods is not some pine-shelved cabin crammed into one of the cheaper parts of Dún Laoghaire, but a huge supermarket where the meat is additive-free and there is what might justifiably be called a library of yoghurt.

Never in your life have you seen so many beautiful women over 40. Their lightly muscled arms are reaching over the pumpkins. There are sleeveless tops everywhere. Michelle Obama has a lot to answer for.

These women are thin, dressed in sports gear. There are a couple of face lifts but there is no discernible make-up; I mean, really, none. There are no high heels either – heels of any kind seem to be regarded as rather trashy in white and Asian San Francisco – and it looks like there is big money behind every shopping trolley. These are the wives of the very rich, who do not work but are proud to be seen in their workout gear. The man on the smoothie machine is from Haiti.

Lifestyle is a minefield. A lucrative minefield. La Boulange is a chain of artisan bakeries which is very popular with San Franciscans. It sells robust and tastefully tan French bread, and delicate cakes, and its shops are very pretty, a slice of retro good taste redolent of a France that probably never existed. La Boulange is sort of like the Amélie of bread.

Yet back in August it was announced that the La Boulange empire – its director, Pascal Rigo, had expanded into restaurants as well – had been bought, lock, stock and barrel by Starbucks, which had paid $100 million for the privilege. I don’t say it’s like Guiney’s closing, but still: there is a part of San Francisco – and quite a large part – that will always hate Starbucks.

Now Rigo, who is one of the city’s food heroes and was called the Steve Jobs of pastry by San Francisco magazine, has not only sold all his shops to Starbucks, he has been taken on to improve the quality of the baked goods offered in Starbucks stores across the United States.

Certainly he is starting from a very low base in that task. Rigo told San Francisco that it is one of his ambitions to introduce warm croissants to Starbucks. But San Franciscan foodies are neither optimistic nor impressed. Far from being the Walt Disney of bakeries Rigo has been revealed to have been nothing more than a serial – or perhaps cereal – entrepreneur all along.

Meanwhile, those of us shopping in La Boulange on Filmore Street last Saturday were treated to startling behaviour. One woman was being served by two members of staff, the man being assisted by a woman who was fetching and wrapping the various items that the customer was ordering.

“You’re not serving me,” said the customer, in the midst of this artisan paradise. The two shop assistants gazed at her in silent amazement. The female shop assistant left the counter and walked up the back of the shop, which is in full view of the counter, obviously angry and perhaps tearful.

“I couldn’t see what she was doing with the vegetable quiche,” the middle-aged customer said. “Give me another one and please use a tissue.” The customer after her was an old lady with perfect hair and a couture suit who ordered coffee and a cake to go and would have been classed as remarkably rude if we hadn’t all witnessed the woman who had preceded her.

It is true what Queen Elizabeth says: taste isn’t everything. But it is a very big issue in San Francisco, in a manner that is polite yet insistent. Taste is the one tyranny that is tolerated, and of course that makes the city vulnerable to some determined teasing. Now if they can just get the nudists out of the Castro district everything will be all right.