This is part of a series called "What It's Like" where we at The Bold Italic tell you what a place in San Francisco is actually like. Based on our own experiences and those of our readers.
- Café Zoetrope: 916 Kearny Street, at Columbus Avenue, North Beach. Open Sunday through Thursday, noon to 8 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, noon to 9 p.m. (415) 291-1700.
- Order the spaghetti and meatballs, the Sofia pizza, and a glass of the Coppola red. Don't skip the machine by the door that prints you a story.
Café Zoetrope began as a building rather than a restaurant. Abe Ruef, the political boss whose graft machine ran San Francisco, put up the Sentinel Building, and it was still going up when the 1906 earthquake hit. The frame survived, one of the few left standing in the neighborhood, and the copper-green flatiron tower was finished a year later on the wedge where Columbus meets Kearny.
Francis Ford Coppola bought the tower in 1973 with Godfather money and opened the café on the ground floor in 1999. It's still there. The menu leans on his family's spaghetti and meatballs and a prosciutto and arugula pizza named for his daughter Sofia, alongside wines from his Napa estate. The house cocktail, also called the Café Zoetrope, is an Irish coffee that swaps the whiskey for brandy and adds espresso.
How to get there
The 8-Bayshore stops at Columbus and Kearny, the corner the building stands on, but only heading inbound toward the Wharf. Outbound it runs over on Stockton. The 30-Stockton and the 45-Union/Stockton are two blocks west, and the Powell-Mason cable car is three blocks uphill. If you drive, Portsmouth Square Garage is one block south at 733 Kearny.
What it's like
Full table service, a real wine list, and usually no wait. The best seats are the ones in the point, looking out at two streets at once. It gets loud when it fills, and it is decorated like a movie set by a man who built movie sets.
The menu leans on his family's spaghetti and meatballs, made to his own beef, pork, and veal recipe, and the Pizza Sofia, arugula and prosciutto and shaved Parmesan, named for his daughter. Pasta is cooked to order and takes about 20 minutes, so the linguine alle vongole and the carbonara with Niman Ranch guanciale are not the move if you're in a hurry.
I first walked in by accident after a class at City College. The machine by the door printed me a line that said, "You laugh from your throat, that's true. But we don't really know where the laugh comes from."
What people say
People love the room and argue about the food, the spaghetti and meatballs gets named more than anything else, and the prices draw the most complaints. Our Facebook comments went somewhere else entirely, mostly upstairs and backwards in time, and how touristy it gets.
Alona Davis pushed back on the tourist-trap charge: "These days it's a nice spot to go in North Beach to get away from tourists. Had a really great dinner here recently with some friends. The menu hasn't changed much in 20 years."
Peter Holter worked in the basement when the Kingston Trio owned the building: "We had no computers and cut all tape by hand. The studio had the only 8 track system in the city and in addition to use to record lots of the famous rock groups as well as people like Bing Crosby, we also would put the 8 track into the back of my boss' station wagon and rent it to other studios."
Ellin Stein remembers what was on the ground floor first, a burger joint. "I used to work there when the ground floor restaurant was a burger joint called Wim's (a tribute to Wenders)," Stein wrote. "It was very good and prices were reasonable."
Café Zoetrope · 916 Kearny St., San Francisco · Sun–Thu noon–8 p.m., Fri–Sat noon–9 p.m. · cafezoetrope.com
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Saul Sugarman
