Every week people search for Mediterranean food in North Beach, walk down Columbus Avenue past a dozen restaurants serving exactly that, and conclude the neighbourhood does not have any. The confusion is entirely about the word. In American usage 'Mediterranean' has come to mean specifically the eastern and southern shores - hummus, shawarma, mezze - which leaves out Italy, Spain, southern France and Greece, all of which are on the same sea. North Beach's food is Ligurian in origin. Liguria is the Italian Riviera. It does not get more Mediterranean than that.
The neighbourhood's best Mediterranean things are counters with short hours - one bakery sells out by mid-morning. Tell Karpo when you will be here.
What Ligurian cooking actually is
Liguria is a narrow strip of coast in north-west Italy, mountainous, with poor soil and limited flat land, facing the sea. Its cooking reflects exactly those constraints: heavy on herbs and greens that grow on terraces, olive oil rather than butter, seafood rather than meat, and a bread and flatbread tradition that is among the best in Italy. It is one of the least rich Italian regional cuisines and one of the most direct.
The dishes that came to San Francisco with Ligurian migrants in the nineteenth century are still the neighbourhood's best food. Pesto - basil, pine nuts, garlic, cheese, oil, and nothing else - is Genoese and belongs here rather than to Italy generally. Focaccia is Ligurian. Farinata, a thin chickpea flour pancake baked in a hot oven, is Ligurian. And the seafood tradition that produced cioppino on this coast came from the same fishing communities.
The focaccia, which is the single best thing
Liguria Bakery at Stockton and Filbert has been making focaccia and essentially nothing else since 1911. It is sold by the sheet, cut and wrapped in paper, in a handful of versions - plain with salt and oil, onion, tomato, raisin - and the shop opens early and closes when it sells out, which on a good day is mid-morning. There is no seating and no menu beyond what is on the board.
This is the most purely Mediterranean thing in the neighbourhood and one of the purest food experiences in San Francisco. Ligurian focaccia is thinner and oilier than the thick bready version sold elsewhere, dimpled so the oil and brine pool in the depressions, and it is meant to be eaten within an hour or two rather than kept. Buy it, walk two minutes to Washington Square, and eat it on the grass. That is the correct sequence and it costs a few dollars.
The rest of the Ligurian repertoire
Look for pesto served the traditional way - with trofie or trenette pasta, and with green beans and sliced potato cooked in the same water. That combination sounds odd to people who know pesto only as a sauce for spaghetti and it is the original preparation. Any North Beach kitchen that serves it that way is cooking the region rather than a generic Italian-American menu.
Beyond that: seafood pastas and stews, salt cod preparations, artichokes, anchovies, and the vegetable tortes that Ligurian cooking uses to make greens into a meal. Cioppino - the tomato and wine seafood stew that Italian fishermen built here out of the day's catch - is a San Francisco invention with Ligurian parents, and it is a winter dish, worth ordering from about November when Dungeness crab season opens and largely pointless outside it.
The delicatessen and the sandwich
The unglamorous middle of this cuisine is the Italian delicatessen, and North Beach still has them: salumi sliced to order, cheese, oil, tinned fish, and sandwiches made on a roll with enough structure to survive them. A proper Italian sandwich here - salumi, provolone, oil and vinegar, maybe roasted peppers - is ten to fifteen dollars and is a complete lunch.
Eat it in Washington Square, which is the neighbourhood's front garden and the best free seat in the district, with the church at one end and Coit Tower on the hill above. Combined with a piece of focaccia and a coffee from one of the old caffès, that is a Mediterranean lunch in the most literal sense, assembled from three counters within four blocks, for under twenty dollars.
If you did mean Levantine
If what you actually wanted was hummus, mezze and shawarma, North Beach is not where it is, and the honest redirect is the Richmond. Clement Street and the avenues around it hold the city's most concentrated eastern Mediterranean supply alongside Chinese, Burmese, Vietnamese and Russian restaurants, and prices there are meaningfully lower than in the central neighbourhoods.
The 38 Geary runs from downtown out along Geary Boulevard and serves the whole corridor in twenty-five to thirty-five minutes. From North Beach that means a transfer and roughly forty minutes, which is a real trip rather than a walk - so decide before you set out rather than wandering Columbus Avenue hoping something appears.
Practical notes
Liguria Bakery opens early and sells out by mid-morning at the latest - go before ten. Washington Square is two minutes away, free, and the correct place to eat what you bought. Cioppino is a winter dish, from about November with Dungeness crab season. Look for pesto served with green beans and potato as a sign a kitchen is cooking the region. Prices: focaccia a few dollars a slab, an Italian sandwich ten to fifteen, a pasta twenty to twenty-eight. Cash is still useful at the bakery and the delis. Parking is bad - come by Muni along Columbus or Stockton, or on foot. And if it was mezze you wanted, the Richmond is forty minutes away and worth the trip.
Tags: #MediterraneanFoodNearMe #NorthBeach #SanFrancisco #Ligurian #Focaccia #LiguriaBakery #Pesto #Cioppino #WashingtonSquare #ColumbusAvenue #ClementStreet #NeighborhoodGuide #SFEats #ItalianFood
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Ask Karpo first
The answer to this search depends entirely on which Mediterranean you meant. Ask Karpo whether the focaccia has sold out yet, which North Beach kitchens are cooking the Ligurian repertoire rather than a generic menu, and where to go instead if it was mezze you were after.
