Showing up for Shuggie's

On the closing of a life-giving neighborhood haunt

[Hi friends, this month another deep dive - with some other links and updates at the end!]

The news was relayed to us at the end of a large meal—there had been eight of us total in the smaller front “orange” room. Cousins were in town for a weeklong birthday celebration, and the last group of visitors had arrived earlier that day. Wanting to give everyone an authentic San Francisco experience before they made their way up to Glen Ellen, we naturally ended up at Shuggie’s.

We didn’t need to look long at the menu to order for the group. Everyone would get a skewer of Green Goddess salad, delivered in a busty headless white ceramic vessel, the end of each crowned with an edible flower. We needed two cacio e pepe “pillows” to share, and a couple stone fruit and tomato salads, arranged in a circular pattern around a shallow dish topped with profusion of herbs and nuts. The orange wine and other beverages flowed throughout, and as dishes arrived we helped guide the guests through the more complicated ones, demonstrating how to ease the flesh off of the sushi-grade tuna ribs and to scrape mushroom sauce out of the bottom of the mouth-shaped containers.

I’ve lost count of the number of people we have taken to Shuggie’s: Kim and Pat, Matt and Will, Jen and Matt, Mia and Steve, Shawn and Nancy, Jen and Andre and Ursula, Megin, Anne, Bri, Sarah, Tamara, our nephews Riley and Jake, my brother Michael, four of my fellow Biblically named cousins (John, Peter, Paul, and Michael), and my aunt Mary Ann (when KJ was in the hospital recovering from misdiagnosed appendicitis—she was wise enough to bring earplugs). If I’ve forgotten you please forgive me and correct the record in the comments!

There is probably not a restaurant I have ever visited with such intentionality. My lord, that sounded so Californian, and who do I think I am born and raised in Tulsa saying something so woo like that. But that’s what happens eleven years into living in the Bay Area. And that’s what happens when you seize the opportunity to become a regular at a place like Shuggie’s—the embodiment of joyful excess and creative intentionality. Or maybe creative excess and joyful intentionality?

*****

That evening we had already wondered if something might be up, as upon entering we had not spotted David and his signature cowboy hat in the kitchen. There had also been no sign of Kayla, who was typically always circulating in support of the team on the floor. As at one of our other favorite restaurants, Hilda and Jesse, the team at Shuggie’s had remained remarkably consistent over the years. We asked our server upon being seated if they were around, and she told us they were in the back doing “some media.”

I already gave it away in the tagline above, but the news was that Shuggie’s was going to be closing within the month, after a four year run. The “media” was an interview about the closing, which we would read about officially in the SF Chronicle the next morning.

We were not as devastated as we might have been because we had been here before, when about a year ago David and Kayla had pulled us aside after another big meal. Then the news had been less severe but no less devastating to us personally: they were deciding to stop doing pizza.

Ah, the pizza! My mouth is literally watering as I recall it. The base was a thin rectangular crust, always sliced into eight pieces. Cheese and pepperoni were always on offer, alongside a rotating cast of seasonal options, featuring various combinations of sausage, onions, greens, and other vegetables and sauces. The servers would always bring a rack so they could be stacked so you never had to worry about ordering two at a time, and we always ordered at least two, even if it was just the two of us.

Our household went through a period of mourning upon hearing the news that the pizza would be going away, although we put on a brave face in the moment and told them how excited we were for the new offerings. And we were consoled by the fact that the key items like the beloved Goddess salad and pillows would remain.

The move away from pizza had been mission driven, like everything at Shuggie’s, which has an underlying concept to its business model: to decrease food waste by using ingredients not typically used by mainstream restaurants or conventional schools of cuisine. More expert observers have explained the details of this at length, and you can read a couple of them here and here.

One of the best examples I can explain is the tuna rib mentioned above. Fine restaurants go through a lot of very nice and expensive and increasingly endangered tuna. But even the most expert sushi chef cannot get every last bit off of the rib. Enter David and Kayla, who figured out a way to keep these ribs from just going into commercial compost, dressing them up with oil and seasonings. Every time I scraped a rib I thought about how many pounds of tuna would never get such star treatment.

“This is not dumpster diving” we would always make clear when introducing people to the restaurant. This was reclamation on a different level, for instance, making boar meat a menu item. In California and other states, wild boars are an environmental nuisance. If you need to eradicate them, you may as well figure out a way to eat them.

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But there was nothing didactic about Shuggie’s, originally called Shuggie’s Trash Pie during the early pizza forward years. The yellow and green sign made this clear from blocks away, and the over the top interiors—originally a yellow room in addition to the green room—made it clear you were not there to get a power point presentation. They were out convert you to tuna ribs and boar by making it a good time.

It was also affordable, given the level of service and attention to detail of the whole enterprise. Every dish had carefully chosen vessels, sourced from who knows where, including some platters so massive the server had to ease them off the table with both hands. With such equipment they could have easily gone upscale as many SF restaurants choose to do, with a fixed price multi-course tasting menu, and probably made their lives a whole lot easier and made more money. But that would not have been as interesting of an experiment, as the goal was always to figure out how the concept might be accessible and even scalable.

But in the meantime, David and Kayla set out to create something truly beautiful and special if somewhat bizarre, as if one were dining at Pee Wee’s Playhouse. There was the car near the front entrance, the motorcycle and leopard in the front room, the David statue in the bathroom, and the dozen or so green “hand” chairs.

The countertops in each room were works of art in and of themselves, and one night after a meal my companion who was contemplating a kitchen renovation asked Kayla where they came from. She smiled and sighed and explained the process by which she had personally mixed buckets of glitter and hot glue, painstakingly smoothing each layer and in the process certainly exposing herself to Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer. But it was clear she didn’t regret a single minute.

(Point five angle pizza shot at the bar in the Green Room, including the hand-poured counters.)

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Last month I had contemplated writing about the concept of “showing up,” reflecting on all the different things we had shown up for in the month of May. These included, in no particular order:

There was the Oakland Ballet’s performance of Angel Island at the Herbst Theater, collaboratively created by a half dozen Asian and Asian American choreographers including a Twitter friend who became an IRL friend, Phil Chan. There was the SF Ballet School’s annual showcase performance, now held at the opera house, which included a snippet of Serenade among the offerings. There was the service at Memorial Church for Ascension Thursday organized by Stanford Canterbury. There was a dim sum extravaganza with our friends Christina and Chris at a restaurant overlooking the SFO runway. There was the final Evensong of the season at St. Paul’s-Burlingame, in which singers from Grace Cathedral filled up the altar to maximum capacity. There was a birthday dinner party hosted by a new friend I met at yoga class, which managed to connect us with every noted Chilean sociologist in the Bay Area. There was also a celebratory retirement dinner at Foreign Cinema, brunch and shopping with friends in Hayes Valley before seeing Mere Mortals a second time at SF Ballet in the evening, and a daytime party at Teeth Bar that included a pop up drag performance of two Backstreet Boys songs, after which I realized that I was one of the only people at the party not on shrooms or something stronger and decided it was time to go home. And of course routine things like yoga and Sunday services at Holy Innocents and a Bishop’s Committee meeting - and my job, of course.

And this was during a month when we spent ten days in the midwest visiting family, which was a whole other slew of activities. But I keep this list local to remind myself that for me showing up for things that matter in my community is the only way I can deal with the world at the moment.

And I’m glad I saved these thoughts on showing up so that they can serve as a small tribute to David and Kayla and the Shuggie’s team for all the joy they have brought us, who showed up in the most beautiful maximalist spirit. It is gonna be such a bummer when Shuggie’s is gone, but it will never be forgotten. And if you want to try to show up with us one last time, drop a line.

(Point five photo in the yellow room.)

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Another way to show up is to click and read!! Some recent work by friends of the newsletter, and preview of some other things to come.

Kim Beil continues to deploy her art historical knowledge to explore the intersection of visual culture and climate change. This recent NYT piece- “What Did the Hudson River Painters See? “- talks about the knowledge to be gleaned from art history, with wonderful graphics! And if you enjoy that and want an extremely deep dive check out “Standing Where Ansel Adams Stood” from three years ago in which she chronicles how she literally hiked into the wilderness and collaborated with a range of scientific experts in order to track down the location of a mysterious Ansel Adams photograph. If I were handing out awards that one would get win for Public Humanities Extreme Sports Edition!

Briallen Hopper is wrapping up a book about Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I have to sheepishly admit I have never read but found a copy in a free library at the Stanford Humanities Center. And in the meantime she wrote a lovely piece for New Republic - “Lessons in Parenting From Salmon” about two books exploring queer parenthood.

Also since it’s Pride month, I must make a plug for RuPaul’s new movie Stop! That! Train! We attended a screening on opening weekend and were not sure what to expect, and were genuinely tickled. It’s done in the style of Airplane and Naked Gun, with dozens of cameos. Watch it with some friends who are ready to laugh.

Looking ahead: I’m currently wrapping up another piece for The Pickup exploring Tulsa and urbanism, as well as a book review/essay about our recent visit to Branson, Missouri. And I continue to tinker on a long-form essay about Josh Hawley’s book Manhood, and now feel like I need to read the new J. D. Vance book on Catholicism (God literally help me). I will have to save Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI for afterwards to cleanse the palette.