Dish

Up From Gay Grub
Gay-ghetto food may be bad, but at least one restaurant in the city frankly caters to a gay crowd and still manages to serve first-rate food -- with superior service and at fair prices. That restaurant is Alta Plaza, on Fillmore in Pacific Heights.

Dish ate there a few times in the early 1980s, when the place served soggy hamburgers of Wimpy's-like insipidity, garnished with great gusts of attitude. The real action then was in the glamorously multileveled and mirrored bar, where suits mingled with sweaters. The bad food was irrelevant: No one went there to eat.

Then, in 1990, Alta Plaza gave way to the Fillmore Grill --"a very hot heterosexual meat market, for about 18 months," according to Peter Snyderman, who acquired the business after the Fillmore Grill turned cold and failed. Snyderman, who grew up in the city and graduated from Lowell High and UC Berkeley, has restored not only Alta Plaza's name and mission, but its luster.

And more. The food isn't just good, it's also imaginative and memorable, a tribute to Snyderman's determination to reverse the "terrible reputation" of the restaurant's first incarnation. "I always wanted to have a restaurant of my own," Snyderman says, "and I knew that the bar would always have a life of its own."

He reopened the place in April 1994, with Amey Shaw (from the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley) as chef. Snyderman describes her menu as "contemporary American, with lots of influences from South America and the Pacific Rim."

It's a menu that appeals not only to gay customers (who, especially on weekends, have turned the place into a destination), but also to the neighbors (many of whom are heterosexual)."On weekday nights about a quarter of the dinner crowd is from the neighborhood," Snyderman says. "My parents come in all the time."

As for parking: Check out the garage a half-block away, on Clay between Fillmore and Webster. After 5 p.m., you can park there all evening for $3.50. That leaves plenty of time for an after-dinner drink at the bar.

Juiced!
Add to the growing list of boutique juices Purdey's, a British concoction that tastes a lot like ginger ale and comes in a gray bottle that looks like a smooth hand grenade. The stuff contains (in addition to fruit juice) extracts of damiana, bayberry bark, prickly ash bark, and ginseng. If one believes the press puffery, these mysterious ingredients will enhance the consumer's sexual appetite; soothe his nerves and sore throat; and boost his energy. All this for only $2.39 per 8.5-ounce bottle. A steal!

By Paul Reidinger