Eating cioppino in San Francisco

Eating cioppino at Sotto Mare in San Francisco.

Cioppino, the seafood stew with various briny creatures in a tomato stock, was invented by fishermen in San Francisco and I have wanted to try it over my repeated visits. The barrier has been cost. The preparation is simple but quality ingredients are pricey and you will pay well over $50 for a bowl of the stuff so you need to choose wisely. On my current visit I finally decided to pull the trigger.

The three places universally recommended for cioppino are Scoma’s on Fisherman’s Wharf, Sotto Mare in North Beach and Anchor Oyster Bar in the Castro. (There is also a restaurant called Cioppino’s but I have eaten there and it is not a good option.) After much deliberation I decided to eat at Sotto Mare, which seems to have the best rankings, and repaired there a bit before noon last Wednesday. It’s a simple lunch counter place with lots of bar seating and two-tops off to the side. Probably half the tables are ordering cioppino which is currently $55 for a bowl claiming to serve two.

View from the bar at Sotto Mare.

I sat at the bar right next to the pass, so I could see what else was going on, and my bowl was placed in front of me within a few minutes. The bowl looked to have capacity of a gallon and was filled pretty close to the brim. It was accompanied by a sliced half loaf of crusty bread. My first impression taking a sip from my spoon is hey, this reminds me of Campbell’s condensed Manhattan Clam Chowder (which I later found out has been discontinued, alas). More delving found lots of mussels in their shells, clams, bay scallops and shrimp. Everything was fresh and flavorful and it was easy to imagine oneself an Italian fisherman in the early 1900s enjoying the day’s catch with some of mamma’s tomato gravy.

Also, there was crab, a lot of crab, legs and breast meat, probably a whole crab less the claws. (Dungeness is out of season most of the year in the bay area so my crab meat was likely frozen, in comparison to the other very fresh ingredients.) A bib for the messy diner was provided along with a shell cracker and a tiny fork for digging through the leg cylinders. The legs had been pre-cracked but even so the stock was cooling off before I finished them, a problem that might not have happened if there were two of us. I set on a strategy to finish the crab pieces and take the rest home. My server packed everything up and included extra bread plus a second Sotto Mare bib as a souvenir.

As I slurped my appreciation for the tomato base grew. It did have that tomato/clam juice balance like Manhattan clam chowder, but there was also a base of sautéed vegetables (celery, onion, possibly garlic, possibly fennel) mixed with bread crumbs. Also, some plain penne pasta was loaded into the bowl (I saw the cook do this) before the stock was poured over. There wasn’t a lot, just enough to add some useful bulk.

Anchor Oyster Bar Cioppino. Photo courtesy Yelp.

The Sotto Mare bread was generous but generic, a strike against it vs the two competitors. Scoma provides buttered toasted crostini and Anchor Oyster Bar a full-on garlic toast. (Anchor’s owner has shared what she says is the family recipe with the New York Times; it is elaborate and includes a detailed process for making the garlic bread if you care to try it.)

“Lazy Man’s Cioppino” at Scoma. Photo courtesy Yelp.

Speaking of the competition, I spent a lot of time studying Yelp photos (there are well over 100 of them for each establishment’s cioppino). You can discern the portions by the size of the mussel shells, a common element. Scoma’s serves a “lazy man’s” version with crab meat instead of crab legs and it’s definitely tempting, but it costs the same as the Sotto Mare and the portion is smaller. Anchor’s cioppino is huge but $25 more assuming we’re looking at the “large” portion and also geographically inconvenient.

We are talking home style cooking vs fine dining here so I am not likely to pay to try the other two places any time soon. (Though I’m fascinated by the star anise in the Anchor recipe.) And yes, you can bet I’ll be working on a lower priced copycat version you can make at home. Stay tuned.