Tony’s Cable Car Restaurant

Breakfast on Geary (redux), Part 17

"If you rub shoulders with the rich, you get holes in your sleeves." ~ Leo Rosten

http://www.tonyscablecar.com/


Place: Tony's Cable Car Restaurant
Location: 2500 Geary Boulevard (between Lyon Street and Presidio Avenue)
Hours: open Monday through Friday at 9:00am, Saturday and Sunday at 9:30am
Meal: Breakfast Muffin ~ fresh egg (well, a fresh egg that is fried), Swiss cheese, and bacon or sausage on an English muffin; a side of Idaho crinkle-cut French fries; and, beforehand, a dynamo donut + coffee Lemon-Thyme doughnut and a cuppa Ritual Coffee Roasters (but not sure which roast/blend) from fifty/fifty Coffee & Tea

http://www.fiftyfiftysf.com/

http://dynamodonut.com/

https://www.ritualroasters.com/

(Get it? "Tony" and "Time (Thyme)" EweToobular juxtaselections.)


Just for a change of place, I felt like doing a mish-mosh[1] for breakfast this morning and wanted to keep it semi-local, so I just hit fifty/fifty Coffee & Tea (for Coffee and a doughnut starters) and then (still along Geary Boulevard and just several more blocks away) Tony's Cable Car Restaurant. 

I was happy to find that there is an actual "Tony" that owns the place. This place has been owned and operated by Tony since 1972. He used to work at Joe's Cable Car on Mission Street (which just closed last year after forty-nine years in business itself) and when the opportunity came to open his own place, he jumped at it. Tony wasn't there this morning, but I met his brother that was there this morning doing all the cooking. I spoke with him for a bit and found out that they are originally from Syria (he's a زرافة-supporter, unfortunately). 

It's a pretty smallish joint. It is designed to look similar (enough) to a Cable Car (well, if a Cable Car had a yellow roof and red-tiled sides) from the outside. It only has eight window-counter swivel seats, two booths for four, two booths for two, and two outdoor tables for five to seven people (which is where I sat this morning); plus (and this is a big plus in most cities now-a-days), they have their own small parking lot for six to seven cars.

Tony's Cable Car Restaurant is mainly a burger and hotdog joint and really only offers for a breakfastary repast just the one thing that I ordered this morning. They do offer several different kinds of burgers: 100% beef ground chuck, turkey (they don't state if this is 100% ground chuck or not, though), and vegetarian (I have heard that vegetarian meat tastes just like chickpeas ~ sorry, I have been waiting all week to use that stupid joke). They also have about three different types of "all beef" hotdogs. There were about six or seven other diners there this morning and they all seemed to be eating different version of burgers and sandwiches.

The doughnut was very good as normally can be expected from dynamo donut + coffee. It had lots of lemon-y glaze on top and (fresh) thyme leaves in the doughnut.

The Breakfast Muffin was really nothing much special (your normal Eggamuffin®-ish dealy), but I wasn't expecting much more, anyway. The cheese seemed like real Swiss cheese for a change, which always beats that fake, processed, sliced junk any day, at least. Of course, I ordered this without any of the dead, decaying porcine products on it.

I didn't bother asking what they offered in the way of condimentary supplementation. I simply went with some of my own The Wiltshire Chilli Farm Mango hot chilli sauce on the muffin-thing and some Winter chilli sauce (Thanks for both, Cindy & Greg!) mixed with some ketchup to use as a dip with the French fries.


Glen Bacon Scale Rating: Breakfast Muffin ~ 5.5; Lemon-Thyme doughnut ~ 7.0; Coffee ~ 6.5


1. Stupid, useless cunning linguist pointer of the day:

Whenever it comes to words of possible Yiddish origin/influence, like "mish-mosh", I always defer to the encyclopaedic expertise of The Joys of  Yiddish by Leo Rosten (who happens to be no relation to the guy in the opening quote of today's 'blog-entry).

Mr. Rosten notes that:

Pronounced MISH-MOSH, to rhyme with "pish-posh". I prefer to spell this delicious word mish-mosh, as it is pronounced, but the 13-volume Oxford English Dictionary spells it mish-mash, and traces it to the German mishmash* and the Danish (!) misk-mask. It is unnerving to learn that Junius' Nomenclator called it mishmash as far back as 1585.

1. A mixup, a mess, a hodge-podge, a fouled-up state of things.
2. Confusion galore. "What a mish-mosh!" "You never heard such a mish-mosh of ideas."**

No Jew pronounces this "mish-mash". In fact, when a Congressman on one of Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life television shows did say "mish-mash", Groucho gave him a startled stare and remarked: "You'll never get votes in the Bronx if you go on saying mish-mash instead of mish-mosh." (Mr. Marx later wrote the same advice to Governor Scranton of Pennsylvania.)***
    I consider mish-mosh a triumph of onomatopoeia - and a word unlike any I know to suggest flagrant disorder. 

*(Extra-added stupid, useless cunning linguist pointer of the day:
"Mischmasch" in German means "hodgepodge" or the alternative "hotchpotch" in English.)
**(Back when I was in the Air Force, this was always known as "FUBAR". Look it up yerdamself!)
***(Why the Governor of Pennsylvania would care what the constituents of the Bronx thought is beyond me, though.)