North Beach is the San Francisco neighborhood where the narrator raised Nic and where their shared history is remembered through walks, favorite meals, and childhood wonder. When Nic later chooses a café there for a meeting with his father, the neighborhood’s familiar landmarks carry the weight of that past into an encounter marked by uncertainty and a long wait.

Childhood Setting

North Beach appears as a lived-in landscape of recurring places rather than a backdrop. Nic played in Washington Square opposite Saints Peter and Paul Church, and the family browsed City Lights before walking down the steep streets toward the wharf. There, they watched the Human Jukebox play trumpet and sat on the curb; the outing could continue with banana splits at the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory.

The neighborhood’s routes also held ordinary errands and meals. The pair crossed Broadway into Chinatown to buy bok choy and melons, then sometimes stopped at Caffe Trieste for coffee and hot chocolate. On other days they ate early at a sushi bar, where Nic ordered tempura made only with orange vegetables, carrots and yams. These specific routines give the remembered neighborhood its intimate scale: it is mapped by what the child ate, watched, and returned to.

The Child in the Neighborhood

Vanessi’s is recalled through the spectacle of its kitchen and the care with which the restaurant welcomed Nic. Waiters in burgundy coats and creased black pants lifted the tow-headed boy, with a gap between his front teeth, onto a stool beside a stack of telephone books. He watched the cooks ignite brandy in their saucepans, thrilled by the flames. They knew his order: a child-sized Caesar salad, ravioli triangolo, and zabaglione whisked in a battered copper bowl.

On the walk home, Nic recognized the women outside the Broadway strip clubs by their costumes—Wonder Woman, She-Ra, and Cat Woman—and believed them to be superheroes patrolling North Beach. When he grew sleepy, his father carried him, his small arms around his father’s neck. The recollection makes the neighborhood a place of childhood scale and imaginative transformation, held together by repeated routes and acts of care.

Return and Distance

Years later, Nic chooses Steps of Rome, a café on Columbus Avenue, for a meeting with his father. The choice returns them to the neighborhood where he grew up, but the setting no longer guarantees closeness. His father waits at a corner table in an otherwise deserted café, with two waiters folding napkins at the bar. He orders coffee and searches for something that might reach Nic, while recognizing that reason and love have not been enough to bridge the distance.

The meeting time passes by more than half an hour. In the wait, the neighborhood’s remembered familiarity collides with the present: the father experiences worry alongside bitterness and rage, and the old streets cannot make Nic arrive. North Beach thus links an affectionate record of shared childhood to a later scene in which connection remains hoped for but cannot be summoned by memory alone.