Landmark Blue Fox closes

Nation's Restaurant News, August 30, 1993 by Alan Liddle

SAN FRANCISCO -- Sixty years after its romp through this city's fine-dining woods began, The Blue Fox has been overtaken by the hounds of time.

Founded in 1933, the San Francisco financial district landmark was known during much of that time for its alley entrance, attentive service and haute cuisine. After a five-year run with a contemporary Italian menu, it closed its doors Aug. 28.

Gianni Fassio's family has owned part or all of The Blue Fox since 1948. He said he decided to shutter the upscale eatery so he could spend more time fine-tuning his popular moderately priced Italian restaurant, Palio d'Asti, and duplicating his value-oriented sandwich concept, Paninoteca.

Evolving dining styles had made the luxury and pace of The Blue Fox irrelevant, Fassio indicated.

"When people go out now, they are not looking for a formal two-and-a-half-hour event," he said. "The upper-end market was not that big to start with, so if the people who used to support it once a month are now going out once every three months, you've lost a hell of a lot of potential customers."

Fassio said that in the past, there were basically two categories of restaurants: fine dining and all others. One experience was "$50 a head; the other, $15," he said.

"Suddenly we've wound up with a lot of very good restaurants where you can get in an out for from $15 to $50 -- you choose what you want to spend," Fassio said. "You might not get crystal, silver or bone china. But in today's world I don't think people care that much about those things."

Fassio's father, Piero, joined Mario Mondin as a partner in The Blue Fox in 1948. Mondin had taken over the restaurant six years earlier.

In its heyday, The Blue Fox was a peer of the finest restaurants in the land: A copy of a decades-old Life magazine article featuring the business can still be found in the downstairs banquet area.

Piero Fassio died in 1975 and for the next 13 years Mondin ran the restaurant with Fassio's widow, Gina, as a silent partner. Gianni Fassio, a certified public accountant, bought out his mother and Mondin in 1988, spruced up the space and reopened The Blue Fox as a showcase for inventive Italian cuisine.

In a letter mailed to regular customers, Fassio used a literary style to explain his feelings about The Blue Fox and Palio d'Asti:

"My father, Piero, and Mario Mondin created The Blue Fox illusion at a time when illusion was needed to lift the spirit. Hollywood created dreamlike fantasies, and the stars flooded to this fantasy place to indulge in delicious, new-found Italian specialities. I wanted to keep the dream alive because of my father and my family, but my dream centered more around the food than the fantasy and glitter.

"My family roots were farmlands in Piemonte. As a boy, I spent summers in northern Italy gathering, preparing and eating varieties of fruits and vegetables still unknown in America at the time. The family operated the town's general store, complete with butchery, bakery and farmfresh produce. ...Palio d'Asti is my reality -- images of a rural past combined with the practical lifestyle of current times and, of course, food in its truest, basic sense."

Fassio's fondness for Palio d'Asti (named after a famous annual horse race in his family's ancestral Italian town) is tied to its exhibition format, which includes rolling antipasti carts that stop at each table.

"The smell of fresh bread baking drifts in from our ovens at the back of Palio, the sound of knives being sharpened intrudes into your conversation, you can watch as our pasta is being made and you can learn from the chef's hand as you watch your favorite dish being prepared.... Your senses are tickled not with pomp and glitter, but with the wonderful smells and colors of the earth," he wrote.

In contrast, chef Tif Birmingham and his Blue Fox brigade had no public presence, other than the personality that seeped into the dishes that traveled from their segregated kitchen to the dining room. Recent menus had featured fare such as salmon carpaccio with endive, mascarpone and leeks, $13; sauteed halibut with artichokes, capers and sun-dried tomatoes, $26.50; roasted breast of Muscovy duck with tangerine sauce, $27.50; and fillet of beef with green peppercorn-grappa sauce, $27.50.

The Blue Fox decor spoke of power and elegance, with grand crystal chandeliers, mirrors and ivory walls. To a growing number of diners, however, the message, like the space, seemed cold.

At the time of its demise, The Blue Fox was still convincing patrons to spend $65 each, on average. Its surviving conceptual sister, Palio d'Asti, asks them to part with less than half that amount.

In its best year under the guidance of Gianni Fassio, The Blue Fox was impressive: annual sales of $2.3 million using a dinner-only format and 100 seats. But The Blue Fox could no more sustain that level of sales than it could keep Fassio's attention or forever hold at bay time's hounds, a pack whose incessant yapping from behind made it only too clear the hunt was about to end.