Looking for a Good Melt, SF Weekly Bumps Into Fondue Fred

When I read "Swiss Bliss," Jeffrey Steingarten's exhaustive piece on fondue in the February issue of Vogue, I figured it was just the famously oppositional epicure getting around to experimenting — his way — with a much-maligned dish. His way means cooking up one or two different versions of the dish every single day for two months. (Or so he claims.) The contrarian in him calls Emmenthaler, one of the main cheeses alongside Gruyère most often used in a basic fondue, "not a pleasant thing to eat."

But then the front page of the January 23 Dining In, Dining Out section of The New York Times featured a classic shot of two speared cubes of French bread, dripping luscious-looking melted cheese over a cast-iron fondue pot. The article, "A Little Nostalgia, a Long Fork and Lots of Cheese," by Melissa Clark, made this salient point, along with four recipes and eight variations: "Few foods are as compelling as melted cheese."

My hunger ignited, I was already well into figuring out where to track down some local fondue when the February issue of Every Day with Rachael Ray featured a reader's tip for, yes, Super Bowl Sunday fare: "My party indulgence is a big bowl of cheese fondue. I love to experiment with different cheeses and mix-ins, like Cheddar and beer with crispy bacon stirred in." That sounds more like a Welsh rarebit to me, but fondue is definitely having a moment.

The go-to restaurant for fondue in San Francisco is the Matterhorn Swiss (2323 Van Ness, 885-6116), open for more than a decade, which I wrote about with affection in these pages a couple of years ago. There's a quickly expanding national chain called the Melting Pot that once announced plans to open on Powell, but so far has come no closer to S.F. than Larkspur. But research turned up several local alternatives, including one venerable place that has managed to survive since 1958.

Most sources cite the '70s as fondue's American heyday. Helen Gurley Brown first recommended it as a great party food in her 1962 and racy-for-the-time Sex and the Single Girl because of its supposed high alcohol content (it's made with dry white wine and kirsch, a cherry brandy), although, of course, the alcohol itself cooks off. (She also suggests a drinking game: If a guy loses his bread cube in the mix, you drain your glass. If a girl does, you all kiss. Or maybe it was the other way around.)

Fondue Fred, anchoring a small building with an interior patio on Telegraph in Berkeley, is the place that has served up melted cheese since 1958. Studying its Web site, I'm intrigued by an all-you-can-eat deal for a minimum party of six people, so I assemble three generations for an early dinner on a very chilly, rainy Sunday night, intending to sample six different fondues from the menu of 15 versions. (The reservationist thoughtfully tells me that the price has gone up a couple of bucks from what's listed on the site.) However, our very affable server, Saul, won't hear of that, pointing out that one of us, my 6-year-old nephew, won't be eating a lot.

Saul won't even let us order the five fondues I request ("too much"). We end up with a classical fondue, a blue cheese fondue, and the Mexican-spices-and-Cheddar Fiesta, as well as Coq au Fondu, a chicken dish described as a cheeseless fondue.

Included are starters of a pretty standard but pleasant iceberg lettuce salad with carrot shreds in a sharpish vinaigrette, and massive quantities of cubed French bread and plates of nicely cooked red potatoes, chunked and dusted with paprika. For an extra $4.99, we get a plate of chopped raw vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, green peppers, zucchini, and carrots. The fondues come to the table in cast-iron saucepans, plopped atop warmers with tiny Sterno cans, whose characteristic gassy scent perfumed the empty, wood-paneled room when we arrived. The Fiesta is accompanied by commercial tortilla chips. Everybody at the table has fun dipping, dunking, and eating, but I'm a little disappointed. The texture is wrong, grainy and thin instead of silky and pully; there's no danger of losing your bread. I don't catch a hint of kirsch.

Saul couldn't be nicer, but when we ask him what kind of blue cheese they use, he has no idea. "Swiss?" he finally says. The boneless chicken stew, not a fondue at all, tastes of acrid dried herbs. We wash down the food with excellent icy Red Hook beer. For dessert, we get a big slab of store-bought cheesecake, sprinkled with chocolate chips, and a thin chocolate fondue that tastes like Hershey's straight from the can, with marshmallows and cubes of fresh melon, pineapple, and strawberries.

Empty when we arrived, the place is now full of happy revelers, including a table of eight lively students going the all-you-can-eat-and-drink route. And Saul gives my nephew a whole bag of marshmallows as a sweet parting gift.