" New dishes beget new appetites."

San Francisco was a city of restaurants - the most wonderful restaurants in all America. With the passing of the old city one shudders to think of the fate of Zinkand's, the Techau Tavern with its sweet-voiced Hawaiian singers and sadly beautiful native music, Tait's mammoth underground palace, the Palace of Art with its wonderful collection of paintings, including a Rosa Bonheur, the new and the old " Poodle Dog " - the latter one of the show places of the Coast. Then there was the newly opened Oyster Grotto, where nothing but shellfish, including the delectable California crabs, was served. There was the Italian cafe of one Coppa on Montgomery Street that had been decorated by the famous San Franciscan artists and where writers, musicians, and painters met to drink Chianti and eat spaghetti, ravioli, and frittura, and through their smoke wreaths admire the wonderfully suggestive frescoes recalling Gelett Burgess and his " goops," Jack London, and other celebrities whose names were lettered upon the border together with those of " Maisie," " Isabel," "Murger," "Verlaine," and other good Bohemians who know how to live - and to die. The restaurants of Chinatown passed by, there was that of one Matias in the Telegraph Hill region which was unique of all eating places in the West. For it was a Mexican restaurant over which Matias, an Austrian, presided proudly, and served his few patrons in the two clean, shabby little rooms that smelled of garlic and were decorated with colored prints all the way from Spain, showing glorious bull fights in every stage from a handsome, lone matador, calmly awaiting the onslaught of Taurus, to the gory finish with rivers of blood; and from without, coming through the open windows, all the clattering tongues of Italian and Greek, Mexican and Portuguese, denizens of the " Barbary Coast."

In the little alcove kitchen in the rear of the first room stood Matias's wife, a handsome, liquid-eyed Mexican woman of thirty, busily cooking the " Albun-digos," " Tamales," stirring the " Chili con carne," and rolling the " Enchiladas ' for the Senor who sat in the next room drinking of the heavy, puckery Mexican wine.

With the second course of delicious fish, with a sauce even hotter than the soup, Matias brought the register, or guest book, which reminds one of a similar one at the "Cheshire Cheese"in London. Filled with autographs of famous people and drawings by artists and verse by poets and pen pictures by descriptive writers, it was a worthy tome, and interested one for more than an hour's time.

The delicious enchiladas which form a part of every Mexican dinner are simply tortillas or corn cakes rolled over like a German pancake and filled with grated cheese and sliced onion with chili sauce poured over it, and a soupcon of garlic grated on top. It is impossible to make tortillas as they are made in Mexico, as the corn is not made into meal there, but is rubbed between stones into a soft, pulpy mass - but I have eaten some very good ones made by a San Francisco artist in his studio on Russian Hill, made like an ordinary corn griddle cake with a little wheat flour added to prevent brittleness. He fried his onions in a little olive oil, then put a spoonful on each enchilada and grated some cheese over, rolled it deftly, and poured over it the chili sauce, which as everyone knows is made from tomatoes and hot Mexican peppers.

The same artist gave to me some of his choicest Mexican recipes which had been given him in a burst of generosity by Madame Matias. Chili chicken is not the least delectable of these, and is made so-fashion:

CHILI CHICKEN. Boil a chicken until tender, let cool, and chop fine. Wash and dry a cup of rice, put it into a pot which contains equal portions of melted lard and butter and fry a few moments, then add chopped tomatoes, onions, salt, and some chili powder, which can be bought at any purveyor's. When this is well blended and the rice has swelled, add the chicken and some of the broth in which it has been boiled.

HOT TAMALE. I wonder if any of you have ever eaten a fresh hot tamale, and if you have ever essayed the canned substitutes offered occasionally on buffet cars of the vintage of Armour or the Libby canning factories? There's just the difference between a new-laid egg and a very bad one - with all due respect to the canners, who certainly do their best to turn out the real Mexican article. But a fresh tamale with the corn husks smoking hot can only be prepared properly by a Mexican woman - so I will not attempt to tell you how they are done. They can be had in their perfection in the City of Mexico, and from there on up the coast to Portland, Oregon, where they are very good indeed.

By way of a change, some day when you are having chicken or chili con carne, try with it some genuine

SOPA DE ARROZ. Boil some rice rather soft, with a trifle each of chili sauce and onion juice or chopped onion, and eat it with salt, pepper and butter. It will be found a vast improvement over the plain boiled " Carolina head."

CHILI RELLENOS is the most delicious of Mexican dainties- stuffed pepper, to be sure, but savoring little of the ordinary hotel product. To some finely-chopped boiled beef, one-half that amount, each, of chopped raisins and chopped almonds, pecans or walnuts, is added. The pepper pods are prepared by being scraped thin - thinner than usual - and after being stuffed with this mixture, the rellenos are fried in egg batter in smoking lard and served with or without chili sauce, as the fancy dictates. To almost any Mexican cookery a substantial shaking of chili powder is added before the chilis are done.

There may be many lovers of chili peppers who are unable to gratify their taste for the toothsome things. To such people, like the ranchman in his desert of cacti and sage brush, the canned sweet peppers or pimientos put up in oil are a luxury, and an inexpensive one at that, since the cans are but 15 cents in most places, and contain enough of the peppers for three or four meals. A favorite dish prepared with them in a Colorado ranch is called