A tasty plate of history
I used to be an avid historical reenactor, demonstrating skills like woodfire cooking, baking, and traditional brewing. My closet contains costumes from various eras, some with stains and scorch marks from feasts of decades ago, and my kitchen cabinet has cookware that I crafted on a potter’s wheel and pewter forge. It can be thrilling to make something precisely as your ancestors did, and gives a food writer a personal perspective on the labor involved in hand-milling grain, butchering an animal, and maintaining a cookfire you started with flint and steel. The perfect environment for a historic meal is one that recreates the culture and era, so the diner has the illusion of inhabiting a different time and space. That usually involves set dressing, but occasionally it’s possible to find a place built in another time and unchanged. There are a few in the South Bay like Old Tony’s, the San Franciscan, and Ercole’s. But The Bull Pen is a special case. The other places on that list retained the original style in original locations, but the Bull Pen has moved three times and still looks much like the original from 1948. Step inside the otherwise unremarkable strip mall location and you…
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