San Francisco | Food | Mark Ruffalo | Reese Witherspoon

Rumor Has It's Mark Ruffalo knows more than his fair share about San Francisco's restaurants and Beat Generation past. It's not just a rumor.
"San Francisco is four cities, not just one," says Mark Ruffalo. "It's one-third Hong Kong, a third Paris, and a third New York, set on seven hills, just like Rome. It's all against the Pacific Ocean, the biggest ocean in the world." On another movie set in another city, the classically trained leading man with the skyrocket­ing career is talking about how he fell in love with San Francisco. He was filming Just Like Heaven, this year's supernatural comedy in which Reese Witherspoon's spirit pursues him through the city of the seven hills. "That's when I really got an idea of what the city was all about," he says.

He had first visited on a junket to promote his breakthrough hit, You Can Count on Me, in which he turned in a searing performance as the bad-boy brother of Laura Linney, but he spent most of his time in a hotel room. But then two roles brought him back for an extended stay: first, Heaven, and, most recently, to scour the city as a detective in director David Fincher's forthcoming film, based on a true story costarring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Anthony Edwards. Ruffalo plays the San Francisco homicide detective tracking the Zodiac serial killer, who terrorized San Francisco for 25 years and who remains at large. During the filming of both movies, Ruffalo saw the city like an ordinary person, instead of like a star, heading out alone with his scripts, disappearing, as always, into his role, getting tips from locals he met in restaurants as he rehearsed his lines silently while eating dinner at the bar.

This month, he's back in Rumor Has It, a loosely based sequel to the 1967 classic The Graduate, costarring Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner. But Ruffalo left his heart in, well, where else? From playing everything from a bachelor chased by a blond dervish to a detective chasing a serial killer, Mark Ruffalo got to know San Francisco not from the hotel suite, but from the streets. Here are the secrets of the city he uncovered.

The city has so many cultural influences, you must have found some excellent restaurants. What were the more memorable ones?
I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, which has the Dining Room, a fantastic, five-star French restaurant. It's down in the lobby, and it has a sort of Southern feel to it. I mean, a little bit of an English, upper-class feel. They have an amazing foie gras, and they'll bring you a paper if you show up by yourself for dinner. Very friendly people.

You ate alone?
I ate alone quite a bit.

You never think about actors eating alone.
Well, you know, my family's not with me. I usually am working and working on my lines, so I spend a lot of time alone. So, I will eat alone often. I went to another place in San Francisco with Reese called Quince, which is an amazing little Italian restaurant. It's a small room; it's very elegant, a little bit looser than the five-star at the Ritz. It's a husband-and-wife team. The kitchen is connected to the back of the building and goes downstairs into, like, a basement area. It's a very French country feel - very open, you know, 15-foot ceilings. The husband's the chef. It's very accommodating, kind of a homey feeling, with the most delicious Italian food. They have a quince salad that is amazing. They have really wonderful handmade gnocchi, with the thumbprints on them. They're really light and perfect, made with very little flour and egg, which is, I think, one of the strong suits of a great gnoc­chi. It has a really wonderful wine list, with Northern Italian wines. It's pretty small and kind of an exclusive place.

Did you find that one, or did ­Reese find it?
Reese found that one. Then, there's House of Nanking, which is a little Chinese joint across from Francis Ford Coppola's building, where they have the American Zoetrope offices. It's this little Chinese kind of roadhouse, nothing fancy. It's sort of get you in and get you out. There's always a line outside. There is a guy there, Peter, who sits you down and asks, "Have you been here before?" If you say no or yes, he says, "Let me bring you some stuff out." He brings you out four or five things, like family-style things. They have great seafood, of course, being in San Francisco, and delicious teriyaki and stir-fries. And Peter does this strange thing where he brings you the rice last, so you don't get filled up on rice. He is very particular about not giving you too much food, which seems to be the opposite of what you would expect. It's important for him that you don't get too much food, that no food goes to waste, which I thought was a very classy sort of thing. They have great dumplings; it's fantastic if you want great Chinese food. It is the place to go to in San Francisco, if you want the down and dirty.

You know your food …
There is Cafe Jacqueline, which is a soufflé place - it's all soufflés. Anthony Edwards took me there. You sit down and they have everything. It takes an hour to two hours to have your dinner. It's a nice long meal. They bring three or four soufflés out. We had a sorrel-and-Gruyère soufflé, a Gruyère-and-garlic soufflé, and then a crabmeat soufflé. We also had a lemon soufflé and a chocolate soufflé for the end. It is the kind of place where you have to get your arteries checked afterward. There's Rose Pistola in North Beach; it's just fantastic. It's an open-grill, open-kitchen­ place. They have a wood-burning­ stove and then two huge wood-burning grills. It has a real Mediterranean flare to it. They cook most of everything on those grills, except for soups and whatever they have to fry. It is just exquisite. They have a goat-cheese bruschetta that is incredible. They have a rabbit stew that is incredible. Fresh sardines cooked on the grill, fresh squid cooked on the grill. It's a little more casual than Quince or the Ritz. Another great place we went to is the Slanted Door. It's a huge place, maybe 20-foot ceilings, very modern and Asian. It has a really clean, austere decor, which makes you focus more on the food. We had great duck there. That was an amazing place to eat.

When you're sitting alone, reading your lines in a restaurant, do people recognize you?
Sometimes. There is a great vegetarian place at the Savoy Hotel, downstairs. It's called Millennium, on Geary. It's a vegan restaurant. I was sitting there at the bar, having dinner. I couldn't get a table. I had a vegetarian jambalaya with vegetarian dirty rice and a vegan ­sausage. San Franciscans are really nice. I was sitting at the bar and started taking to a couple. I was by myself again, working on my lines. They must have thought I was crazy, sitting there talking to myself. They were like, "Oh, you're getting that - we had that. What are you doing? Are you from out of town? Well, we live here, let me tell you about this place … " After a while, they asked me what I did. They had seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and they were like, "You've gotta try this place and this place." This is kind of how I find my way. I go to all these different places, and I will find a local there and have them hook me up.

Tell me what you discovered on your last visit, playing a cop chasing a serial killer.
We stayed at the Hilton for [the Fincher film] - that's by Union Square, right on the edge of the Tenderloin - and I would just head out. I had a good time just sort of wandering. It's a great place to just walk around. The couple at the bar at the Savoy are the ones who told me about this breakfast place, Dottie's True Blue Cafe.

Did you wander through Chinatown?
I found this fantastic little art shop there, the Kee Fung Ng Gallery. They have a lot of sandstone carvings directly from China. This couple runs it. He does not speak En­glish very well, and she is this lovely woman. They have the best-priced, most interesting limestone and sandstone carvings. It's such a funky little place, and everything is covered with dust. It's probably the shabbiest of all those little curio shops in Chinatown, but it's the most authentic, with so many one-of-a-kind, original sculptures. We got a bunch of stuff there. That was a real find.

Within walking distance from there is, of course, North Beach...
And the Tosca Cafe Bar, which is one of Sean Penn's favorite haunts. It is the literary stomping ground of some of the great American writers. The owner has an old registry that I guess Hunter S. Thompson found back in a storeroom about 20 years ago. He brought it out and wrote the Tosca Bar's preamble and constitution in it, sort of. Over the years, all these great talents have signed it. Sam Shepard, Thompson, Johnny Depp - the list goes on and on, the people who have gone through there. It's this old-school sort of Italian saloon right across from City Lights Bookstore, which is, of course, just so, so intellectual, sort of an American renegade. The City Lights Bookstore is the center of that whole world there. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and all these other great writers were just a common staple there. Lawrence Ferlinghetti started City Lights. It's easily the best bookstore in this country. It's what is slowly dying out in America, a bookstore that came out of a literary explosion of poetry and new ideas. It's right across the street from Tosca. The whole place is just wrapped in this progressive, ­forward-leading,­ freedom­-fighting, expatriate culture.

Where would you go for a drink after work?
There is always the Clift Hotel, the Redwood Room Bar. It's a huge room with dark redwood paneling, filled with a lot more girls than guys, and a huge bar. It's quite a scene. I went there one night and it was a little too much for me. But it was a big, beautiful room. It's all wood-paneled. You are surrounded by wood.

I know you have two young children. Are there great places for kids?
There is this really great concrete slide. It's zippy, wide enough for a grown-up to go down. It's at Seward Street Mini Park. It's so much fun. They call it the best slide to go down at three a.m. while drunk. A 14-year-old American girl named Kim Clark, who entered a 1973 park-improvement competition, designed it. It's really fun and really crazy.

What's something wild, strange, or funny that happened to you while you were there?
We were [filming] across the Golden Gate Bridge, but we were staged on the San Francisco side of the bridge. It was five a.m. They told me I had about half an hour before I had to get ready. I went on a little walk. Right underneath the bridge there is a little park. I come down, and I see a guy in a wet suit and a helmet carrying a surfboard walking toward the bridge. It was foggy and barely light out. I said, "You people surf here?" He was like, "Yeah, right over there." And he walked away and got his helmet on. I started walking along, and joggers are going by, and I was thinking to myself, What kind of surfing could they possibly have under the Golden Gate Bridge? I mean, we are right in the middle of a bay here.
All of a sudden, he hits the water. I just followed him. The mist starts to move off and it is a giant break right on the rock. These guys are dropping in. It was one of the most treacherous surf areas I have ever seen. They are dropping in, basically breaking right on the shore. It starts a little offshore, and then just starts piling up with these huge barrels. Everyone has helmets on. They are fully wet-suited up. It was pretty astounding to see that at five a.m., underneath the bridge. I'm a surfer, and I have never heard of that.

What does that tell you about San Francisco?
It's a city [where] they are as close to being free as anywhere else in the United States. It's kind of cool that they can pull that off.