Bay Area restaurant playlists: Why you hear Stevie Nicks as you eat your gnocchi

Joel Selvin can still clearly recall the moment he realized that restaurateurs had taken pairing music with meals to a whole new level.

“I walked into this incredibly pretentious, foodie-oriented Mission district restaurant,” he remembers. “And outside, there was a glass bulletin board case that showed that night’s menu and that night’s playlist — like they were pairing them.

“It was a new level of pretense in the restaurant business and in the music business that I hadn’t encountered. But I understood what was going on.”

And he decided to get involved. The longtime Bay Area music critic, who had just retired after a multi-decade run as the music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, decided to jump on the trend and offer up his services as a music consultant/curator to local eateries.

His first gig was with the Red Rocker himself, singer Sammy Hagar, who Selvin says hired him to create a “steak-eating playlist” at his then-new Mill Valley spot, El Paseo.

“To me, that meant a lot of big band, a lot of up-tempo R&B, a lot of sort of white supper club pop,” Selvin says. “Didn’t see any rock ‘n’ roll in a steak-eating playlist.”

Selvin was in an unique position at the time — given that he could draw upon his vast private music library to create playlists that could be uploaded to iPods. Streaming has since changed the game, and pretty much everybody has access to millions upon millions of recordings these days.

Not so coincidentally, the curated restaurant playlist concept has gone mainstream in recent years. Now establishments around the Bay Area and well beyond are pairing ditties and dishes.

Of course, the idea is hardly new. Musical accompaniment for the dining experience has probably been around as long as there have been instruments. A fine meal accompanied by the right soundtrack — or jazz combo or Renaissance troubador —has been one of the world’s great joys for centuries.

What is new, however, is the ease and simplicity with which people can deliver such far-reaching playlists these days, due to the advancements in streaming.

Walk into Besharam, chef Heena Patel’s popular Indian restaurant in San Francisco, and you’ll find plenty of Bollywood hits as part of an international playlist that is as likely to stop in Bangkok as it is in Beirut. And the playlist might sound quite different a few months later.

“It always changes,” Heena says. “I believe the music needs to be changed with the season — and with the food. Of course, you are here to eat. But I am trying to give you the whole experience — and the music is one part of it.”

Of course, diners probably won’t be surprised to hear Bollywood tunes being played at Besharam. Pairing cuisine with music from the same area of origin is common. If you walk into David Kinch’s The Bywater in Los Gatos to get a fried shrimp po’ boy, some Creole spiced fries and an order of beignets, it seems only natural to hear such Fat City favorites as Allen Toussaint and The Meters.

“You’ll get a lot of New Orleans-type music — a lot of that blues, jazzy (music),” says Bywater manager Jorge Marquez Lobato.

Yet, sticking only with what’s expected isn’t always the right choice. So, many restaurants will stray from matching the cuisine only with music from the same geography. In the case of the Bywater, patrons get New Orleans tunes as well as a big batch of familiar pop offerings.

“You make sure that there is general pop music and greatest hits from throughout the eras,” Lobato says. “So, a lot of ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s — not really the ‘90s.”

Bywater further mixes it up by setting the playlist on shuffle, thus removing any real sense of order from the equation and setting the table for some really cool and unexpected musical juxtapositions.

“You might be sitting here and the next thing you know, you will hear some New Orleans rap pop in, followed by the Beatles,” Lobato says.

It’s easy enough to find pre-existing playlists on Spotify or other music streaming sites. Just type in “classic rock” or “date night” or whatever, then push play. (Restaurants, however, pay music licensing fees to organizations like ASCAP — the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers — in order to be able to play music in public venues.)

Yet, some might consider piping in a ready-made playlist akin to letting some random chef walk into a restaurant’s kitchen and start whipping up the meals for the night.

There’s a definite downside to having a generic, unorganized playlist, where “all of a sudden you have, like, Led Zeppelin blaring and then it’s, like rap, and then it goes into Beyonce and then it’s like back to ‘70s Yacht Rock,” says co-executive chef Thomas McNaughton from Flour + Water in San Francisco.

That’s why Flour + Water employs music directors to curate the tuneful offerings played for the restaurant group, which also includes Penny Roma, Trick Dog and Flour + Water Pasta Shop.

No, it’s not a full time gig. Music directors Andy Poole and Kristina Farina have other non-music related responsibilities. They do, however, get “a cool title and a fake business card,” McNaughton says.

The playlist concept is different at Flour + Water than most other restaurants. Instead of focusing on individual songs, the San Francisco eatery fills its playlists with full-length albums. That means you could walk into Flour + Water for a bite and hear the 2011 Blood Orange debut, “Coastal Grooves,” played in its entirety, followed by, say, both sides of the Pointer Sisters’ “Energy” from 1978.

Compiling good music alone is not enough, says McNaughton. The playlist must match a restaurant’s “flow of service.”

“It actually does take curation throughout the night,” he says. “Our vibe at 5:30 — and demographic — is a lot different than it is at 10 p.m.”

Ryan Pollnow, McNaughton’s co-executive chef at Flour + Water, says that a music director plays a crucial part in the dining experience.

“He’s pairing the energy of the restaurant at different points of the night to different energies of albums — and also the build within those albums,” Pollnow says. “It actually becomes incredibly complex to really pull off successfully. But when you do, and when it’s a person that’s in that music director role and in that service five nights a week and knows those different kinds of cue points throughout the night, it’s something that is really magical.”

Of course, despite the effort, there’s no guarantee that people will notice the specially selected music. But there are times when it’s clear that diners are indeed listening.