But something else cuts through all the bustle: harp music, soft yet riveting, flowing in a haunting, richly harmonic arc.
It comes from the front of the restaurant, where a dark-haired young woman sits over a harp. Her graceful hands dance over the strings with the delicacy of a spider on a web; her focus seems almost a serene meditation.
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She is Angelica Jenkins, 20, daughter of longtime San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter and Montara resident Bruce Jenkins.
Living with her father and family for the summer before her third and final year at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, Scotland, she is pursuing her chosen path — playing harp in informal settings where she can share the traditional Celtic (specifically Scottish and Irish) music she loves.
“It’s not my heritage, it’s not from anywhere I know. I just love the music,” she said. “It’s extremely important to establish a connection, because it’s traditional music. By the people, for the people. This is very for the people.”
The music is traditional Scottish or contemporary airs written in traditional style. It goes far back — “harp was the main instrument (of Scotland) before the bagpipe” — and was handed down, pre-1700, via oral tradition.
Around 1700, she said, wars, cultural unrest and the breakdown of Scotland’s early clan system undermined the harp. When it made a comeback, it was at a time when music was written down.
But previous music is lost. “It’s gone. They didn’t record it,” she said. “That’s one of the biggest losses, so far as I’m concerned.”
She plays the haunting tunes in sets, one flowing into the next in a pattern as musically intricate as intertwined Celtic knotwork. She plays a Celtic lever harp of acoustically bright curly maple with a spruce sound board, made by Triplett Harp of San Luis Obispo.
The strings, made of nylon (no longer cat or sheep gut) are colored by notes (C notes are red, F are blue, and so on). To go to a new set, she flicks selected levers, raising the pitch of those strings to change the key.
If the music is traditional, Jenkins’ life is not.
Music was in her genes. Her paternal grandfather, Gordon Jenkins, was a 1930s/40s Grammy-winning performer, arranger and composer. His wife, Beverly, was a professional singer who appeared on national radio. Her maternal grandfather, Bill Ulyate, was a prominent Los Angeles saxophonist who performed on film soundtracks with the 20th-Century Fox orchestra.
She was born via water birth, in a horse trough filled with water at her family’s beachfront Malibu home. She and elder sister Anna were home-schooled by their unconventional mother, who loved musical theater.
Their father feared the home-focused girls might lack social skills, but he needn’t have worried. “I’ll never forget how they got up in front of about 10 guests (at a party at home) and sang ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’ from ‘Oklahoma!’” he said. “They had every note perfect. That’s when I realized they had an aptitude for (music).”
With a “really nasty habit of adopting everything (Anna) took on,” little Angelica followed her big sister into learning the harp. (Anna now also plays harp professionally.) Angelica — “Ella” to friends — took private harp lessons and graduated with honors and an associate of arts degree in music from College of the Canyons near Santa Clarita.
Her studies focused on classical music, but she left that behind. “It’s so beautiful and so moving, I didn’t want to play it if I couldn’t do it right,” she said. “I didn’t feel I was doing justice to it.”
Celtic music “was what I considered fun: very rhythmic, very catching. I knew music that sounded that way appealed to me.”
Her future crystallized when she learned of the Royal Scottish Academy. “That was the only university I applied to,” she said decisively. “It was that or nothing.”
At first, she said, it was scary to be away from home and her sister. She turned for support to her harp, named “Valentine” after she bought it on Valentine’s Day.
There’s a knack to finding the harp that “sings to you,” she said. “It takes years to find the harp that’s perfectly attuned to you. It’s stabilizing. It brings you to a level of calm.”
After graduation, Jenkins, who also loves ocean swimming and horseback riding, plans to go to the Isle of Skye, to study Gaelic. Then she will return to Half Moon Bay to focus on harp: teach, play for weddings or school programs, or places like It’s Italia.
“Betsy wanted to keep the music (for patrons) strings only,” said co-owner George Del Fierro.
“I feel strings are magical,” said his wife.
Jenkins will play there, at 401 Main St., from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
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