Beyond telling you that The Times published my fresh guide to dining in San Francisco after two recent weeks of research, I have a hard time narrowing down my thoughts about the City by the Bay. It’s been a part of my life for over 35 years.
San Francisco through the years
My parents took me and my brother to San Francisco for a family vacation in the late 1980s. I was 16. When I went wandering off on my own to the Embarcadero area, I saw a coffee shop and, believing myself sophisticated, ordered my first espresso. The staffer handed it to me in a to-go cup. I took a sip through the plastic opening in the top and, not imagining it would be raging hot, burned my tongue.
For a splurge that trip we went to Hubert Keller’s Fleur de Lys, a legendary restaurant (that closed in 2014) where brocades of red and gold cloth gathered at a crest in the ceiling to evoke some luxury Bedouin tent, with a crystal chandelier dangling in the center. I’d always been a kid who was curious about all kinds of food, but this was the first time I remember being awed by a dining room’s atmosphere.
While making desserts in restaurants through my 20s, I scraped together money to take a solo vacation to S.F. in 1997. I only remember the dinner that was the main impetus for my travel: Farallon, a seafood restaurant with over-the-top Jules Verne-inspired decor where chef Emily Luchetti led the pastry kitchen. Luchetti had been the chef at Jeremiah Tower’s fabled restaurant Stars, and I’d missed my chance to eat there at its heyday.
If my memory holds, her late-spring dessert menu at Farallon delivered two bangers: blood orange gratin, at once custardy and citrus-bright, served with surgically carved blood orange supremes, and crackling pavlova that almost deflated like a souffle when I dug in my fork. It arrived stained with a compote of strawberries and rhubarb. I stole the blood orange idea and added dates.
In a twist my young self could not have yet imagined, I was hired by the San Francisco Chronicle as a food critic under Michael Bauer in spring 2006. My first review was of a small, fantastically personal Japanese restaurant in the Mission called Minako, named for the owner, Minako “Judy” Hisamatsu, and her mother, Yoko Kondo, who ran the kitchen. What stays most clearly in my mind are the jars of aging umeboshi plums Kondo maintained; she served customers mellow, complexly sour examples that dated to the early 1980s. What older me wouldn’t give to time-travel and taste those again.
Not long after, I tackled one of the more insane assignments of my career: eating through nearly 90 taquerias in 10 weeks in an attempt to grasp the state of the Mission-style burrito. I recall that the mid-2000s-era online food forums engaged in robust speculation concerning my digestive health after such an endeavor.
I moved on from the Chronicle within a year, but I beelined back to San Francisco again professionally during my first month on the job — right after Los Angeles, my inaugural stop — as Eater’s national critic in early 2014. The eating those nine days was and remains a blur. Probably the meal that affected me the most was Corey Lee’s Benu, which prefaced the rise in modern Korean fine dining in the United States.
I wrote a lot about San Francisco — and Los Angeles, and California — during the Eater years.
It was a full-circle privilege to return to San Francisco in late August and early September, the best time of year to luxuriate in end-of-summer produce. The weather was kind: In the low 70s when the rest of the state was suffering through a heatwave, and the fog on several occasions rolled in cinematically, the fast wisps preceding a cottony bank that blotted out the sun.
Like every urban region of the West Coast, San Francisco is a complicated city that changes from block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood. As dining goes, S.F. continues to be magnificently unique, wholly its own place. Disappointments happened here and there: A lunch at Hog Island Oyster Co., in the Ferry Building, for example, felt far more touristy and slapdash than nearly two decades ago, when a dozen briny Sweetwaters and the grilled cheese, once with a real edge of funk, was my lunchtime escape from the Chronicle. These days I’d send you down the hall for Nite Yun’s Cambodian-style noodles instead.
There were far more pleasures, expressing many cuisines. I name 35 of them. Please read, with a semi-annual plea: A subscription to The Times costs $1 for the first four months. The paper pays for every meal for massive undertakings like these. I can all but promise your investment will be worthwhile.
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Our L.A. Times restaurant experts share insights and off-the-cuff takes on where they’re eating right now.
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101 Reveal
It is that time of year already! The ticket site for this year’s 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. reveal party, taking place Dec. 3 at the Hollywood Palladium, went live last week, and as Laurie Ochoa mentioned in last week’s newsletter, already the early-bird VIP tickets and “first bite” general admission tickets have sold out. If you act soon, there are still some early-bird reduced-price general admission tickets left as well as full-price VIP tickets, which usually go fast since they allow you to start eating and drinking 45 minutes ahead of general admission ticket holders from more than 40 food and beverage stations.
Also …
- This week Jenn Harris has a profile of the wonderful Minh Phan, who stepped away from running restaurants (Phenakite, Porridge + Puffs) to become the artist in residence at Food Forward — which is, as Jenn writes, “a nonprofit that recovers, then donates surplus produce from the L.A. Wholesale Produce Market plus other growers and produce shippers as well as leftovers from farmers markets and harvests from backyard trees.”
- Stephanie Breijo has the news on Jaca, the forthcoming fine-dining restaurant from the chefs behind Alta Adams and Locol.
- Stephanie also wrote this week about Akira Hirose, the chef who helped popularize fusion cuisine in 1980s and ’90s Los Angeles, who has died at 70.
- Heather Platt has a story about Sideways, the movie released 20 years ago that changed the way we think about wine. (For the record, I’m pro Merlot.)
- Stephanie also checks out a mysterious new Highland Park hot spot — with no social media, no website and no phone number. Says one owner of Sam’s Place: “We want the experience to start when you walk in the door, and not on your phone or on the internet.”
- Finally: Going to CicLAvia this weekend? We have suggestions for eating and drinking along the route.
Eat your way across L.A.
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