We need a word for the disappointment experienced upon realizing that the food in front of you has been optimized for Instagram and not for you.
It takes a while, but exploring neighborhoods can be really rewarding. I rarely wait for a table, and if you do have to wait there is usually another place right next door. Not every place is spectacular, but the overall food quality here is decent. Finally, avoid anywhere with more than 20-30 items on a menu (Thank you Gordon Ramsey).
There is another (realer imo) Asian area on Clement and Geary over in the Richmond that has authentic food all over. Japan town is good, but stay away from most of the tourist trap that is the Grant street Chinatown.
But this city does suck for Mediterranean.
Honestly, I'd even take an everyday American Chinese restaurant over one of those yuppie restaurants that sell overpriced Chinese-ish food aimed at white yuppies (the Americanization bothers me less than the catering to the yuppie community... regular old working-class American Chinese food is actually pretty tasty, even if it's not my favorite, which is more than I can say for Yuppie Chinese).
I generally love the taste and diversity of food in SF, but I feel like restaurant owners don't value their customers, nor their customer's time when they open a restaurant like this.
My new rule is: if the wait is 30 minutes or more, I go somewhere else. No exceptions. Honestly, I've fallen out of touch with many friends because of this rule, but my time is worth more than that. I actively try to patronize the "critically underrated" places that are good, but have no line down the block.
the only real solution for the "too popular" problem is to raise the prices, which might satisfy you but enrage others who are then priced out.
Here's how that plays out: if enough people start to do that, someone will start a system for sharing information to support them, the discovered places will become trendy and either crowded or expensive, rinse, and repeat (actually, you are already in that cycle—that’s how lots of trendy places happen now.) As long as the Bay Area is awash in money, the same process driving real estate prices through the roof is going to do the same thing to dining prices wherever there is quality except where obscurity creates hidden bargains. But to exploit that you'll need to spend more time than you'd spend waiting in line at known places finding the hidden gems, and then finding new ones as other people discover the one you've found and the obscurity you've been exploiting is replaced with visibility and success.
Eh, that seems pretty generous to me still. I won't wait more than five minutes or so. (i.e. if a table has already asked for bills and I'm just waiting for them to pay and clear out.) I'll give a bit more leeway if there's a seated area where my friends and I can get served drinks while we wait.
I waited in line in Paris at both Obermama (pizza & cocktails) and Kotteri Naritake (butter ramen with very few seats). I've been told to come back in an hour at a favorite spot (corsican food with very few seats).
It definitely happens elsewhere.
There's also obviously the separate fast-food and fast-casual markets that focus on rapidly cycling customers with minimal delay and much lower service levels; they still try to be full as much as possible which still means queuing at peak times, but the queues tend to be shorter in time or just as deep (or deeper), and tend to involve actual physical, rather than merely logical, queues.
[0] http://www.worldcitiescultureforum.com/data/number-of-restau...
My New Yorker friends also think that queuing 30+ minutes for a trendy place is normal.
I know right! There was one time I went to one restaurant with a good rating, and the line up was so long we ended up just waddling over to an inconspicuous Japanese place next door, to discover some pretty decent traditional style service and food.
I did find a number of chinese/korean restaurants that clearly cater to actual chinese/koreans, but the cultural density is so low that unfortunately they've mostly fell short compared to the quality you can get in the various chinese/korean neighbourhoods in Toronto.
During B2B a couple years ago I actually asked an officer about that. Apparently it's 100% legal to be naked in SF, as long as you're not being too sexual... I don't know what the actual line is legally, but that's what I was told.
You've forgotten the few weeks in the spring and fall where the Central Valley-powered air conditioning turns off and suddenly SF becomes Palo Alto. :)
> SF is cold! (yes, this coming from a canadian)
It's kind of interesting that as much as I love cold weather, I wouldn't want to live any place where it's actually cold as a matter of course. Why? Air conditioning. In warm places like Dallas and Vegas, air con is everywhere. Central A/C is in all the houses, and every business is air conditioned. In cooler places, that doesn't exist. I've heard horror stories from friends who moved to SF/SV and can't find a place to live with air conditioning. And people will say you don't need it, but a) heatwaves still exist, and one heatwave will fuck up your entire week, and b) they underestimate my lack of tolerance for heat. I blast my air con at 60°F even in the winter :)
> It's very common to see people lining up for unique eye-catching things like asian+mexican fusion, dashi-broth ramen and taiyaki ice cream, but finding good traditional chinese or greek or korean food or even a half-decent shawarma is tough
Honestly, I've been put off of SF a very long time ago, but if I hadn't already, this would do it.
The older I get, the more I find white people's spins on ethnic food to be just plain annoying. It's both more expensive and not as tasty as the real thing.
Here's a pretty recent example for me: in a suburb of Dallas, they recently opened an upscale food hall called Legacy Hall. I was really excited about it when it first opened, and I tried it a few times. Every time I ate there, I ended up leaving unsatisfied for the most part. Why? Because so much of their food was some kind of ethnic or regional food all gussied up by and for white yuppies. Case in point, they had one Asian-style noodle joint there called the Monkey King Noodle Company. I ordered the dan dan noodles, because I love dan dan noodles, and I've ordered it several times at hole-in-the-wall Sichuan restaurants. What I got was some white guy's idea of what dan dan noodles are. It was awful. And it was way more expensive than it should have been. And that's not the only kind of this thing I've encountered at Legacy Hall... I've had a few similar experiences there, but this is just the one I picked as an example.
But of course Dallas is a wonderful city, and there are hole-in-the-wall restaurants of every ethnicity here. I have one coworker, of Filipina descent, who I go out to lunch with once a week or so, and we mostly go to all different kinds of hole-in-the-wall Asian places of pretty much every ethnicity we can find. And while we're in the car, we talk so much smack about overpriced "Asian" restaurants that cater to white yuppies... it's so cathartic to have someone to talk to about how frustrating this is (TBH, I'm a Jew who grew up on Chinese food, understands Japanese well enough to translate as a hobby, and has never identified with white people).
> LGBT community: Toronto has a large LGBT community and one of the largest parades in North America, but people generally don't try to be too outrageous. In the one year I've been to SF, I've ran into butt-naked people numerous times (in contexts ranging from them just walking down the street to them running the Bay-to-Breakers marathon). Also ran into a leather fetish gear festival around costco a while back. Nothing really against that sort of stuff, but can be awkward to inadvertently run into it when you're just out and about with the kids on a random weekend.
I'm a transgender lesbian, and my main goal in life is to assimilate into ordinary life as a girl and maybe play around with a few chicks here and there. I've felt out of place in a lot of online LGBT communities because so many of them are dominated by those who... well, who aren't like me. People with radical political beliefs, very distinct "alternative" looks, who are thoroughly immersed in queer culture, etc. Now, I don't have a problem with those people existing (and in fact one good way to get on my bad side is to tell me they make the community "look bad"), but I do feel alone because so few people in the community are like me. And then I started getting involved in my local LGBT community and became a regular at a trans support group. And most of the people I met there are a lot like me, and it felt great to finally be part of a community I identify with. Going to that group felt like coming home, and I've since pulled out of most online trans communities in favor of becoming more involved with my local community.
Again, I don't have a problem with the queerer or more alternative parts of the community, and I'd never say they make the community look bad, and I certainly won't invalidate their identities, but I don't identify with them, and I just feel isolated when I'm surrounded by them, which is what's happened in most online communities, and I'm more comfortable when I'm with people who share my sensibilities and life goals.
From what I understand, SF is filled with the segments of the community that I don't identify with, and so I probably wouldn't get involved with the LGBT community there.
I read an article a while back about a couple of americans who went to china and opened a "chinese" food restaurant because real chinese food looked nothing like the americanized "chinese" delivery food and they missed their sweet-&-sour chicken balls and fortune cookies. It flopped hard... until they rebranded and called it "american comfort food". It's always amusing to learn about the quirky dissonances between expectation of people from different cultures.
> SF is filled with the segments of the community that I don't identify with
I'm married and straight so I don't have much contact with the LGBT community in SF, but for some reason the few times have always been somewhat awkward. Imagine looking at marathon runners with funny costumes and then having to explain to your 5/yo not to be pointing and yelling at the naked guy with the rainbow cape. Another time my wife took my daughter to what she thought was a generic kids activity at a library and it turned out to be a transgender seminar, dumbed down to kids vocab level.
I've also found the gay parade in particular to be a bit surreal: the SF parade seemed more like a corporate sponsorship show and had a distinct "spectacle" feel, nothing like the communal street party feel of the Toronto Pride parade.
It almost feels like the culture here is that LGBT identity is this unusual curious thing to be on display on a similar level to the animal shows at the library. Just feels very weird, coming from Toronto, where people are generally nonchalant/indifferent towards sexual orientation.
Some other things that struck me about living here.
- SF is cold! (yes, this coming from a canadian) In Toronto you get "real" seasons and snow during winter, but SF (especially in the areas closer to the ocean) is blasted with cold wind and fog year-round so there's really never a hot season. In addition to that, SF has its infamous micro-weathers: it might be foggy on one patch of the city, rain on another and be sunny (but still windy) on yet another part of town, all at the same time.
- Food scene: SF does a lot of spins on food. If I were to describe food here, I'd have to say it's generally "gimmicky". It's very common to see people lining up for unique eye-catching things like asian+mexican fusion, dashi-broth ramen and taiyaki ice cream, but finding good traditional chinese or greek or korean food or even a half-decent shawarma is tough. Also, having to wait in line for 30+ mins almost everywhere detracts a lot from dining experiences. Many places are also ridiculously cramped. I've never had to walk _through the kitchen_ to get to a restroom anywhere else before.
- LGBT community: Toronto has a large LGBT community and one of the largest parades in North America, but people generally don't try to be too outrageous. In the one year I've been to SF, I've ran into butt-naked people numerous times (in contexts ranging from them just walking down the street to them running the Bay-to-Breakers marathon). Also ran into a leather fetish gear festival around costco a while back. Nothing really against that sort of stuff, but can be awkward to inadvertently run into it when you're just out and about with the kids on a random weekend.
- Geography and nature: Within SF, there are gorgeous places scattered throughout the city (e.g. views from Russian Hill, around Randall museum, presidio area). If you have a car, there are also a ton of amazing state parks in the surrounding areas, from redwood forests to beaches. You can see wild sea life up close at fitzgerald marine reserve and even spot whales at pigeon point.