Today's exercise in unnecessary neighborhood naming comes from the heart of Mid-Market where the recently arrived Dottie's True Blue Café and Pearl's Deluxe Hamburgers are doing wonders to rehab the area's stabby reputation. The Chronicle's resident Jimmy Buffett fan is on the scene, discovering the key to the "Sixth and Market streets makeover 2.0":

While it is always risky to predict that things are turning around - how many stories like that have we done? - there is one critical factor that has been missing until now: customers.

So what did it take to get the city's bright young foodies to brave the possibility of a 6th Street knifing while waiting for brunch? Comfort food, apparently. Between the heavy, drippy burgers at Pearl's and the homemade pastries at Dottie's, the "gourmet ghetto" label seems a bit dated, leaving Pearl's owner Sylvia Yi to linguistically gentrify the neighborhood with the new moniker: "comfort corner".

Before we fret about the inevitable onslaught of 7x7 and San Francisco Magazine trend pieces celebrating the return of coziness to mid-Market, we should also point out that another local publication has already put forth efforts to dub the stretch of Market Street between Sixth and Seventh, the city's "Mid Riff", as though we never left the 1990s.

[Chron]
[BoldItalic]