It's SFist's 20th anniversary week this week, and it seemed like a good time to look back on how we've covered food and the local restaurant scene going back to the site's early days, spanning an era in which SF restaurants became some of the most buzzed-about places in the country.
While I have not been with SFist for all of its 20 years — I started as a contributor in 2009 and became a full-timer in 2013 — I have been one of the primary people on the restaurant beat for much of that time. Prior to becoming an editor on the site, I spent three years as the San Francisco editor for Grub Street, New York Magazine's food-news site, which went back to covering New York and national food news only in 2013. And during those years I had a front-row seat to San Francisco's blossoming from well-respected and quaint food city to world-class food city — an evolution that was fueled by the Web 2.0 boom and the consequent influx of well-paid people who ate out a lot.
When I started at Grub Street, circa December 2009, changes were afoot in SF, with the recent openings of restaurants like Frances and Nopa getting national attention. Today, openings like these might garner modest attention and buzz, but for the time they were big news, with a fine-dining chef like Melissa Perello exploring humbler if still refined California cuisine with Southern influences, and Nopa's Laurence Jossel taking over a former bank building on what was then a fairly gritty Divisadero corridor known for its dive bars, gas stations, and auto repair shops. And let's not forget former Frances beverage director Paul Einbund, now the proprietor at The Morris, popularizing the dollar-per-ounce house-blended wine that garnered New York Times attention.
The quote that I heard, at a time when the city proper had never been home to a Michelin three-star restaurant, was "San Francisco gives great middle." The general impression in the 1990s and aughts was that you needed to go to New York or up to Napa for truly top-notch fine dining experiences, but San Francisco had long been a city overflowing with great food — especially Chinese and Italian food — and better-than-they-needed-to-be neighborhood restaurants. Restaurants like Stars, Ernie's, and Fournou's Oven, which were once destinations, were gone or nearing their ends, and New York had taken back the lion's share of attention and opulence.
The farm-to-table shadow of Chez Panisse also loomed large in these years. You may recall that New York chef David Chang, in 2009, bashed SF's entire food scene saying, "Fuckin' every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate. Do something with your food."
Within two years that would change, with former Chronicle critic Michael Bauer raving that 2010 was the most exciting year for restaurant openings in his career at the paper. It was a year that saw the splashy openings of Prospect and Marlowe, which are still going strong in SoMa; the year Mission Chinese Food debuted, before it became mostly a New York thing; and it was the year that Saison and Benu made their debuts, with both going on to earn three Michelin stars.
The boom years in SF really hadn't even begun, and Bauer noted at the time that the wealth of great new restaurant openings was "doubly amazing in this struggling economy." He surmised that "the economy might be part of the reason the scene is so vibrant — with a strong dining culture, restaurateurs have been forced to focus and create something that makes their places stand above the competition."
By 2015, the buzz having been building, Bon Appetit declared San Francisco the best food city in the country. When the Michelin Guide was released in the fall of 2017, the Bay Area officially overtook New York for the most three-star restaurants in the country, with seven (Benu, Coi, French Laundry, Manresa, Quince, Meadowood, Saison). Three of those have since closed, Coi, Manresa, and Meadowood is in limbo as its building gets rebuilt from the 2020 Glass Fire.
But San Francisco's maturing as a food town, starting around 2010, happened alongside national food trends, the popularity of Top Chef, the rise of food blogs like Eater and Serious Eats and Grub Street, and the birth of social media. These all contributed to a national conversation about food and cocktails that hadn't existed in the same way before. Each week someone was discovering some authentic something that most people hadn't heard of. Chefs in smaller cities like Portland and Boston which punched above their weight food-wise could now be constantly, passively exchanging ideas with colleagues in LA, SF, Chicago, and elsewhere.
SFist played a small part in the growing democratization of food buzz that happened around this time, too. (Our first "definitive" best burrritos list came in 2015, which was updated in 2017, and here are best sushi and best Detroit-style pizza lists. Our This Week In Food news roundups launched in 2014.) Traditional gatekeepers like major newspaper critics were no longer the only game in town, with Yelp, blogs, and ultimately Instagram playing outsized roles in how regular people discovered places to eat.
As SF-based food writer Kevin Alexander writes in his book Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End, around this time, "The idea of 'foodies' being some tiny niche population of wealthy, retired couples excitedly standing outside suburban strip mall Thai joints, holding marked-up copies of Zagat and Michael and Jane Stern's Roadfood, became increasingly outdated, as entire swaths of upwardly mobile twentysomethings, with their knowledge squeezed from Eater Heatmaps and Thrillist Eat Seekers and Yelp and Infatuation ratings, considered finding good food so obligatory that it no longer registered as a defining characteristic of one's identity."
Alexander narrates the arc of one SF restaurant in particular, AQ, which debuted in SoMa at the height of SF's restaurant frenzy in late 2011, as an example of the ambition that characterized the era. The restaurant had a seasonally changing menu, which went along with seasonally changing decor, cocktails, and staff uniforms to go with it, and debuted in an industrial space on Mission Street that had never been home to a restaurant. It was a finalist for Best New Restaurant at the James Beard Awards the following spring, also earning a rave from Michael Bauer, but by 2017, with costs rising and revenues falling, the owners called it quits.
Other noteworthy SF restaurants had similar arcs, closing pre-pandemic, like Commonwealth, Dosa, and RN74. All three had opened to much acclaim and attention, and all three had run their course and exhausted their pivots by the time the tech economy was showing its first signs of flagging in 2019. AL's Place, which debuted in 2015 and made it through most of the pandemic, called it quits in 2022, a victim of chef burnout. The biggest loss from that era, for me, was Bar Tartine — a stellar, wildly ambitious restaurant from which I'm still carrying food memories, and will be for years, whose heyday under chefs Nick Balla and Cortney Burns lasted from 2010 to 2016.
But there have been great success stories aplenty. Look at State Bird Provisions, which turned 12 this year and still draws lines of walk-ins most evenings for its innovative dim-sum-style service. Mister Jiu's and Nari have brought Michelin-level cred to Chinese and Thai cuisines, respectively, with Californios earning two stars for its high-end takes on Mexican flavors. And restaurateur Adriano Paganini has tapped into the "middle" with an array of wallet-friendly, delicious restaurants across the city like Beretta, A Mano, Wildseed, and others, churning out hit after hit.
And despite there being the sense that San Francisco's food scene has been in a bit of a rut or ebb tide in the last few years, the pandemic notwithstanding, the pendulum of national buzz is certain to swing our way again, as it repeatedly has. Michelin three-starred Quince has undergone a gorgeous remodel; an ambitious Michelin-starred chef, Sorrel's Alex Hong, is opening what will certainly be a noteworthy new restaurant in the former Slanted Door space in the Ferry Building; and the city is awash in great bagels and great pizza like it never was a decade or so ago. We are still probably the greatest city in the country for Italian food. (Fight me, NY.) And there isn't another US city (save, maybe, New York) with the access to amazing seafood and the wealth of stellar omakase menus we now have here.
The restaurant economy itself, though, has become its own story in the last five years. SFist has been covering the grumblings over bill surcharges for years now, and the restaurant industry successfully pushed back on a new law that would have taken effect this month, outlawing them. But those surcharges are just a symptom of a larger shift in restaurant operations, with employees demanding better pay and greater quality of life than earlier generations did, and cities mandating things like healthcare and higher minimum wages for all.
Combine these with the rising costs of the raw food itself and generally high rents, and you have the state of things today, where bowls of pasta can run you $38 at Che Fico, and a Chronicle-approved burrito clocks in at $22.
At least, with the knowledge, experience, and hindsight of the last decade and a half, chefs and restaurateurs are adapting where they can to the tastes of the day. International cuisines are mixed and matched as standard procedure. Tasting menus are mostly reserved for special occasions — though we remain a city with a staggering number of them. And every light fixture doesn't need to be an Edison bulb. Also, for most small restaurants, it's insane to be growing, butchering, pickling, and hand-making every last menu item. Especially in this economy.
We all need to be constantly reminded, though, that we get the restaurant scene we ask for, and that we support. Ordering in delivery and over-relying on meal kits, especially on weekends, has turned swaths of this once bustling city into a hibernating bedroom community, long after pandemic concerns abated. I'd urge everyone to make it a point, if they have the means, to make it out regularly to the restaurants they love, within and outside their neighborhoods. Because restaurants are beautiful, generous places that can disappear very easily, if we don't show our love.
Related: The Best New Restaurants In San Francisco 2023
The Best New San Francisco Restaurants of 2021-2022
Top image: A snack course at Ernest. Photo by Jay Barmann
