SF Restaurants, Food & Drink SF Chronicle Restaurant Critic Defends Against Bias Accusation After Being Seen Getting Friendly With Restaurant Owners It's certainly not a scandal by any stretch in 2025 terms, but the Chronicle is going public with a reader letter and its restaurant critic is trying to quash criticism that she perhaps wasn't objective in a recent review.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Chronicle Critic Nearly Gets Booted From French Laundry as Thomas Keller Puts His Foot Down About Criticism Thomas Keller seems to be battening down the hatches at the Michelin three-star French Laundry after a string of less-than-stellar reviews. And recently he went so far as to tell the Chronicle's MacKenzie Chung Fegan that she wasn't welcome there.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink French Laundry, Saison, Chez Panisse All Snubbed on Chronicle's New Top 100 Some controversial cuts were going to be inevitable when the Chronicle's two main food critics set about reviving the Top 100 restaurants list this year. But, call me crazy, just-OK taco shops do not belong in the top 20 when over a dozen Michelin-starred spots are getting snubbed completely.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink The SF Chronicle Is Reviving the Top 100 Restaurants List at Last After more than five years in which the San Francisco Chronicle has published a bevy of shorter food lists, the big grandaddy of them all, the Top 100, is making a comeback.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Chronicle Critic Raves About Pakistani Restaurant In Basement Mall Food Court Both the former and the current lead restaurant critics at the San Francisco Chronicle agree: There is a hidden gem in the food court at the former Westfield mall, soon to rebrand again to become the San Francisco Centre.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Four SF Restaurants Gain Michelin Stars; Gary Danko Loses Star For the first time since Michelin began publishing dining guides for the Bay Area, 25-year-old fine-dining institution Gary Danko has lost its Michelin star. But on Monday night, the tire company and venerable restaurant-guide producers bestowed new stars on four San Francisco restaurants.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Go Eat This Thing: High-End Southern Thai Tasting Menu at Hed 11 Outside of Thailand, it was rare to find fine-dining-style Thai food a decade ago, let alone menus that explored Thai dishes beyond the comfortable realm of curries, pad Thai, and a few other noodle dishes and salads.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink San Francisco's Food Scene Has Changed Wildly, Mostly for the Better, In the Last 20 Years 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.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Michael Bauer Raved About the Pozole at Elena's, Chronicle Critic Was Not Impressed Associate Chronicle restaurant critic Cesar Hernandez has lodged one notable difference of opinion with former critic Michael Bauer, who continues to make restaurant recommendations on Instagram.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink New Chronicle Critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan Begins Tenure With Zuni Review Much like her predecessor in the job, Soleil Ho, newly installed Chronicle restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan took on a Bay Area sacred cow for her first review at the paper, Zuni Café.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Tried and True: Frances Gets Stellar Menu Makeover From New Chef Ricky Chu Frances, which will be celebrating 15 years in the Castro later this year, remains one of the city's neighborhood restaurant gems, and the menu has recently been seeing some changes at the hands of newly promoted chef de cuisine Ricky Chu.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Chronicle Launches Not-Particularly-Helpful AI 'Chowbot' For Food Recs Artificial intelligence and restaurant recommendations would seem like a pretty natural fit — at least in terms of crowdsourcing things with good reviews. But a new AI bot launched by the SF Chronicle seems to be pretty limited in its food intelligence so far.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink This Intimate SF Restaurant Is Taking Diners on a Nightly Journey Back In Time... and Forward In Time, and Sideways You've likely never had a dining experience that, over a couple of hours, attempts to take you time-traveling backward and forward through important moments in global food culture, and into a future of dining we can only begin to imagine.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Soleil Ho Is Stepping Down as Chronicle Restaurant Critic After Four Years Four years, a James Beard Award, and a pandemic later, Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho is relinquishing the post — and without a whole lot of explanation.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Michelin Awards New Stars to Four SF Restaurants Including Osito and Nisei; SPQR and Mourad Lose Theirs The Michelin inspectors giveth and they taketh away in the latest California guide release, which is arriving later in the year than usual. The biggest winners in SF are a handful of new one-star honorees, but the big headline is that SoCal has its first three-star restaurant.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Esquire Names Three SF Spots (and One In Sonoma) As Best New Restaurants In the Country San Francisco got short shrift the last couple years when it's come to the James Beard Foundation Awards and Bon Appetit's Best New Restaurants lists, but Esquire is still paying attention to our food scene.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Liliana May Be SF's Best New Date Spot For the Cocktail-Inclined San Francisco is stupid with great cocktail bars — though sadly we have fewer than when a pandemic decided to kill some off. But how many actually double as great date spots where you can sit down, hear each other, and get a complete meal?
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink We Now Know Why the Chronicle Doesn't Think The French Laundry Is Worth the Splurge Anymore Three years in, Soleil Ho drops a review of The French Laundry, and now the details emerge about why the Chronicle's restaurant critic left Thomas Keller's famed restaurant off a recent list of best splurge restaurants.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink This Week In SF Food: Bar Piccino Debuts, an NFT Restaurant Breaks Ground, and More It's about time we revived this weekly roundup of food and restaurant news from SF and around the Bay — now that there's a real, steady flow of restaurant news coming down the pike once again.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Chronicle Does List of Best Splurge Restaurants, Snubs French Laundry, Manresa, and Quince A big-city newspaper critic has to deal with the big-name, Michelin-starred places eventually, and it seems that Soleil Ho's tour of the Bay Area's more acclaimed, pricey spots is finally complete.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Two Buzzy SF Restaurants Are Trying Out New Models For Compensating Workers — And Checks Are Going Up In Price There was much talk in the restaurant industry throughout the pandemic about how the restaurant business was broken, how kitchen staff in particular have historically been mistreated and underpaid, and how things would need to change if restaurants wanted to staff up again.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink World-Class Pasta and Unique Bar Bites Make for Winning Combo at Sorella Newly made over with a new concept, Acquerello's six-month-old sister restaurant in Polk Gulch is a winner, offering Acquerello-level pasta and excellent bar snacks alongside cocktails, great wine, and a huge selection of amaro.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Go Eat This Thing: Every Handroll at Handroll Project It was maybe obvious for fans of Ju-Ni that the new, casual side project of chef Geoffrey Lee and partner Tan Truong in the Mission, Handroll Project, would be an instant winner. And they would be right.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Ernest: An Early Contender for Best New Restaurant In SF Open since March in the loft-like space once occupied by Coffee Bar at Florida and Mariposa, Ernest is the kind of restaurant that makes San Francisco the dining destination that it is — and it joins us at a time when we could all use a little culinary surprise and delight.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Lily's High-End Vietnamese Cuisine Delights in the Inner Richmond, Joins the Area's Culinary Rebirth Lily on Clement quietly opened its doors in the middle of San Francisco's coronavirus shut down, and it's a great new spot serving up creative iterations on Vietnamese cuisine.
