Catherine Ledner A view of the Ferry Building tower from the Embarcadero.
After a stratospheric rise and precipitous tumble, the City by the Bay is reclaiming its glory days with bold design, innovative chefs, stylish boutiques, and burgeoning neighborhoods fit for hippies and hipsters alike. Lynn Yaeger reports.
"San Francisco these days?It's like a groovy Mayberry!" Ben Ospital tells me on my first night in town. We are lingering over a three-hour dinner with his sister, Chris, at Quince, a restaurant in the once down-and-out neighborhood of Hayes Valley, just west of the Civic Center. Ben is a native San Franciscan who owns, with his mom and Chris, the nearby MAC (Modern Appealing Clothing) boutique, which stocks avant-garde Belgian designers like Walter van Beirendonck and has been a mainstay for local fashion mavens since the original store opened downtown on Post Street, 25 years ago.
I mention some of the people I plan to talk to while I'm in town—hotelier Chip Conley, artist Catherine Wagner, restaurateur Dennis Leary—and it turns out Ben has hung with all of them at one time or another. The small-town grooviness that he speaks of comes from places like Quince: a clean white room with an easy blend of high and low, a seamless mix of the elegant and the egalitarian that I will come to see as emblematic of San Francisco itself. At Quince, the nuanced food could not be more carefully prepared. The chef trained at Chez Panisse, and the menu is so obsessed with freshness, it offers the provenance of every chop and bean—but the vibe is unpretentious, and Ben tells me the owner bought the unmatched vintage tableware on eBay.
I know Ben from fashion circles (the worldwide coterie of Belgian-fashion fans is even smaller than you might think) and he has been urging me for the last few months to check out San Francisco's renaissance firsthand. My last trip was during the height of the dot-com boom, when every restaurant was booked way in advance, and I nearly starved looking for simple food—anything—on a Saturday night. Now, with the cyber interlopers having vanished into thin air, things are at once calmer and cooler; the inmates, to everyone's relief, are back in charge of the institution. With the reopening of the De Young Museum imminent, and new boutique hotels, galleries, bistros—whole neighborhoods!—popping up practically overnight, Ben's pleas of "Come visit!" became impossible to resist.
Indeed, when I ask the Ospitals over dinner to tell me everything they love about their hometown, their enthusiasm is overwhelming. "We love eating outside at the Foreign Cinema, where they show old movies on the wall, and late nights at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, and Mexican hot chocolate from Mijita in the Ferry Building," Chris, who has fire enginered hair, tells me. Anything besides food? "Well, the art galleries at 49 Geary are great," Ben adds. "Oh, and Amoeba Music in the Haight, which is so good that a guy in Antwerp asked me about it. And let's not forget the gospel service at Glide Memorial Church." Church?"The pastor, Cecil Williams, is our local Martin Luther King Jr.Bill Clinton goes when he's in town. Socialites hand over their Mercedes keys and sit in the pews between ex-cons and drag queens."
I will encounter countless examples of this extreme lack of snobbery, this spirited openness, wherever I go in the Bay Area. There's an earnestness, a touching lack of cynicism here that to my jaded East Coast eyes is a revelation. Though politically progressive ideas are an integral part of the city's heritage—S.F. was, after all, the cradle of three radical 20th-century social movements (the Beat Generation, hippies and the Summer of Love, and the fight for gay rights)—this resurgence of unbridled optimism seems fairly recent. San Francisco is finally recovering from what one person I talked to described as "a five-year hangover after a five-year binge." Now, at long last, the migraine is clearing.
On the theory that nothing lifts a hangover like a good bar, I go to meet the masterminds behind Otis, a combination restaurant-hangoutprivate club near Union Square, at the site of the former Iron Horse, which used to be an old boysmartini sort of place. Damon White, one of the partners, grew up in Harlem and worked in Los Angeles as an actor and a promoter before arriving in San Francisco. He says he noticed there was something lacking in the local nightlife: sex appeal. So White and his partner, Joseph Latimore, burrowed into their Rolodexes and decided they could make a significant mark by creating a club in the most traditional sense: one with a members-only policy. It would be a sort of Soho House for the Golden Gatesociety set, a West Coast outpost of the kind of spot more readily associated with New York or London or Berlin.
In fact, Nicolo Bini, Otis's architect, cuts quite a figure in local society (I see his photo in the social pages of the paper three times while I'm in town). Bini tells me he looked at the city itself for inspiration: Otis's eclectic décor reflects San Francisco's nutty amalgam of flamboyant and folksy—a mural is painted with gold leaf, the light fixtures are modeled after costumes worn by Moroccan belly dancers, and porcelain antlers decorate the walls. "There's so much here, such cultural diversity," Bini says, beaming. When I point out that Otis's door policy seems antithetical to the ethos of the town, he looks genuinely hurt. "No, no! We're going to find a way to have different age groups, different income levels. We want diversity! We want it to be like a juke joint." I have my doubts—it hasn't been my experience that freewheeling, inclusive nightspots have a VIP list—but then again, there's something sweet about this longing for sophistication and polish in a city that tends to eschew the merest whiff of affectation.
Though Otis is Union Square's single haute boîte, there have long been plenty of high-end shops in the area, including Gump's, the old-line San Francisco department store that sits just across the street from Otis. As long as I'm in the neighborhood, I visit a few favorites: Lang Antiques, for its ravishing heirloom jewels; Babette, whose Issey Miyakeish clothes are perfect for travel; Wilkes Bashford, where I covet the alligator loafers; and Three Bags Full, a sweater store specializing in hand knits, many from England, that sell 12 months a year in this crisp climate. I pause for a moment to mourn the passing of City of Paris, a department store with a fabulous glass dome on Union Square. Neiman Marcus gutted the space (save for the dome, which is still extant) after preservationists waged, and ultimately lost, a fierce battle.
Early the next morning, I take a taxi to the almost finished De Young Museum. The driver, who is brimming with enthusiasm as he takes me out to the site, is hardly the only one excited about the museum's new building—Nicolo Bini fairly crowed when I brought up the De Young. "It's turning San Francisco around! There have been a lot of naysayers, but it'll knock your socks off!" I'm ready to lose my socks as the cab meanders through Golden Gate Park and pulls up to the reborn museum, which, despite its avant-garde exterior—including a striking overhang, ribbon of windows, and spectacular observation floor—looks right at home in the park.
The old De Young was irreparably damaged in the 1989 earthquake. When it came time to rebuild, municipal funding problems emerged, so Dede Wilsey, a reigning society queen (and the subject of a scathing new memoir by her stepson, Sean Wilsey, that casts her as an evil stepmother), raised the money single-handedly. The famed Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron was hired to design it, and though the result is uncompromisingly modern, the De Young is nothing like, say, New York's Whitney Museum, a building that always seems to have a chip on its massive shoulder.
The angular, copper-clad structure, which manages to be both dramatic and inviting, will patinate to a rich green as the copper oxidizes, a process that in the sea air may be more rapid than the planners at first imagined. The patterns embossed on the copper have a pretty amazing backstory: the architects photographed dappled sunlight on the building through the tree canopy, translated the images into stencils, then transferred them onto the façade. There's not a single duplicated pattern in the 960,000 pounds of sheathing, and, in a nod to the environmental consciousness of the city, all the metal is recyclable. Inside, the galleries offer an unusual sense of transparency—showcases are constructed so that you can walk around an object and view it from all angles.
My second stop is photographer Catherine Wagner's warehouse studio, in the Mission District. The renowned San Francisco artist's show "Re-Classifying History" will be the inaugural exhibition at the De Young's Connections Gallery. As I enter Wagner's sun-flooded workspace, she's poring over photos of an installation she did for the Comme des Garçons store in Kyoto. Wagner and I bond over a shared love of Rei Kawakubo; the artist says she sometimes finds things on sale at Susan, the one place in town that stocks a good assortment of Japanese designers. Indeed, when I visit Susan, on Sacramento Street in Presidio Heights, a few days later, I'll spend a lot of time trying on clothes by Undercover, a Tokyo label so wacky that it's exceedingly hard to track down even in Manhattan. Then I'll wander around the neighborhood, which is hushed and expensive and feels like a West Coast East Hampton. (It's the sort of place where Carrie Bradshaw might have shopped if she'd married Big and moved to Napa.)
For part of her De Young installation, Wagner is making a video in which she asks foreign-born Americans to give their impressions of Christopher Columbus. One of her interviewees is Charles Phan, who opened the incredibly popular Vietnamese restaurant Slanted Door in the Mission in 1995. (He has since moved to digsin the Ferry Building with sweeping bayfront views.) Phan also happens to be among Wagner's best friends: he threw a birthday party for her at the restaurant when she turned 50 last year.
"This is such a small town," Wagner admits. "My art-world friends are always asking me, 'When are you going to leave that sleepy little fishing village?'" But she's fiercely loyal. "We're still recovering from the trauma. Before the dot-commers lost all their money, you couldn't get into your favorite restaurant. Or, you'd be sitting at a table next to a 21-year-old who didn't even like wine, and he'd ask the waiter, 'What's the most expensive bottle on your list?We'll have that.' Well, now all those people are back living with their parents."
Wagner says she can feel the town returning to life—Valencia Street's mélange of traditional Latino businesses cheek by jowl with boutiques; the new Muni light-rail line down Third Street; the massive project to redevelop the Mission Bay waterfront; and, perhaps dearest to her artist's heart, the fact that San Francisco will soon boast not one but two world-class museums—the fantastical De Young and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
When I tell Wagner that I'm off to interview hot chef Dennis Leary at his minuscule new restaurant, Canteen, in the Tendernob neighborhood (set between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill), she says, "Tendernob?That's new! Never heard of it." I'm taken aback for a moment, but realize that neighborhoods are springing up so quickly that even the most clued-in residents may have missed a newly minted moniker.
Dennis Leary, who looks like Steve McQueen during his Cincinnati Kid period, opened his 20-seat luncheonette in the former coffee shop of the Commodore, a fleabag recently brought back to life as a budget boutique hotel. When I enter, he's sitting on one of his counter stools, dressed in checked pants and white chef's jacket. Leary was the prize-winning chef at the famed Rubicon in the Financial District (co-owned by Robert De Niro) for six years, so he's the perfect person to ask about San Francisco's reverence for good food. We chat about the city's tradition of culinary appreciation. There's the fact that it was settled by Spanish, Italians, and Chinese (all from food-centric cultures); there's also the city's proximity to some of the best agricultural regions in the world. Then there's the theory that San Francisco has always been a boom-and-bust town, with the gold rush, then silver, then railroads, and, most recently, the dot-coms. ("Restaurants are an expression of good times," Leary explains.) And finally, there are the mavericks like Leary, chefs whose influence branches out across this small-town city.
Canteen, which receives a rave review in the Chronicle two days after we talk, reaffirms Leary's decision to leave behind big corporate jobs. "I wanted a stripped-down experience—no pretensions, good service, serious food," he says. "It's been fun not working for anybody."
Leary says his vision as a restaurateur is particularly suited to his city. "I want to do this with a sense of humor. San Francisco can't carry off something really fancy like New York. I get socialites, a lot of foodies, old bachelor guys who've lived alone for years, a lot of gay couples. It's a real mix."
Even as the city welcomes new ultramodern elements, some people cling to its vintage hallmarks. Surprisingly for such a forward-thinking chef, Leary turns out to be one of these old-fashioned souls. Just as he embraces retro décor and dishes like pot pie at Canteen, Leary loves the sentimental side of San Francisco: the camera obscura at the Cliff House, high on a bluff over the Pacific; the WPA murals in Coit Tower; and the old seal on the floor of the Ferry Building. He sighs. "There's a kind of quirkiness here that refuses to die. You see naked people running down the street all the time here! It's a freak show and I love it." (I think this is pure hyperbole, but the very next day I see three older guys, stark naked, riding bikes on the Embarcadero with FREE SPEECH scrawled across their backs. Certain things about this city will never change.)
After two nights in the dimly lit recesses of the Ian Schragerowned, Philippe Starck-designed Clift hotel, where I spend my off-hours curled up on a mammoth ivory divan under a faux-mink throw, I move to the Hotel Vitale, a brand-new property on the Embarcadero. If the Clift is about smoldering glamour, the Vitale is about health and sunshine and relaxation: there are complimentary yoga classes and soaking tubs on the roof, the concierge can arrange a Rolfing session upon request, and a video of migrating birds plays in the elevator. Hotel Vitale also has startling 180-degree views that take in the Bay Bridge and the Ferry Building, a landmark so beloved that the legendary Chronicle columnist Herb Caen once observed, "The waterfront without the Ferry Tower would be like a birthday cake without a candle."
The Ferry opened in 1898, and for decades visitors passed through its portals when they arrived in the city by boat. But with the coming of the automobile, the building fell into obscurity; by the 1950's it was being used for humdrum office space. The Embarcadero Freeway was practically the last straw. It went up in 1958 and shut out the tower's light and air for over 30 years. Then something oddly miraculous happened: the 1989 earthquake caused so much damage to the freeway that the city decided to tear it down. Fourteen years later, a splendidly renovated Ferry Building reopened, showcasing—what else?—gourmet food.
Chip Conley, the 44-year-old CEO of Joie de Vivre, the company behind the Vitale and several other boutique hotels in town, agrees to spend a morning showing me around the Ferry Building, where Saturday shopping has become an institution. Conley is anxious to take me to Boulette's Larder, one of his favorite Ferry Building stops, where we ogle the local foodies, who are in turn ogling a vitrine full of quails stuffed with farro and currants. "Alice Waters shops here," Conley whispers reverently. We drop in at Mijita to try the Mexican hot chocolate favored by the Ospitals, then head over to the historic Filbert Street steps on Telegraph Hill, where Conley used to live.
Filbert Street, an almost vertical neighborhood of mid-19th-century cottages, is reachable by a series of incredibly steep flights of stairs. I huff and puff, almost too winded to enjoy the gardens lining the way and the—literally—breathtaking views spread out in front of us. Conley reminds me that this is where Armistead Maupin set Tales of the City, his campy, sex-filled novel of San Francisco in the seventies. "One of the characters was based on Pat Montandon," he says, which is funny: Montandon is Sean Wilsey's birth mother. Small town, indeed.
Conley drops me on Market Street, where I order a delicate silver bracelet from Jeanine Payer, a jeweler with a distinctive style: she engraves sweet sayings in tiny script on her pieces. You'd think her store would be on a picturesque little lane, but she sits just a stone's throw from Old Navy. It's another example of how San Francisco defies expectations—in most cities, exquisite jewelry boutiques are not located next to discount emporiums.
Then I grab a cab to Valencia Street, past used-book shops and feminist bathhouses, and visit 826 Valencia, also known as the Pirate Store, David Eggers's tongue-in-cheek shop and literacy project. Here you can buy glass eyes and striped sailor shirts while contemplating a huge vat that turns out to be an actual tub of lard. But it's not just a funky junk store. In true San Francisco fashion, it has been committed to higher purposes, including writing seminars and other cultural activities (such as hand-shadow demonstrations).
Across the street, and in a radically different frame of mind, Den offers Midcentury Modern furniture. In fact, the whole neighborhood is dotted with various insouciant boutiques. These places have a homegrown, offhand quality, in marked contrast to the neighborhood's restaurants. Here, as everywhere else in the city, the bistros are invariably more lushly appointed than the boutiques.
Before I leave town, I want to make sure I take a closer look at Hayes Valley, which is either incredibly cool or completely overrun with precious shops, depending on who you talk to. Like the Ferry Building area, Hayes Valley was a neighborhood able to make lemonade from the '89 earthquake: when U.S. Highway 101 was damaged and subsequently pulled down, new life bloomed in the raffish quarter, which had previously been cut off from the fancier Civic Center neighborhood. Now there are stores like Alabaster selling Fortuny velvet fabrics, mother-of-pearl frames, and exquisite French Deco breakfronts; and Zonal, where picture frames are made from Iowa barn doors.
I stop by MAC to say good-bye to the Ospitals; it's Saturday afternoon and the space is like a town square, with neighbors stopping in, babies and dogs in tow, to shoot the breeze. I admire a tiny shirt by a local designer who uses preCivil War prints for his 21st-century styles, and then fall into conversation with a young dad who tells me I better not dare leave San Francisco without having coffee at Blue Bottle Coffee Co., an artisanal micro-roaster in Hayes Valley with a cult following. As I dive into the windy sunshine I hear him call out behind me, "Be sure to get the ginger scone!"
WHERE TO STAY
The Clift
DOUBLES FROM $225
495 GEARY ST.; 800/606-6090 OR 415/775-4700
www.morganshotelgroup.com
Hotel Vitale
DOUBLES FROM $269
8 MISSION ST.; 888/890-8688 OR 415/278-3700
www.hotelvitale.com
Hotel des Arts
Small property bordering Union Square and Chinatown; each room has been
painted by an artist.
DOUBLES FROM $89
447 BUSH ST.; 800/956-4322 OR 415/956-3232
www.sfhoteldesarts.com
WHAT TO DO
De Young Museum
50 TEA GARDEN DR., GOLDEN GATE PARK; 415/750-3500
Foreign Cinema
2534 MISSION ST.; 415/648-7600
www.foreigncinema.com
Glide Memorial United Methodist Church
330 ELLIS ST.; 415/674-6000
www.glide.org
SFMOMA
151 THIRD ST.; 415/357-4000
www.sfmoma.org
Conservatory of Flowers
JFK DR., GOLDEN GATE PARK
415/666-7001
WHERE TO SHOP
MAC
387 GROVE ST.; 415/863-3011
AMOEBA MUSIC
1855 HAIGHT ST.; 415/831-1200
GUMP'S
135 POST ST.; 415/982-1616
LANG ANTIQUES
323 Sutter St.; 415/982-2213
BABETTE
361 SUTTER St.; 415/837-1442
WILKES BASHFORD
375 SUTTER ST.; 415/986-4380
THREE BAGS FULL
500 Sutter St.; 415/398-7897
SUSAN
3685 SACRAMENTO ST.; 415/922-3685
JEANINE PAYER
762 MARKET ST.; 415/788-2417
826 VALENCIA (PIRATE STORE)
826 VALENCIA ST.; 415/642-5905
DEN
849 VALENCIA ST.; 415/282-6646
ALABASTER
597 HAYES ST.; 415/558-0482
ZONAL
568 HAYES ST.; 415/255-9307
DE VERA
29 MAIDEN LANE; 415/788-0828
WHERE TO DRINK
Otis
25 MAIDEN LANE; www.otissf.com
Mijita
1 Ferry Building; 415/399-0814
With its remade Ferry Building—a mecca for food mavens—and a fresh slate of first-rate restaurants, San Francisco has sealed its reputation as a culinary capital. Many of the best spots are a short walk or cab ride from downtown.
A16
Pizzaiolos pull perfect pies from a wood-fired oven, and patrons gather
at the bar, sipping wines from southern Italy and sampling simple but sophisticated
Neapolitan dishes such as petrale sole with capers and lemon leaves.
DINNER FOR TWO $80
2355 CHESTNUT ST.; 415/771-2216
Bocadillos
The small-plates trend was growing tiresome when this Basque tapas restaurant
brought it back to life. Grilled meats and marinated seafood in Mini Me portions
and rotund sandwiches known as bocadillos make for relaxed, elbows-on-the-table
eating that complements the casual atmosphere.
Dinner for two $50
710 Montgomery St.; 415/982-2622
Boulette's Larder
Like a quaint culinary lab, this small open kitchen in the Ferry Building produces
sauces, crèmes, and stocks for discriminating home cooks. At night a
large farm table (available for group reservations only) becomes a stage for
some of the city's most magical meals.
DINNER FOR TWO $240, BASED ON 10-PERSON TABLE
1 Ferry Building; 415/399-1155
Canteen
Imagine if the Fonz had gone to cooking school in France. What was once a worn-out coffee
shop has been transformed into an haute diner by wunderkind chef Dennis Leary, with apple-green
counters and canoodle-friendly booths for two. Entrées like veal pot pie are served
with flair but without fuss. Dinner for two $50
817 Sutter St.; 415/928-8870
Michael Mina
Meals come in trios—foie gras, scallops, tomatoes—and Modernist presentations
at this smart (and beautiful) restaurant, which overlooks the renovated lobby of the city's
landmark Westin St. Francis hotel. Ideal for special occasions and expense accounts. Dinner
for two $176
335 Powell St.; 415/397-9222
Myth
A restaurant worldly enough to serve citrus-glazed salmon in lobster sauce and relaxed enough
to deal in burgers too. The cushy, carpeted setting, perhaps the most comfortable in the city,
walks a similar line: it invites blue jeans and black ties alike. DINNER FOR TWO $80
470 Pacific Ave.; 415/677-8986
Quince
The redial button is required to land a reservation, but Chez Panisse alum Mike Tusk makes
it worth the extra work. House-made pastas like pork-and-veal-stuffed agnolotti are as close
as cooking comes to art.
DINNER FOR TWO $120
1701 Octavia St. 415/775-8500
Slanted Door
Charles Phan's fans have followed his rise from his original place in the dog-eared Mission
District to his new home in the gleaming Ferry Building. The food remains the same sharp vietnamese
cuisine, light on the grease, heavy on the organic ingredients.
DINNER FOR TWO $90
1 Ferry Building; 415/861-8032
Tartare
George Morrone, a chef never afraid of extravagance, goes for a big change in mood and
a slight change in food. The space is intimate, with soft leather touches and latticed woodwork,
and the menu, true to the restaurant's name, offers creative versions of the rare and the
raw (think ostrich tartare with pink peppercorns).
DINNER FOR TWO $90
550 Washington St.; 415/434-3100
—JOSH SENS
