Welcome to SLAMMED’s culinary tour of the City by the Bay. Jo Lynne Lockley will be your guide to the kitchens and bars that chefs love. Please keep your hands and feet inside the tour bus at all times.

San Francisco is not blessed with the raw materials of New York’s restaurant culture.  New York is fueled by an influx of highly-trained chefs from Europe; most of the nation’s top culinary schools as a talent resource; a strong corporate dining culture (and bankroll); and the nation’s most influential food writers as an audience. This city has to be a scrappy little town to keep nose-to-nose with Manhattan. While New York has extreme resources, the City by the Bay pulls even, and occasionally ahead, with nearly year-round farm-fresh produce—and the country’s richest wine region—at its back door. San Francisco has a few other resources: culinary pluck, a dining public game to try just about anything, and an anything-goes approach to food.

If San Franciscan chefs don’t exactly thumb their noses at long-standing culinary culture and tradition, they thrive on pushing its limits. Talents migrate to San Francisco as a culinary terra nova, following the course of its restaurant pioneers. The surviving avant garde of 70’s “California Cuisine” are today’s honored grey eminence: Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse and Café Fanny are now breeding grounds for the next generation of native-grown kitchen stars like Mark Franz, whose Farallon took off from, and eventually eclipsed, Jeremiah Tower’s now-defunct Stars.

Only a magnificent few of the City’s established restaurants have managed to maintain or improve their quality and standing. Masa’s, now under Chef Ron Siegel and new ownership, still stands as an icon of the City’s best and most expensive. Hubert Keller’s exquisite French but not classic Fleur de Lys and Bradley Ogden’s equally notable but all-American Lark Creek Inn does as well. Brilliant upstarts like Gary Danko and Napa Valley’s explosive Thomas Keller (no relation) soared to national recognition as the best restaurants in the country, some say the world. These chefs are among the ultimate “whos” in an intricate hierarchy and camaraderie of culinary leadership, clear to participants, but all but inscrutable to the outside world and occasionally the press.  

Welcome to the Mediterranean
The City is in truth a small, mis-located Mediterranean country with a plethora of Italian and Mediterranean restaurants. While Rose Pistola may be the most visible restaurant in San Francisco’s traditional Italian quarter, North Beach, back-alley gems like Ideale are manned by some of the city’s finest. Chefs and cork dorks steer toward Craig Stoll’s fabled Delfina, the quirky Incanto with young Turk Chris Cosentino, Vincenzo Cuocco’s Noe Valley Bacco, Suzette Gresham’s incomparable Acquerello, Mike Tusk’s Quince, and Palio d’Asti (Chef Dan Scherroter.) Tucked away in the financial district, these draw the cognoscenti away from the tourist areas.

And French. In addition to Hubert Keller, Dubray and Portay, grand culinarians put Gallic flavors on San Francisco’s tables, e.g. La Folie’s Roland Passot and culinary visionary Gerald Hirigoyen of Fringale and his recently opened Piperade. Laurent Manrique’s Aqua is one the City’s few truly fine seafood restaurants—and the most discussed due to California’s ongoing foie gras flap. Philippe Jeanty and Francophile Joseph Graham rekindled the local love of the French Bistro with Jeanty at Jack’s and Graham’s quirky Florio. Chefs stop for a glass after shopping for rarities Saturdays and Thursdays at the Frencher-than-the-French Market Bar at the new Ferry Plaza. Loretta Keller’s French-country Bizou has survived the dotcom bust which wiped out most of her imitators and puts butts in seats South of Market, opening the area to a restaurant boom.

Fast Lane Closed Ahead
Like the entire town, San Francisco’s chefs are more heads-down and subdued these days, taking care of business rather than flaunting their stuff à la Rocco and the New York media whirlers. Ascending stars like the One Market Team of Adrian Hoffman and Richie Brandenburg, Bix’s Bruce Hill, PlumpJack’s James Ormsby, Home’s Lance Dean Velasquez, Scala Bistro’s Staffan Terje and Moose’s Jeffrey Amber—respected figures in a tight knit community of restaurant professionals—have arrived and quit shouting about it. They quietly, skillfully, and dare one say, modestly continue to produce excellence for houses overflowing with adoring diners who are driven less by the press and more by quality. San Francisco chefs don’t have media coaches.

Our chefs have grown up. The HIGH life of the nineties—the cocaine, the all-night excesses, and hungover kitchens—appear to be history. Joseph Manzare’s late night industry customers at Globe are likely to be there for the food, rather than the scene. Known chefs, “arrived” and married, are not always subdued: celebrity chefs were recently sighted dancing on Globe’s tables. The less well-known Shalimar, Yuet Lee or Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack pull in the after-hours kitchen rats. The established top chefs often prefer to travel in small groups to test new hot spots like Town Hall, recently opened by sibling chefs Mitchell and Steven Rosenthal formerly of Postrio. Other current chef-watching spots are A16, Pascal Rigo’s Cortez with co-chefs Quinn and Karen Hatfield, Andalu, the Banbuddha Lounge at the Tenderloin’s Phoenix Hotel, and Charles Phan’s relocated Slanted Door. As a rule, if you can’t get in, chefs can and will.

Like any other town, San Francisco has its share of Society restaurants. Unlike any other town, few deserve mention. Notable exceptions include Restaurant Gary Danko, Bix, PlumpJack (the ultimate see-and-be-seen restaurants in town), and Khai Duong’s under-recognized Vietnamese enchantment at Don Johnson’s Ana Mandara. “Gourmet” corporate entities like Chaya Brasserie and Roy’s garner scant attention from local diners, and none from the local chef community, who prefer much of their dining action in the neighborhoods. Chefs and the inner culinary circles stick to the fringes, where some of the best food is produced by previous line buddies or employees. The Universal Café in the Mission, Pizzetta 211 in the Richmond, Chenery Park in Glen Park or, phenomenal Isa in the Marina draw the serious pros.

So what does make a chef in San Francisco? Who sets the bar? What’s the rating system? Here’s a tip. Don’t check Zagat; don’t search on the Internet; don’t buy The Top 100. Ask a chef.