The first thing you notice when you walk into Izzy’s is the mural that wraps the dining room in a scene reminiscent of Bemelmans Bar in New York, but with a San Franciscan twist: longshoremen, newspapermen, artists, and perhaps a few off-the-record characters, including writer William Saroyan and restaurateur Sam DuVall, who opened Izzy’s 40 years ago. His daughter, Samantha Bechtel, grew up in the neighborhood and spent years alongside her father at the restaurant absorbing its rhythms, regulars, and spirit. When she took over after his passing in 2020, she stepped into the role with equal parts reverence and vision, determined to carry on the legacy while breathing new life into it. It’s a theme I would run into again and again on my culinary journey through the city.
Although Bechtel has kept beloved classic dishes, such as a perfect gratin and creamed spinach, to accompany their famous steaks, she and Executive Chef Daniel Lucero have refreshed the menu with seasonal dishes that reflect the city’s ever-changing food scene. Sommelier Dan Cameron has expanded the wine program to provide guests with access to hard-to-find bottles, making the experience feel special. The point, Bechtel explained to me, is to maintain a place where locals can hang out and order their favorite dish off the menu—as many customers have for decades—while enjoying an exceptional bottle of wine.
“My father opened Izzy’s in 1987, and it’s long been a place where locals and visitors come to feel the soul of the city, “ Bechtel says. “They feel this through our classic dishes—many that have been on the menu since we opened—warm and inviting hospitality, plus a little grit around the edges.”
Throughout the trip, one question was on repeat in my mind: Is San Francisco our best food city? Between the food movements that have started in the Bay Area, the fresh produce that’s available year-round, and the fact that San Francisco has always been a place where the creative and innovative thrive, there are so many reasons to make this claim. If you’re measuring by Michelin stars, New York outpaces every other city in the U.S., but for many travelers, San Francisco is a destination defined by its food.
Few restaurants embody that better than Quince. Founded in 2003 by Chef Michael Tusk and his wife, Lindsay, Quince began in a Victorian townhouse in Pacific Heights before relocating to a 1907 brick-and-timber building in Jackson Square in 2009. It earned its first Michelin star in 2007 and now holds three—a testament to its enduring excellence.
Chef Tusk’s vision is rooted in the Bay Area’s seasonal bounty, thanks in large part to a partnership with Fresh Run Farm in Bolinas. The farm provides produce grown exclusively for Quince, creating a closed-loop system that brings just-harvested vegetables, fruit, and herbs into the kitchen daily.
“Quince is a uniquely and distinctly San Francisco restaurant,” Tusk says. “I moved to the Bay Area because of the quality of the produce in the farms that surround The City. Over the last 25 years, I’ve worked with suppliers to cultivate products exclusively for Quince. We bring freshly harvested ingredients to the kitchen daily–serving oysters on the same day that Luc Chamberland pulls them from the water in Inverness and carrots hours after Peter Martinelli dusts the soil off them in Bolinas at Fresh Run Farm.”
When I dined at Quince, we were served an off-menu meal paired with wines I still can’t believe I tasted. Farfalle with morel mushrooms alongside a 1964 Fratelli Serio & Battista Borgogno Barolo; hearth-grilled duck with a 1995 Mount Eden Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Sommelier Paul Noii shares the backstory of every bottle with warmth and precision, turning the experience into a conversation. You could choose a bottle from their unparalleled wine list, but somehow everything is elevated when you are surprised with a Charles Dufor Mistelle—a still, fortified wine from Champagne—alongside your cheese plate. It’s the kind of detour that turns a meal into an adventure, introducing you to bottles you might never have chosen on your own.
Chef Tusk explains that Quince continues to evolve. “Over more than 20 years, Quince has changed with the City,” Tusk says. “Now, we’re stripping back some of the trappings to make the restaurant more comfortable and accessible while maintaining our service and kitchen standards.”
After a nearly year-long renovation, completed in early 2024, the refreshed interior is airy and inviting, with couch seating that would invite a nap after your meal, as if you were at a friend’s house. Staff are welcoming and friendly, providing service that is so seamless it’s almost invisible. With its oak-lined walls, bookshelves, vintage furniture, and mismatched ceramics, the bar room is a sumptuous and comfortable place to enjoy a lighter food menu accompanied by a cocktail or a glass of wine. Their refreshed service also includes lunch, which is described as a “midday pause” to help wind down the week. And really, who couldn’t use a reset like that now and then?
Each morning, I woke up early and took myself on a walk. Down the hill from the Fairmont on Nob Hill, where I was staying, is a curious little coffee shop called Coffee Movement. There’s a quiet rhythm to the place—you’re shown where to stand to place your order and where to wait. The menu features a tasting flight—three pours of the day’s featured coffees, or one coffee prepared three different ways—alongside creative drinks like espresso tonic and orange cream coffee. You could stick with a latte, and it would be excellent, but why not go with the vibe?
Staying at the Fairmont also came with a reminder that some San Francisco traditions never fade. The Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar is still going strong—a time capsule of tiki kitsch where a floating band plays in the middle of an indoor lagoon under a ceiling that rains every half hour. The cocktails are potently delicious—the bartenders understand the assignment, and I’m not sure you can find a better Mai-Tai anywhere else. On rare occasions, a guest will get caught up in the moment and leap into the pool mid-Tiki. There’s a $500 fine for this, which I suspect is less of a deterrent and more of a cover charge for a story they’ll tell for the rest of their lives.
Bites, Bustle, and Bay Views
In between gorgeous meals at Michelin-starred restaurants and early morning coffee excursions, there is the Ferry Building. I was last here in 2021, when the pandemic had left it eerily quiet and many favorites had gone dark. This time around, I was buoyed by the crowds bustling through the hallways as well as in the downtown area—people are back in offices, and the vendors have returned. The beloved Nopa has opened Nopa Fish Market & Kitchen, a casual spot for shrimp arancini or a smoked albacore melt. Peaches Patties, founded by Chef Shani Jones—whose mother is from Kingston, Jamaica, and father is from New Orleans—makes delicious Jamaican patties with a Southern twist.
Hog Island Oyster Co. is thankfully still around. The farmers market (open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays) is where you’ll meet many of the area purveyors: people like Olivia Mecalco, the founder of Mi Comedor, who will serve you the most flavorful breakfast taco you’ve ever tasted, and Sonia Rojas, who, with her husband Ramon, started Rojas Family Farms. They leave the farm at 4 AM to drive down to the market every week so customers can enjoy their delicious fruit, which, by the way, pairs perfectly with a breakfast taco from Mi Comedor.
The idea of a Michelin-starred restaurant is often accompanied by visions of white tablecloths, tuxedoed servers, and silver-plated service—formal and dated. But 7 Adams rewrites that script. While the food and service meet every measure of Michelin quality, the atmosphere is modern cool—paneled wood accents, amber lighting, an indie playlist—worlds away from the stiffness often associated with fine dining.
Owned by the husband-and-wife team of David Fisher and Serena Chow Fisher, the tasting menu feels like a collaboration between the kitchen and the customer. The first two courses are set by the restaurant—a salad with charred green asparagus and a hiramasa crudo, for example—then, guests choose their path from a seasonally driven à la carte menu. David’s pasta sensibility comes through in dishes like celery root ravioli or braised lamb tagliatelle, plated with precision and loaded with personality. Serena’s desserts are both elegant and unexpected—and her ice cream is not to be missed.
Sometimes, however, white tablecloths are just the right choice. In the heart of downtown, you’ll find Tadich Grill, California’s oldest operating restaurant, still packed 175 years after its founding. Established in 1849 by Croatian immigrants as a coffee stand on Clay Street, Tadich Grill has survived earthquakes, Prohibition, and countless reinventions. Beloved for its plainspoken luxury—efficient white-jacketed service, dark wood-paneled interior, and a restaurant-length bar, it’s a place where you feel you’ve tapped into the city. At the bar, the action is fast—it buzzes with activity and congeniality. Dining tables are set alongside or in wood-paneled cubby spaces, and the menu hasn’t changed much. Look at a menu from 1922 and you will still find the same classics served in 2025—crab salad, shrimp cocktail, and the Hangtown Fry, a Gold Rush-era dish of fried oysters, bacon, and scrambled eggs. Tadich is a lens into how early cuisines helped shape the city.
San Francisco unfolds in flavors—each neighborhood defined as much by its dishes as by its streets. In North Beach, espresso bars spill onto the sidewalks and cioppino tastes like it’s been simmering for generations. Chinatown, the oldest in the U.S., remains a maze of dim sum palaces, noodle shops, and bakeries that have shaped the city’s palate for over 150 years. Japantown, one of only three left in the country, offers everything from steaming bowls of ramen to elegant kaiseki. And in Jackson Square, Gold Rush‑era brick buildings now house some of the city’s most refined dining rooms, including Quince and its sister restaurant, Cotogna.
And then there’s the Presidio—once a military post, now amid a renaissance. In just a few years, it’s become one of the most exciting dining destinations in the city. That’s where you’ll find Dalida, where chefs Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz are reimagining Eastern Mediterranean food through a California lens. Located in a historic brick building on the Presidio’s Main Parade Lawn, the menu blends the flavors of Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Persian kitchens with the vibrant bounty of Northern California. Fluffy hearth‑baked pita arrives with labneh, muhammara, and hummus; scallops are paired with rhubarb; Turkish noodle pasta comes tossed with forest mushrooms, grilled peppers, and sweet corn. When I visited, the showstopper was a Santa Barbara urchin over crispy saffron rice with trout roe, yellowtail, and preserved yuzu—equal parts delicate and bold, surprisingly delightful.
The whole place carries the energy of people who care deeply about their food and clearly love the city they’re in. As Chef Sayat put it, “We’ve stayed grounded by doing what we do best: creating a space where people feel seen, cared for, and nourished, not just by food, but by human connection. San Francisco’s dining scene has always been a mirror of the city itself—creative, resilient, and constantly evolving—and Dalida was born from that same spirit.”
Chef Sayat himself brought out a Grilled Mediterranean Turbot and filleted it tableside for us, which we paired with a 2022 Matthiasson Linda Vista Vineyard Chardonnay. The wine list spans the globe, with special attention to bottles from Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, and Greece—regions that mirror the menu’s cultural influence. For dessert, another memorable dish: butter-roasted kataifi with San Geronimo washed-rind cheese, accompanied by a refreshing sorbet.
Chef Sayat echoed Samantha Bechtel when he noted that San Francisco has always been a place of fortitude, tenacity, and deep devotion to craft. Sayat says, “Visitors to San Francisco will discover that our food scene, like the city itself, tells layered stories—of cultures in conversation, of resilience and reinvention, of joy and grit.”
San Francisco never lost its edge—it simply shifted focus. What’s happening in the city’s kitchens today is not a comeback, but a recalibration: a fresh focus for a new era. “For visitors, dining in San Francisco is, of course, about the food—but it’s also about connecting with the character of the city,” says Samantha Bechtel. For those seeking both, now is the moment.
