7 ms·

San Francisco Is Losing Its Great, Inexpensive Restaurants

38 points by lnguyen 9y ago

dnautics 9y ago
I have thought this since I moved here. If you want great and inexpensive, San Diego is the city to go to.
- bsder 9y ago
  LOLWHUT? San Diego is horrible for this. San Diego has a massive number of overpriced, aggressively mediocre restaurants. Yes, you can dig your way through the Chinese and Mexican restaurants to find good, cheap ones, but it requires real persistence. For people coming from Pittsburgh, Chicago, or Houston, the San Diego selection in cheap food is laughable. Houston Chinese food used to be terrifyingly cheap--we would hit our favorite dumpling house with something like a dozen people and the bill would be less than $40 for an absolutely enormous quantity of great food. Once we all graduated and were earning money from jobs, we would go back and we would leave tips of double, triple or more of the bill just because we never wanted them to go out of business.
  - cvsh 9y ago
    >Yes, you can dig your way through the Chinese and Mexican restaurants to find good, cheap ones, but it requires real persistence. Or, you know, just talking to a local who has already done the legwork
solatic 9y ago
Who in their right mind moves out to SV anymore for less than a quarter million in compensation? If you have a family, your costs are astronomical. Mortgage, daycare, multiple cars, school-related fees. If you're single, you're dealing both with the gender-imbalanced dating market (the imbalance hurting both men and women), as well as the difficulty of saving for a SV mortgage. If you plan ahead of time, coming into SV, that you're going to leave SV eventually because of the high cost of living, then that future move is going to come at the cost of most of the professional and personal networking that you built up and will have to say goodbye to, and build all over again after you move. Sure, SV is the mecca for professional networking and VC funding, but a) you don't need to be in SV to be successful (counter-examples abound) and b) is it really worth it? The death of cheap eats in the Bay Area is just a symptom. You're either making enough money not to care, or you're wondering anyway whether it's worth it to live there.
- tome 9y ago
  > the gender-imbalanced dating market (the imbalance hurting both men and women) I'm curious about how an excess of men can hurt women in the dating market.
  - thundergolfer 9y ago
    Me too. Maybe the imbalance makes all the guys batty?
    - JSONwebtoken 9y ago
      If anything, it makes the women batty by inflating their ego. Where else in the world can you be totally average yet have your pick of six-figure earners? Anecdotally, SV women are the most materialistic, the least attractive (relative to their self perception), and have the most myopic personalities I've been around.
      - rosser 9y ago
        > Anecdotally... This sounds to me like nothing so much as confirmation bias. I've lived in SF for six years now, and gone on dozens of first (and far fewer, but still nonzero, subsequent) dates. While I do see some slight evidence for this notion, it's the exception, not the rule, in my experience. That is to say, "the plural of anecdote is not data."
        saiya-jin 9y ago
        I can attest from different high-earning places like Singapore and Geneva that this is generally unfortunately true. All written is valid in my (unfortunately somewhat bigger) experience and it actually makes complete sense, based on how human personalities develop & distort due to various environmental situations and pressures. I wish it wouldn't be so, many guys around me wishing the same, but simple truth is out there, day and night. It is still possible to find non-spoiled balanced good-hearted loving partner, but it is ridiculously hard even if you do proper filtering from the beginning and you really have stuff to offer (looks, personality, salary, cool adventurous life etc). Small places are like from another planet in this regard. Btw this is valid for both sexes, at least from what I can see from a straight guy perspective. After some time I generally stopped seeing any high-earning ladies, especially those in management/trading etc. Completely, utterly useless for serious relationships. Now happily engaged to a doctor, at least the part about good personality/heart is very true, but shared time can be sometimes counted in few hours/week. Hard, crushing work they have, and underpaid compared to some pathetic software dev position like mine.
jbaudanza 9y ago
Cafe Zitouna on Sutter and Polk falls into this category. It's a family owned Tunisian/Moroccan restaurant. It's inexpensive and the food is top notch. It's been in the neighborhood forever. Go check it out and order a Breakfast Falafel Wrap, before it turns into a condo building. https://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-zitouna-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-zitouna-san-francisco
saimiam 9y ago
Mildly offtopic: Why does everything perfectly ordinary and expected in any other city have to become "Great" in an American city? Across the world, restaurants, from the very basic to the very high end, arise around every agglomeration of people but here Bloomberg headlines these SFOs restaurants "Great". What makes them "great" that a decades old Irani restaurant in Mumbai cannot hope to match? I can think of only one other place where "great" gets applied to very very ordinary things - Great Asian Cities when referring to Asian mega cities like Mumbai or Manila.
- ykler 9y ago
  The article is specifically about exceptionally good restaurants that are moderately priced. And San Francisco has historically been famous for this (at least I heard about it a lot growing up in Seattle).
  - notyourday 9y ago
    As someone who goes out a lot and who was courted to move to SF by people who go out a lot, I can tell you that in 2015 SF restaurant scene does not hold a candle to NYC. It was one of the reasons I decided not to move to SF.
- hectorlorenzo 9y ago
  In this case I would say there is a feeling of guilt that is overcompensating for the quality of the restaurants. Most of the people complaining about this phenomenon are the actual culprits. Even with liberal types, the past is way more appealing than the present.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  I interpreted it as "great" compared to the average American city.
- rweba 9y ago
  We Americans do tend to overuse superlatives. It's just part of our culture. A restaurant you enjoyed can't just be "good" or "decent", it has to "great". A nice vacation can't just be "relaxing" or "enjoyable" it will be described as "awesome". "Amazing" is another word we tend to overuse.
d--b 9y ago
> “The issue is that the tech companies have million-dollar kitchens and budgets, they’re taking all the great talent and offering benefits and 9-to-5 hours. Meanwhile, the restaurant business is a grind, and the cost of doing business is insane in the Bay Area. Independent operators are getting pushed out. I cook accessible food, and you have to charge accessible prices for that.” Wow, I wasn't expecting the restaurant business being affected by tech companies running their own canteens.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  The usual rule of thumb for a restaurant: lunch pays your rent, dinner pays for labor and profit. If you don't have any lunch business because everyone eats at work, you're done. If your dinner seatings are empty before 8PM because nobody leaves work until 6:30 and the traffic is terrible, you're done. If the rent keeps going up because the real estate market says so, you're done. What survives: takeout, with low service overhead, small footprints and fast turnaround. High-end, where the money from a few tables each night pays for everything. I think SV and SF are heading for a Shoe Event Horizon.
jpswade 9y ago
Just visited San Francisco. There's over 7000 restaurants. The 67 restaurants on the list this year hardly seems to touch the surface of what's available. Breakfast or lunch seemed to be about $30-40 for two. Evening meals were easily double if not triple that, depending where you go. If you go fancy, you'll get a fancy bill too. LA was no different.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
pjc50 9y ago
You can't have cheap food in expensive real estate. The rent for the floor area of chair and table occupied by the diner becomes prohibitive.
notyourday 9y ago
It is always amusing to read pieces like this or comments by those who either cannot understand or dislike it. Here's the simple truth: there should be no such thing as an excellent, inexpensive restaurant for more than a flash in a pan. Why? Because if a restaurant is excellent and is inexpensive, then it underpricing its offerings the same way as an excellent software developer making $50k a year should not exist in Bay Area for longer than a flash in a pan because that software developer is underpricing his offerings. Say I have a successful restaurant. For the sake of the argument it seats 40 people and does fixed price brunch and is only open between 11am and 4pm on Sunday. Brunch costs $20. It is amazing. I have a line out of the door. People wait for hours for tables. What should I do? Well, it is simple, I am going to raise a price for $30. Am I still packed? Are people still waiting? $50 it is! Holy crap, still a line? $100! I'm charging a hundred. Oh look, the line is smaller but I'm still doing the same number of covers I did before. $150! I really have no line but the number of covers now is right around what I can do. Excellent. $150 it is. What does it mean? It means that before my restaurant was excellent, inexpensive and mispriced. Now it is just excellent and priced correctly. Lets try it again: same setup. $20, i have a line and a wait list, and people outside clamoring for the brunch. Ok, I raise price to $30. Line is gone. I'm doing as many covers as before but there's no real line. I decide to hold at 30. Two months later I have half of the tables empty because people moved on. I drop prices to $20 and nothing changes. Still half of the tables are empty. What happened? I discovered I did not have an excellent and inexpensive restaurant, I just had an inexpensive restaurant and as soon as it tripped into not so inexpensive category it was over. P.S. There are tons of cheap eats in Bay Area and SF. They are just not the kind of "cheap eats" that the people who make $150k/year like to eat. P.P.S. Comment of the owner of the restaurant that tech companies are taking away the talent because they pay more, give full benefits and have 9-5 schedule is pure gold: pay. more. money. That will solve the problem. The owner do not deserve to make money for her services any more than Jack The Dishwasher deserves to make money for his.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  > What should I do? Doesn't that assume that profit maximization is the ultimate and only goal of every restaurant owner? Perhaps it is, I'm not familiar with San Francisco restaurants. But some might simply enjoy being able to offer excellent food at a comparatively low price simply because all their business, personal, and employee needs are met and rising prices could be detrimental to that balance. For example, if you enjoy seeing low-income families from your local neighbourhood eat at your place because you are affordable (not to mention healthy and delicious), then raising prices would drive them out, and you might be sad and disappointed, for whatever personal reason (i.e., your personal needs are no longer being met as neatly as before).
DonHopkins 9y ago
I miss Sam Wo's, which had excellent food, was open late at night till 3:00 AM, was quite inexpensive, and had extremely insulting and abusive staff. It was the home of Edsel Ford Fong, the world's rudest waiter, and was featured in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Kids love the Sam Wo Mystery Room. And there's absolutely no fortune cookie!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel_Ford_Fong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel_Ford_Fong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnrs6Hzp6Kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnrs6Hzp6Kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0-GnG8qGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0-GnG8qGs https://tinyurl.com/ybuwn5jn https://tinyurl.com/ybuwn5jn At least the Tamale Lady is still delivering her scrumptious blessings to late night denizens. https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-tamale-lady-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-tamale-lady-san-francisco
- thecity2 9y ago
  You didn't hear they re-opened Sam Wo in a different location? I've been once, it doesn't have the same charm as the old place, but it's alright. Still cheap! http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Resurrected-improved-Sam-Wo-serves-Chinatown-6730163.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Res...
- shalmanese 9y ago
  Sam Wo's had profoundly mediocre food but it was open til 3am and the rude waiters were fun.
thecity2 9y ago
You can get cheap dim sum on Clement. Half the reason I moved to the Inner Richmond. lol

38 points by lnguyen 9y ago

dnautics 9y ago

I have thought this since I moved here. If you want great and inexpensive, San Diego is the city to go to.

bsder 9y ago
LOLWHUT? San Diego is horrible for this. San Diego has a massive number of overpriced, aggressively mediocre restaurants. Yes, you can dig your way through the Chinese and Mexican restaurants to find good, cheap ones, but it requires real persistence. For people coming from Pittsburgh, Chicago, or Houston, the San Diego selection in cheap food is laughable. Houston Chinese food used to be terrifyingly cheap--we would hit our favorite dumpling house with something like a dozen people and the bill would be less than $40 for an absolutely enormous quantity of great food. Once we all graduated and were earning money from jobs, we would go back and we would leave tips of double, triple or more of the bill just because we never wanted them to go out of business.
- cvsh 9y ago
  >Yes, you can dig your way through the Chinese and Mexican restaurants to find good, cheap ones, but it requires real persistence. Or, you know, just talking to a local who has already done the legwork

solatic 9y ago

Who in their right mind moves out to SV anymore for less than a quarter million in compensation? If you have a family, your costs are astronomical. Mortgage, daycare, multiple cars, school-related fees. If you're single, you're dealing both with the gender-imbalanced dating market (the imbalance hurting both men and women), as well as the difficulty of saving for a SV mortgage. If you plan ahead of time, coming into SV, that you're going to leave SV eventually because of the high cost of living, then that future move is going to come at the cost of most of the professional and personal networking that you built up and will have to say goodbye to, and build all over again after you move. Sure, SV is the mecca for professional networking and VC funding, but a) you don't need to be in SV to be successful (counter-examples abound) and b) is it really worth it? The death of cheap eats in the Bay Area is just a symptom. You're either making enough money not to care, or you're wondering anyway whether it's worth it to live there.

tome 9y ago
> the gender-imbalanced dating market (the imbalance hurting both men and women) I'm curious about how an excess of men can hurt women in the dating market.
- thundergolfer 9y ago
  Me too. Maybe the imbalance makes all the guys batty?
  - JSONwebtoken 9y ago
    If anything, it makes the women batty by inflating their ego. Where else in the world can you be totally average yet have your pick of six-figure earners? Anecdotally, SV women are the most materialistic, the least attractive (relative to their self perception), and have the most myopic personalities I've been around.
    - rosser 9y ago
      > Anecdotally... This sounds to me like nothing so much as confirmation bias. I've lived in SF for six years now, and gone on dozens of first (and far fewer, but still nonzero, subsequent) dates. While I do see some slight evidence for this notion, it's the exception, not the rule, in my experience. That is to say, "the plural of anecdote is not data."
      - saiya-jin 9y ago
        I can attest from different high-earning places like Singapore and Geneva that this is generally unfortunately true. All written is valid in my (unfortunately somewhat bigger) experience and it actually makes complete sense, based on how human personalities develop & distort due to various environmental situations and pressures. I wish it wouldn't be so, many guys around me wishing the same, but simple truth is out there, day and night. It is still possible to find non-spoiled balanced good-hearted loving partner, but it is ridiculously hard even if you do proper filtering from the beginning and you really have stuff to offer (looks, personality, salary, cool adventurous life etc). Small places are like from another planet in this regard. Btw this is valid for both sexes, at least from what I can see from a straight guy perspective. After some time I generally stopped seeing any high-earning ladies, especially those in management/trading etc. Completely, utterly useless for serious relationships. Now happily engaged to a doctor, at least the part about good personality/heart is very true, but shared time can be sometimes counted in few hours/week. Hard, crushing work they have, and underpaid compared to some pathetic software dev position like mine.

jbaudanza 9y ago

Cafe Zitouna on Sutter and Polk falls into this category. It's a family owned Tunisian/Moroccan restaurant. It's inexpensive and the food is top notch. It's been in the neighborhood forever. Go check it out and order a Breakfast Falafel Wrap, before it turns into a condo building. https://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-zitouna-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-zitouna-san-francisco

saimiam 9y ago

Mildly offtopic: Why does everything perfectly ordinary and expected in any other city have to become "Great" in an American city? Across the world, restaurants, from the very basic to the very high end, arise around every agglomeration of people but here Bloomberg headlines these SFOs restaurants "Great". What makes them "great" that a decades old Irani restaurant in Mumbai cannot hope to match? I can think of only one other place where "great" gets applied to very very ordinary things - Great Asian Cities when referring to Asian mega cities like Mumbai or Manila.

ykler 9y ago
The article is specifically about exceptionally good restaurants that are moderately priced. And San Francisco has historically been famous for this (at least I heard about it a lot growing up in Seattle).
- notyourday 9y ago
  As someone who goes out a lot and who was courted to move to SF by people who go out a lot, I can tell you that in 2015 SF restaurant scene does not hold a candle to NYC. It was one of the reasons I decided not to move to SF.
hectorlorenzo 9y ago
In this case I would say there is a feeling of guilt that is overcompensating for the quality of the restaurants. Most of the people complaining about this phenomenon are the actual culprits. Even with liberal types, the past is way more appealing than the present.
danmaz74 9y ago
I interpreted it as "great" compared to the average American city.
rweba 9y ago
We Americans do tend to overuse superlatives. It's just part of our culture. A restaurant you enjoyed can't just be "good" or "decent", it has to "great". A nice vacation can't just be "relaxing" or "enjoyable" it will be described as "awesome". "Amazing" is another word we tend to overuse.

d--b 9y ago

> “The issue is that the tech companies have million-dollar kitchens and budgets, they’re taking all the great talent and offering benefits and 9-to-5 hours. Meanwhile, the restaurant business is a grind, and the cost of doing business is insane in the Bay Area. Independent operators are getting pushed out. I cook accessible food, and you have to charge accessible prices for that.” Wow, I wasn't expecting the restaurant business being affected by tech companies running their own canteens.

dsr_ 9y ago
The usual rule of thumb for a restaurant: lunch pays your rent, dinner pays for labor and profit. If you don't have any lunch business because everyone eats at work, you're done. If your dinner seatings are empty before 8PM because nobody leaves work until 6:30 and the traffic is terrible, you're done. If the rent keeps going up because the real estate market says so, you're done. What survives: takeout, with low service overhead, small footprints and fast turnaround. High-end, where the money from a few tables each night pays for everything. I think SV and SF are heading for a Shoe Event Horizon.

jpswade 9y ago

Just visited San Francisco. There's over 7000 restaurants. The 67 restaurants on the list this year hardly seems to touch the surface of what's available. Breakfast or lunch seemed to be about $30-40 for two. Evening meals were easily double if not triple that, depending where you go. If you go fancy, you'll get a fancy bill too. LA was no different.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

pjc50 9y ago

You can't have cheap food in expensive real estate. The rent for the floor area of chair and table occupied by the diner becomes prohibitive.

notyourday 9y ago

It is always amusing to read pieces like this or comments by those who either cannot understand or dislike it. Here's the simple truth: there should be no such thing as an excellent, inexpensive restaurant for more than a flash in a pan. Why? Because if a restaurant is excellent and is inexpensive, then it underpricing its offerings the same way as an excellent software developer making $50k a year should not exist in Bay Area for longer than a flash in a pan because that software developer is underpricing his offerings. Say I have a successful restaurant. For the sake of the argument it seats 40 people and does fixed price brunch and is only open between 11am and 4pm on Sunday. Brunch costs $20. It is amazing. I have a line out of the door. People wait for hours for tables. What should I do? Well, it is simple, I am going to raise a price for $30. Am I still packed? Are people still waiting? $50 it is! Holy crap, still a line? $100! I'm charging a hundred. Oh look, the line is smaller but I'm still doing the same number of covers I did before. $150! I really have no line but the number of covers now is right around what I can do. Excellent. $150 it is. What does it mean? It means that before my restaurant was excellent, inexpensive and mispriced. Now it is just excellent and priced correctly. Lets try it again: same setup. $20, i have a line and a wait list, and people outside clamoring for the brunch. Ok, I raise price to $30. Line is gone. I'm doing as many covers as before but there's no real line. I decide to hold at 30. Two months later I have half of the tables empty because people moved on. I drop prices to $20 and nothing changes. Still half of the tables are empty. What happened? I discovered I did not have an excellent and inexpensive restaurant, I just had an inexpensive restaurant and as soon as it tripped into not so inexpensive category it was over. P.S. There are tons of cheap eats in Bay Area and SF. They are just not the kind of "cheap eats" that the people who make $150k/year like to eat. P.P.S. Comment of the owner of the restaurant that tech companies are taking away the talent because they pay more, give full benefits and have 9-5 schedule is pure gold: pay. more. money. That will solve the problem. The owner do not deserve to make money for her services any more than Jack The Dishwasher deserves to make money for his.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Freak_NL 9y ago
> What should I do? Doesn't that assume that profit maximization is the ultimate and only goal of every restaurant owner? Perhaps it is, I'm not familiar with San Francisco restaurants. But some might simply enjoy being able to offer excellent food at a comparatively low price simply because all their business, personal, and employee needs are met and rising prices could be detrimental to that balance. For example, if you enjoy seeing low-income families from your local neighbourhood eat at your place because you are affordable (not to mention healthy and delicious), then raising prices would drive them out, and you might be sad and disappointed, for whatever personal reason (i.e., your personal needs are no longer being met as neatly as before).

DonHopkins 9y ago

I miss Sam Wo's, which had excellent food, was open late at night till 3:00 AM, was quite inexpensive, and had extremely insulting and abusive staff. It was the home of Edsel Ford Fong, the world's rudest waiter, and was featured in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Kids love the Sam Wo Mystery Room. And there's absolutely no fortune cookie!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel_Ford_Fong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel_Ford_Fong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnrs6Hzp6Kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnrs6Hzp6Kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0-GnG8qGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0-GnG8qGs https://tinyurl.com/ybuwn5jn https://tinyurl.com/ybuwn5jn At least the Tamale Lady is still delivering her scrumptious blessings to late night denizens. https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-tamale-lady-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-tamale-lady-san-francisco

thecity2 9y ago
You didn't hear they re-opened Sam Wo in a different location? I've been once, it doesn't have the same charm as the old place, but it's alright. Still cheap! http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Resurrected-improved-Sam-Wo-serves-Chinatown-6730163.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Res...
shalmanese 9y ago
Sam Wo's had profoundly mediocre food but it was open til 3am and the rude waiters were fun.

thecity2 9y ago

You can get cheap dim sum on Clement. Half the reason I moved to the Inner Richmond. lol