5 ms·

i did not say poor quality food. i said very average food, overpresented artistically and overpriced. farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better. ag

i did not say poor quality food. i said very average food, overpresented artistically and overpriced. farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better. aged about a month. sushi -yes. except very little sushi from what i saw in sf. a lot of weird rolls, which is not sushi to me. good sushi was in tokyo, where i have lived for several months. fresh produce is shipped overnight anywhere nowadays. being near a farm no longer gets you fresher produce. and keep in mind, produce is grown in many, many places. heck, in chicago we got farmer's markets every few blocks. miami is one little street that's walkable, and a run down city of trash. i never said it was better. la was the example i gave of a city that is not walkable, like sf is not walkable. so density is not sf's pro, which the comment i replied to claimed. as far as discerning taste, i've lived in moscow, versailles, catalonia, and tokyo. i've had good food. sf wasn't it. it was regular food, presented in weird ways, just to be different. putting avocado on something or drinking sake cold doesn't make it good -it just makes it different.

mrgordon 6y ago
San Francisco has functional public transit which escapes almost every American city and the cool neighborhoods are in fact quite dense, like the Mission. This is why people view it as one of the most walkable cities in America even though it may not be a compact area built around a train station like much of Europe, for example. I would like that, but that’s not how any of America is. You went to a few sushi roll places and now you want to demean the quality compared to Tokyo? Give me a break. I’ve spent months in both and you’re not painting a very fair picture. Tokyo is the sushi capital of the world. No one would dispute that the Japanese have the widest variety of amazing sushi. But San Francisco is way up there and if anything the problem is there are too many unaffordable omakase menus with the best fish from Tsukiji market in Tokyo or from Monterey Bay. There are places that sell California rolls to tourists like everywhere, but San Francisco has so much actual Japanese food and so much omakase that I find it absurd that you characterize it that way. There is no way Chicago can go toe to toe on Japanese restaurants and you know it. As for drinking sake cold, if you spent much time in Japan you’d know they typically serve crappy sake warm to disguise the impurities of not having polished the rice enough before making it. A good Junmai Ginjo will be served cold. You are welcome to have sake however you want, but don’t blame San Francisco for knowing how to drink sake properly. In fact, San Francisco has the only sake store in America (True Sake) because there are so many Japanese people and it’s so popular.
- dongvsascript 6y ago
  i did not go to mission, so my comment about density may not be correct. which is why i asked. that's one neighborhood though. as far as sake.. i don't drink anymore, for a while now, but you're wrong. serving it warm brings out the taste, and makes any cheap nastiness worse. serving it cold is what hides it. having a store that only sells sake does not make it 'the store for sake.' there are many stores stateside that have a good sake selection. they also sell japanese beer and plum wine. and in the style of true sf culture, you just said japan has crappy sake, which is why they serve it warm, while sf is doing the traditional japanese wine correctly. this -people like you on every corner, is why i didn't like sf. it's the culture -or lack thereof.
  - pb7 6y ago
    Honestly, I can’t take anything you said seriously if during your 3 weeks here you didn’t step foot into one of the most unique/distinctive neighborhoods in the city and then proceed to berate the availability of tasty food. I read all of your comments here and was trying to decide whether you were uniquely knowledgeable or full of shit and this right here tells the whole story. I have also been all around the world and SF has a wide collection of high quality cuisines from all around the world — not just Japanese food in Tokyo and Russian food in Moscow.
    - dongvsascript 6y ago
      strange how a whole bunch of people on this thread agree with me - both visitors and sf residents. this ladies and gentlemen is what you get when you have a kid, he gets picked on for doing stupid things i school, and you tell him it's not his problem -it's just those people have issues. sf has some good food. you have to know what it is, and take an uber across town there. the claim was, you'd live in sf for its food. if you step out of your house and walk to surrounding restaurants, the food is very average, overly presented, and priced by artistic presentation - not taste. when in tokyo, i can walk to a random place and get great sushi. in moscow, the russian food at any cheap hole in the wall is good (and greasy) - you don't need cafe pushkin. in sf, if you don't know where you're going and do some research, the food is average. which isn't bad. but average food is certainly no reason to live in a sausage factory and pay 2mil for a studio.
Reason077 6y ago
> "farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better." "farm to table" does not mean the meat is not aged. It just means the restaurant buys directly from the farm. No good restaurant would ever serve you an un-aged steak.
kelnos 6y ago
> sushi -yes. except very little sushi from what i saw in sf. a lot of weird rolls, which is not sushi to me. good sushi was in tokyo, where i have lived for several months. Ok, you lost me there. I've lived in SF for 10 years and there's sushi all over the place. Actual, real sashimi, nigiri, whatever you want. A la carte, set meals, omakase, whatever. Some of it is pretty high end, and you'll pay more in SF for an equivalent meal in Tokyo. Beyond that, it's a little weird to bring up Tokyo as an example... the sushi in Tokyo is better than the sushi in pretty much any place in the US, perhaps in pretty much any place outside Japan. Not really a fair comparison. Regardless, I kinda just think that you were visiting the wrong places when you visited SF. I agree that there's an annoying amount of of mediocre food that seems to exist more to look nice than to taste amazing, but that's true of many cities. (But these places tend not to last that long.) There's lots of fantastic food in SF, and frankly it's not even that hard to find, so I'm baffled by your bad experience.

mrgordon 6y ago

San Francisco has functional public transit which escapes almost every American city and the cool neighborhoods are in fact quite dense, like the Mission. This is why people view it as one of the most walkable cities in America even though it may not be a compact area built around a train station like much of Europe, for example. I would like that, but that’s not how any of America is. You went to a few sushi roll places and now you want to demean the quality compared to Tokyo? Give me a break. I’ve spent months in both and you’re not painting a very fair picture. Tokyo is the sushi capital of the world. No one would dispute that the Japanese have the widest variety of amazing sushi. But San Francisco is way up there and if anything the problem is there are too many unaffordable omakase menus with the best fish from Tsukiji market in Tokyo or from Monterey Bay. There are places that sell California rolls to tourists like everywhere, but San Francisco has so much actual Japanese food and so much omakase that I find it absurd that you characterize it that way. There is no way Chicago can go toe to toe on Japanese restaurants and you know it. As for drinking sake cold, if you spent much time in Japan you’d know they typically serve crappy sake warm to disguise the impurities of not having polished the rice enough before making it. A good Junmai Ginjo will be served cold. You are welcome to have sake however you want, but don’t blame San Francisco for knowing how to drink sake properly. In fact, San Francisco has the only sake store in America (True Sake) because there are so many Japanese people and it’s so popular.

dongvsascript 6y ago
i did not go to mission, so my comment about density may not be correct. which is why i asked. that's one neighborhood though. as far as sake.. i don't drink anymore, for a while now, but you're wrong. serving it warm brings out the taste, and makes any cheap nastiness worse. serving it cold is what hides it. having a store that only sells sake does not make it 'the store for sake.' there are many stores stateside that have a good sake selection. they also sell japanese beer and plum wine. and in the style of true sf culture, you just said japan has crappy sake, which is why they serve it warm, while sf is doing the traditional japanese wine correctly. this -people like you on every corner, is why i didn't like sf. it's the culture -or lack thereof.
- pb7 6y ago
  Honestly, I can’t take anything you said seriously if during your 3 weeks here you didn’t step foot into one of the most unique/distinctive neighborhoods in the city and then proceed to berate the availability of tasty food. I read all of your comments here and was trying to decide whether you were uniquely knowledgeable or full of shit and this right here tells the whole story. I have also been all around the world and SF has a wide collection of high quality cuisines from all around the world — not just Japanese food in Tokyo and Russian food in Moscow.
  - dongvsascript 6y ago
    strange how a whole bunch of people on this thread agree with me - both visitors and sf residents. this ladies and gentlemen is what you get when you have a kid, he gets picked on for doing stupid things i school, and you tell him it's not his problem -it's just those people have issues. sf has some good food. you have to know what it is, and take an uber across town there. the claim was, you'd live in sf for its food. if you step out of your house and walk to surrounding restaurants, the food is very average, overly presented, and priced by artistic presentation - not taste. when in tokyo, i can walk to a random place and get great sushi. in moscow, the russian food at any cheap hole in the wall is good (and greasy) - you don't need cafe pushkin. in sf, if you don't know where you're going and do some research, the food is average. which isn't bad. but average food is certainly no reason to live in a sausage factory and pay 2mil for a studio.

Reason077 6y ago

> "farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better." "farm to table" does not mean the meat is not aged. It just means the restaurant buys directly from the farm. No good restaurant would ever serve you an un-aged steak.

kelnos 6y ago

> sushi -yes. except very little sushi from what i saw in sf. a lot of weird rolls, which is not sushi to me. good sushi was in tokyo, where i have lived for several months. Ok, you lost me there. I've lived in SF for 10 years and there's sushi all over the place. Actual, real sashimi, nigiri, whatever you want. A la carte, set meals, omakase, whatever. Some of it is pretty high end, and you'll pay more in SF for an equivalent meal in Tokyo. Beyond that, it's a little weird to bring up Tokyo as an example... the sushi in Tokyo is better than the sushi in pretty much any place in the US, perhaps in pretty much any place outside Japan. Not really a fair comparison. Regardless, I kinda just think that you were visiting the wrong places when you visited SF. I agree that there's an annoying amount of of mediocre food that seems to exist more to look nice than to taste amazing, but that's true of many cities. (But these places tend not to last that long.) There's lots of fantastic food in SF, and frankly it's not even that hard to find, so I'm baffled by your bad experience.