San Francisco, California

San Francisco: A Practical Guide with Honest Caveats

San Francisco is 47 square miles, the second smallest city by area in the United States, and it contains more concentrated variety of food, landscape, and neighbourhood character than most cities ten times its size. It is also a city with a serious homelessness crisis, a cost of living that makes permanent residents grimace, and a tourism infrastructure that can be both excellent and actively misleading. Going in with accurate expectations makes it considerably better.

The Golden Gate and Alcatraz

The Golden Gate Bridge is exactly as impressive as the photographs suggest, and walking or cycling across it is the correct approach. Driving across gives you a toll and a view of traffic. The bridge opens to pedestrians at 5am on the east footpath; fog obscures it entirely a significant proportion of the time. The fog version and the clear-day version are both worth seeing; they look like different structures.

Alcatraz requires advance booking – often weeks ahead in summer. The audio tour narrated by former inmates and guards is genuinely excellent and longer than most visitors expect; the island portion alone takes 2 to 3 hours. The last ferry back leaves around 6:30pm. Book as early as possible.

Fisherman’s Wharf is honestly overrated as a destination in itself. The Dungeness crab from a street vendor on Jefferson Street is the best reason to be there. The rest is souvenir shops and overpriced restaurants designed for people who haven’t yet discovered the Mission District.

The Neighbourhoods Worth Knowing

The Mission District is San Francisco’s most interesting neighbourhood for food and street culture. La Taqueria on Mission Street, cash only, is the reference point for the Mission-style burrito: flour tortilla, well-seasoned meat, beans, no rice. The neighbourhood’s Valencia Street corridor has the best independent bookshops and restaurant concentration in the city.

North Beach, adjacent to Chinatown, has Italian cafes and the City Lights bookshop at 261 Columbus Avenue, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Beat Generation institution, still operating as an independent bookshop and publisher since 1953. Vesuvio bar across the alley is where the Beats drank. Both are worth stopping for.

The Richmond District’s Clement Street corridor has better dim sum than Chinatown for cheaper prices; Hong Kong Lounge II for sit-down dim sum and Good Mong Kok Bakery for char siu bao.

Food: Where the City is Genuinely Good

The Ferry Building Marketplace on the waterfront runs a farmers’ market Tuesday and Thursday mornings and all-day Saturday, with some of the best Bay Area produce, dairy, and prepared food in the city. Tartine Bakery on Guerrero Street in the Mission has been making bread that food writers describe with genuine emotion since it opened; the country sourdough loaf is sold starting at 5pm.

Zuni Cafe on Market Street, operating since 1979, has a brick oven roasted chicken for two (ordered an hour in advance) that is the dish people return specifically for. Bix in Jackson Square has one of the better cocktail bars in the US in a space that looks like a 1940s supper club.

Getting Around

The Powell-Hyde cable car is legitimately historic: the only manually operated cable car system in the world. Buy a single-ride ticket from the conductor rather than queuing at Powell and Market. The queues at the main terminals on summer weekends are extraordinary.

BART connects the airport to downtown in about 30 minutes and runs to major city destinations. Muni buses and the metro cover the rest. Clipper card or the Muni app handles payment. The city’s hills mean that “15-minute walk” on a map can involve a 30-metre elevation change.

When to Visit

September and October are the best months. The fog that covers significant portions of the city through June and July (locals call it Karl) typically clears by late summer, temperatures are genuinely warm, and tourist volumes are below peak. November through January is colder and wetter but the city empties out and hotel prices fall.