The food is substantial (and tasty) enough to make a meal of, but getting a couple of early evening cocktails and snacks before a later downtown dinner rez is really the move here. Read more.
Drifters Wife effortlessly nails that date-night wine-bar vibe that city dwellers know so well. But what makes it better is that you’re on the coast of Maine, taking in that salty ocean air. Read more.
Here’s the lunch spot you dream of stumbling into, a place where you order a ham sandwich and are handed a crackly ficelle spread with radish butter and ribbons of French jambon. Read more.
The entrées—roast chicken, slow cooked lamb—veer more traditional, so we love to make a meal out of the small plates, plus all the desserts. Read more.
Sukle's Caesar salad is a genius reinvention of the classic, crunchy from paper-thin slices of kohlrabi, with added depth from cured herring. And his pastas are nothing short of transcendent. Read more.
Here dishes read as “interesting” (e.g., grilled clams with cultured nasturtium butter) but eat with the simple gratification of a perfectly roasted chicken. Chopped liver has never felt so relevant. Read more.
Most of all, do not skip dessert: Two brain-twisting flavors of gelato and sorbet daily that will probably win Brooks Headley another James Beard award. Read more.
Visit the tearoom in the morning, when the sun illuminates the room in a dreamy golden hue, and the crowds have cleared out. Read more.
Ask for wine director Jorge Riera. He will pour you what you never knew you needed. And Always. Order. Dessert. Especially if that peanut butter creation is on the menu. Read more.
Start with the clams with Chinese sausage and Sichuan chiles. The bitter melon with black bean confit might be the most unappetizing-sounding dish, but it’s the unexpected star. Read more.
Snapper, rockfish, pork belly, quail, Camembert: You name it, and Jeremiah Langhorne can cook it over fiery embers. Langhorne combines these old-world techniques with a modern chef’s outlook. Read more.
Here the gin and tonics are poured with house-made tonic and garnished with juniper berries and citrus, and the menu of small plates is as vast and ambitious as it is precisely executed. Read more.
There is no breakfast, lunch, or dinner menu. Instead there are the two specialties of the chef, Cristina Martinez: tortas served Tuesday through Thursday, barbacoa tacos Friday through Sunday. Read more.
This is one of those places where it’s actually fun to share. Highlights like lamb ribs and whole stuffed porgy are built “for two,” so bring a crew to sample as much of the menu as you can. Read more.
For his meat, Brent Young goes to one place: Jubilee Hilltop Ranch in nearby Bedford, Pennsylvania, which supplies 100 percent grass-fed beef. Even the ketchup here is local. Get it? Read more.
You’re here for the pizzas and pastas, like the irresistible casareccia (short, twisty noodles) with vinegar-braised duck. Read more.
You’ll find an omelet du jour—impossibly soft, butter-slicked, topped with grated Parm and minced herbs—that would make Jacques Pépin weep with joy, plus textbook steak tartare and roast chicken. Read more.
Here barbecue means local pasture-raised pig (not the usual commodity stuff), smoked 18 hours over a mixture of oak, cherry, and hickory, until it's juicy and sweet. Read more.
Most everything comes off the grill, from lamb sausage with pickled celery to roasted oysters with chili butter. Vegetables make up nearly half the menu, imbued with smoky flavor via the coals. Read more.
Those who venture away from the crowd-pleasers at the restaurant will be rewarded with plates of crispy barbecue pig tail (tastes like chicken wings) or country rib chops with plums and cucumbers. Read more.
Patrick Phelan, Megan Fitzroy Phelan, and Andrew Manning are planning to open a restaurant. In the intervening months, they’ve hosted monthly pop-ups under the Longoven moniker at Sub Rosa Bakery. Read more.
As the truck's name indicates, rice is the thread that binds this menu. It stars in the onigiri, here stuffed with everything from spicy local yellowfin tuna to pickled green tomatoes. Read more.
Ryan Smith's dishes—silky-smooth chicken liver topped with tart Meyer lemon jelly, fried-chicken skins with honey and whipped sauce, red snapper in fermented-shrimp broth—are technical and intricate. Read more.
The main course is as it should be: a handsome rib eye, aged 55 days, sliced thick and settled into a slowly forming pool of its beefy juices. Read more.
The must-order entrée is a shatteringly crunchy skate-wing “schnitzel”; and the wok gets a warm welcome into the Italian kitchen, imparting toastiness to everything from chicken livers to strangozze. Read more.
Jason Vaughan puts a fresh spin on samosas (here filled with salt cod), somehow manages to make fried cauliflower taste like sesame chicken, and turns out delicate braised-lamb-filled dumplings. Read more.
You’ll want the spunky fermented cabbage with roasted pineapple, the whole chicken served with sunchoke hot sauce, and, for a worthy splurge, the absolutely transcendent uni-bathed Japanese wagyu. Read more.
Lisa Ludwinski is famous for her salted maple, a creamy custard in a twice-baked, all-butter, crazy-flaky shell. Alongside that staple are rotating beauties that span the growing season. Read more.
Look out for one-off specials—like late-night Juicy Lucys (a hamburger stuffed with melty cheese)—at the bar. All-day hours make late afternoons a great time to stop in for a drink and a tartine. Read more.
Josephine Estelle's raison d'être is the pastas; no fewer than eight different ones are made in house, including the standout mafalde (squiggly ribbons) with "Maw Maw's" gravy. Read more.
Think outrageously flavorful lobster rillettes from France or calamari in spicy ragout from Portugal, served straight from the can. Chicken of the Sea this is not. Read more.
Grab a Pimm’s Cup or an Abita Amber Ale, and stay for a while. As massive as the sandwiches are, it’s worth sneaking in a few hush puppies and an order of pimento cheese before they arrive. Read more.
Gourmet fast-casual kind of place, with the option to eat in or take out. Delicious selection of instagrammable pies etc. I was impressed by the avocado/egg tartine and Milk Money Latte.
As remarkable as the pastas are, don’t go flour-wild. A dim-sum cart circles the room, and when the server asks if you’d like any of the small plates, your answer best be yes. Read more.
In addition to à la carte options, the restaurant serves family-style set-menus ($80 for two people; $140 for four; $180 for six), which are the best way to experience FC for the first time. Read more.
Our ideal day starts with room service breakfast: Could we have one chorizo Scotch egg with green-chili cornbread, please? Eventually, we'll head down to the all-day café for a duck-confit muffuleta. Read more.
There are three simple but surreal tacos: deep-pink tacos de trompo, which reaches its crispy-juicy peak thanks to the trompo (the rotating vertical spit); bistek; and vegetarian paneer-poblano. Read more.
The eight-course menu features interludes like buttery, rich grilled Wagyu beef, but Yui is above all a showcase for Gen Mizoguchi’s sushi mastery. Read more.
Uh’s menu is made up of about ten Cali-Asian grain bowls and pastas, each more interesting than the last. Think farro with roasted koji beet cream, concentrated kombu dashi, and onion-rose pickles. Read more.
Whatever you do, don’t pass up Ng’s blistered, bubbly, charred flatbread. (It won’t surprise you to learn that Ng was the opening chef-de-cuisine of Nancy Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza.) Read more.
On a corner of Russian Hill, chefs Carrie and Rupert Bleases' food feels eminently San Franciscan: doggedly seasonal, stunningly beautiful, effortlessly modern. Read more.
This is not a drill. Everything imaginable, from the ice cubes at the crowded bar to ventilation hoods in the kitchen, is tricked out with environmentally friendly bells and whistles. Read more.
Our favorite bowl is the toothsome black rice piled with dilis (teensy deep-fried anchovies) and doused with the palate-jolting house-made vinegar. Read more.
A lo-fi counter serving a changing roster of authentic Mexican tacos, such as pork in chile verde or squid in adobo, alongside market-driven aguas frescas (pray for the coffee horchata). Read more.
You can’t go wrong with churro French toast with Mexican chocolate ice cream and a griddled breakfast burrito stuffed with ham and American cheese. Read more.
Strubel’s savory food is just healthy enough that it’s fully permissible to end the meal with one of everything from the pastry case. Read more.
A steakhouse that brings in whole animals from Whidbey Island, butchers and dry-ages them in-house, and sells each steak by its weight, accessorized with bone-marrow or preserved-lemon butter. Read more.
Katy Millard serves a juicy roast chicken family-style and prepares rustic craveable pastas, like curlicues called girella, coated with milk-braised pork ragù and topped with crunchy fried sunchoke. Read more.
The raison d’être might be the noodle dishes, whether that’s the famous pad thai, served with peanuts, roasted chiles, and sugar on the side, or the incomparable and so intensely flavorful khao soi. Read more.
As adventurous as Pizza Jerk gets, it never neglects the essentials, by which we mean the kind of pepperoni that crisps as it cooks, curling up into little cups of greasy, spicy goodness. Read more.
