San Francisco / Berkeley, August 2024

~ Shakeel Hashim
  1. I was underwhelmed by almost all the food on this visit. Thanh Long’s garlic noodles aren’t as special as one is led to believe (and certainly not worth the price); Rose Pizzeria is fine but doesn’t hold a candle to basically any pizzeria in NYC or Chicago; La Taqueria and Hang Ah Tea Room are both fine but nothing special; and Tartine’s cakes are actively disappointing. At normal prices this would all have been tolerable; at SF prices it feels like robbery.
    • I thought Escape from NY, Woodhouse Fish Co. and Las Cabanas were all decent and not ridiculously priced, though.
  2. The big exception to this is the superb Arsicault. My friend described their pain au chocolat to me as the most delicious thing he’s ever eaten; it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. The croissants are superb, too.
  3. I’ve been to SF MOMA before, but enjoyed it even more this time round. The Visitors is particularly special — I went in expecting to stay for 5 minutes, and ended up remaining for over an hour.
  4. Berkeley has some really excellent book shops. Half-Price Books has, as the name implies, very good prices (especially by American standards), while Moe’s has an exceptional selection of second-hand film books (an oddly small history of technology section for the region, though).
  5. Golden Gate Park is absolutely stunning. Smells great, too.
  6. If only the same could be said for Market Street, which is still an absolute disaster. 
  7. Waymo taxis, now omnipresent in the city, are very obviously the future. A faultless journey, aside from the end: it dropped me off down an alleyway next to someone high on fentanyl, which sounds so absurd I’m sure you think I made it up.
  8. The De Young is a pretty middling museum (certainly not worth the admission fee), and it ought to be criminal to own a Turrell Skyspace but not allow access at sunset.
  9. The Musée Mecanique, on the other hand, is an absolute delight — an obvious labour of love, and a fascinating one at that. Cheap, too!
  10. It continues to be very odd that a broadly quite average city (at least in terms of museums, food, theatre, transport) is the most important place on earth.

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