The next evening, I head over to the trendy Richmond district to meet another couple of friends. They’re the archetypal Bay Area power couple, she in the wine business, he a trans-Pacific trader and part-time musician who has transformed their garage into a recording studio to cut his own DVDs. Both are also avid bikers, and tell me they often bump into comedian Robin Williams (who lives on the same street) tooling around on the local trails. I figure if anyone is tapped into the local zeitgeist, it’s these two.
When they suggest that we dine near touristy Fisherman’s Wharf, however, I wonder if they have lost their edge. I shouldn’t have: chef Gary Danko’s namesake restaurant has earned a reputation as one of the city’s best, and I savor my juniper-crusted bison served with herbed spaetzle. It’s one of the best meals of my trip, though there will be plenty of other contenders, such as the nouvelle Californian cuisine (think duck with huckleberries in smoked-honey jus) at Mark Sullivan’s elegant Spruce restaurant, or new Mission District hot spots like Commonwealth and Heirloom Café.
For an after-dinner drink, we scoot over to the nearby Marina District. Not so long ago, the neighborhood was known more for rich grannies than beautiful young things. But that was before the 1989 earthquake destroyed much of the area. The chic waterfront ’hood has since reemerged as one of the city’s buzziest bar scenes, especially the notorious “Marina Triangle” at the intersection of Fillmore and Greenwich. I ask the bartender at the Balboa Café about the nickname. He flashes a wry smile and says, “It’s because virgins go in, but they never come out.” Enough said. Draining our Irish coffees—allegedly invented nearby at the Buena Vista Café—we head back out into the mild night air.
Matrix Fillmore, among the hottest dance clubs in town, is just up the road. But we get back in the car and drive instead to the other music venue of the same name—the legen-dary Fillmore—to catch a rockabilly blues band from Texas. In its ’60s incarnation, the Fillmore was a music mecca, the place where you went to see The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, or the Grateful Dead. I don’t spot the ghost of Jerry Garcia that night, but the memories of concerts past still haunt the old hall, new seats and a fresh coat of paint notwithstanding.
Steep roads, tall buildings, clanging streetcars—that’s the typical image of San Francisco. Yet the city has an awful lot of green space, too. And that’s what my last day is all about—rediscovering the wide-open spaces of one of the country’s most crowded urban centers.
After a morning spent admiring street murals in The Mission, I make my way back to the Presidio, where kite surfers are taking off and landing at Crissy Field. This onetime military airstrip, scenically located on a kilometer-long beach, was revamped a decade ago largely through a grant from the Haas family, heirs to the denim empire founded by Levi Strauss during San Francisco’s gold-rush days. Stripped of its concrete and chain-link fencing, it is now among the city’s best parks, a 40-hectare paradise of coastal dunes, grassy meadows, wetlands, and cypress groves.
