Food + Drink Archives

SF Food News This Week: Taco Bell’s Hyped, Waterfront Cantina Opens in SF Tourist Hot Spot

18Jan

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

SF Food News This Week: Taco Bell’s Hyped, Waterfront Cantina Opens in SF Tourist Hot Spot

Plus: A beloved Chinatown staple closes, and yes … you can still find $1 wings in San Francisco. Taco Bell elicits one or two reactions from the general population: a feeling of utter jubilation, wrapped with young-adult nostalgia, or an opinion of disdain and disgust. Thankfully, the vast majority of us fall into the former — Crunchwrap dreams and bean burrito wishes. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Daniel Lurie (@danielluriesf) That popularity led to an explosion in the fast food restaurant’s physical footprint over the past decade; Taco Bell saw its international restaurant figure nearly triple from 400 to over 1,000 locations between 2017 and 2024 alone. Its Cantina iterations...

One of SF’s OG Donut Shop Locations Is Officially Closing Before Thanksgiving

3Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Food + Drink

One of SF’s OG Donut Shop Locations Is Officially Closing Before Thanksgiving

The 72-year-old Bob's Donuts location on Polk Street in San Francisco will shut its doors for good on November 23rd. Bob’s Donuts has remained a San Francisco fixation, touchstone, and late-night icon for over 70 years. In the decades since its original location opened at 1720 Polk Street, the beloved donut store spawned multiple locations across San Francisco, including its most recent store that sits right up the street at 1621 Polk Street, and has grown into a staple for morning sweet tooth and a post-bar darling for those looking to sober up on their walks or Waymos home. Bob’s Donuts suggested earlier in 2025 that its days at the original location were numbered; a series of failed lease negotiations with the building’s landlord were ultimately to blame for its future exit … w...

The Rumors Are True: Viral, Bougie Erewhon Is Coming to San Francisco

30Sep

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

The Rumors Are True: Viral, Bougie Erewhon Is Coming to San Francisco

If you think Bi-Rite’s prices in SF are nose-bleedingly high, get ready to pass out over $55 chicken salad. San Francisco’s the city that popularized the $15 salad, billionaire’s bacon, and coffee fades capable of emptying your checking account. SF is no stranger to hella expensive grocers either; the running joke among locals is that a quick jaunt to Mollie Stone’s for a granola bar and a canned beverage will cost you $23 — and one working kidney. But surprisingly, SF has avoided homing in on America's most expensive (and most viral; most cult-like; most clout-farmed) grocer as of late: Erewhon. With its celebrity-endorsed $23 smoothies and surprisingly affordable pizza slices, the Los Angeles-headquartered upscale grocery chain now has 12 physical locations — a nearly four-fold i...

Popular SoMa Culture Hub To Close This Month, Making Way for Affordable Senior Housing

17Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Food + Drink

Popular SoMa Culture Hub To Close This Month, Making Way for Affordable Senior Housing

Kapwa Gardens, which opened in SoMa in 2020 amid the pandemic lows, will close next Saturday, July 26th, before reopening at a second location sometime in the future. Kapwa Gardens, the Filipino multi-purpose space in San Francisco’s South of Market Neighborhood, was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The culture and community incubator Kulitvate Labs financially sponsored the project, which has hosted many viral events (read: San Francisco’s first festival dedicated to all things ube) and served as a touchstone for Filipino culture. Alas, the Filipino hub is set to close on July 17th, going out with a bang (read: one last Ube Festival). Announced in a blog post by the nonprofit, Kapwa Gardens will close after five years, though the shuttering is neither permanent nor without p...

Yes, San Francisco Does Have an E-bike Problem. But It’s Specific to a Type of Bike (and Rider)

8May

By Matt Charnock4 Comments

Culture + Travel, Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Food + Drink, Hyperlocal News + Stories

Yes, San Francisco Does Have an E-bike Problem. But It’s Specific to a Type of Bike (and Rider)

Food app delivery drivers on their glorified e-mopeds, which are still classified as e-bikes, have brought a certain danger to San Francisco's bike lanes. I’m someone who’s grown accustomed to feeling my back moisten with sweat going to and from destinations in San Francisco. As a distance runner who grew up in the car-centric south, evolving into an urban cyclist over the past few years has nicely filled the liminal space in my day-to-day life that exists between a need for cardiovascular exercise and yearning to travel at highway speeds, nursing a canned Diet Coke that, like my back, wets as time goes on. Life in the bike lane checks off an exercise requirement and the desire to travel faster than one can on foot. Like so many San Franciscans—a city that boasts one of the largest...

Brat Summer Is Long Over. A San Francisco Corner Store Remains Green With Nostalgia.

23Mar

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Food + Drink, Queerness

Brat Summer Is Long Over. A San Francisco Corner Store Remains Green With Nostalgia.

Passersby in SF's Russian Hill neighborhood still have a reminder of last year's "Brat" monoculture thanks to a surprising source: a themed corner store. Corner stores are nothing unique nor novel for urban areas. (Though you’d be hard-pressed to shake New York City of its maligned bodega-spun chronic uniqueness.) Old ones, some decades old, continue thriving in SF. Others, freshly opened, have taken over spaces that were historically vacant for years. Each one, too, has its own unique charm; if they have a resident feline — a bodega cat mascot – they immediately exist as an elevated pantheon. These mostly family-owned shops aren’t trendy, nor do they need to cling to trends for relevance. That said, when they do, it’s notable and, ostensibly, newsworthy (albeit for hollow, fee...

Hayes Valley’s New Trader Joe’s Now Shines as the Only Affordable Oasis in a Pricey Food Desert

14Mar

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Food + Drink

Hayes Valley’s New Trader Joe’s Now Shines as the Only Affordable Oasis in a Pricey Food Desert

After SF's most embattled and controversial Safeway location closed in February, tens of thousands of San Franciscans found themselves unexpectedly far from an affordable grocer overnight. Nearly 39 million Americans — over 10% of the country’s population — live within food deserts, where people reside comparably long distances from a supermarket. (Those in urban areas further than one mile from a grocery outlet are in food desert parameters; for rural Americans, that distance jumps to ten miles.) In San Francisco, around 600 local communities live in low food access. When the Safeway location at 1335 Webster Street closed earlier this month, it created a chasm of affordable food that reached far beyond the Fillmore District where it was addressed. Residents in the shoulder neighbo...

The Weekend Catch-Up: GoFundMe Launched for Man Behind SF Pancake Party Who Died at 46

25Feb

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, News to Know

The Weekend Catch-Up: GoFundMe Launched for Man Behind SF Pancake Party Who Died at 46

Plus: New art is coming to SF's upcoming Ocean Beach park and the National Park Service is in crisis. San Francisco’s network of neighborhoods evokes community. As the city recovered from lockdowns, while the very real threat of COVID still loomed and lingered, outside events experienced a renaissance. Among one of the city’s most sought-after, popular, viral al fresco happenings were the pop-up pancake parties held by Curtis Kimball. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people lined up for blocks around stacks of made-to-order pancakes flipped by Curtis Kimball during his events. But even before those pancake parties, Kimball gained by hyperlocal not air as the “crème brûlée guy,” whose cart would pop up across San Francisco, ready to serve hungry passersby. Over the weekend, Kim...

New Bike Share Dock Is a Mobility Win for SF’s Golden Gate Park

11Jun

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Food + Drink, News to Know

New Bike Share Dock Is a Mobility Win for SF’s Golden Gate Park

A Baywheels dock recently opened “just steps away” from Golden Gate Park, bringing with it a big win for nearby mobility — sans the need for a car. Car ownership is not the answer to urban mobility for the masses, particularly in San Francisco; we know this. SF’s network of permanent car-free corridors, courtesy of SFMTA’s Slow Streets Program, which has (thankfully) yet to sunset, shows that giving residential streets back to pedestrians is a boom for communities. But admittedly, with the laughably small apartments we pay demoralizing sums to occupy, our individual storage space is at a premium. Owning a bike could decimate already low-volumes of closet room. It’s why bike share programs like Baywheels exist as an essential means for many who yearn to get around San Francisco with...

SF’s New Trader Joe’s Is (Like… Actually) Slated to Open on Time

2Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Food + Drink, Nature + Climate Crisis, News to Know

SF’s New Trader Joe’s Is (Like… Actually) Slated to Open on Time

The city’s Trader Joe's in Hayes Valley is still scheduled to open by the end of June. The SF Bay Area is no stranger to deserts — deserts here connoting scarcity of resources, that is. Since 2021, over six Walgreens locations have closed in San Francisco, leaving residents to travel further for their prescriptions, as well as acquire certain location-specific vaccines and other medical goods. An analysis conducted by ABC7 found that 600 neighborhoods across the SF Bay Area are in low food access zones, a.k.a. referred to as a "food desert,” meaning residents are half-a-mile or more from a grocery store; this figure represented a 40-year-high when that figure was published. For San Franciscans in Hayes Valley, news that the neighborhood’s much-hyped Trader Joe’s location is still e...