The Eater Awards are back, which means it’s once again time to celebrate the people and places that make San Francisco one of the country’s most enthralling places to eat and drink.
There’s a Filipino American chef carving out a new home for modern Southeast Asian cuisine in Fisherman’s Wharf, a German bakery that’s breaking out of the box, and a West Oakland pitmaster who put Bay Area barbecue on the national map.
Despite the odds, Horn finally gave his meticulously prepared meats a permanent home in September of last year, and since then, the plumes of oak-scented smoke have drawn diners from near and far to an industrial corner of West Oakland like ships to a lighthouse.
The menu moves beyond clumsy mashups to offer intricately layered plates like vibrant end-of-season peaches and tomatoes tumbled through savory mung bean puree and a clam chowder riff that’s lifted with coconut milk and cilantro — each at once distinctly Californian and recognizably Filipino, too.
When Ettan opened one month before lockdown, it embedded an acclaimed chef in Silicon Valley and brought a different regional flavor to the Peninsula’s heavily North and South Indian restaurant scene.
Designer Thomas Schoos strung chandeliers and plants from the domed windows; layered patterned wallpaper, textiles, and woodwork; and made it pop with modern art and black-and-white portraits.
The Bay loves pastries at the best of times and took solace in them at the worst — many bakeries showed endless ingenuity throughout the pandemic, sizing down cakes and pies, making mixed boxes, and repackaging their goods to go.
As the city locked down, reopened, and changed the dining rules relentlessly, Do never turned off the ovens, baking mini stollen through the night.
Nelson German of Alamar seafood restaurant opened Sobre Mesa, a hotly anticipated Afro-Latino cocktail lounge, in March 2020, and while that was tough timing, the bar came back strong almost exactly a year later with tropical rum drinks, lush hotel lobby looks, and big Oakland energy.
And though a lot of bars are filled with a lot of plants these days, Sobre Mesa does it the most immersively, with jungle-green walls, a black marble bar, and tan leather banquets under the glow of low lights.
What started as a pop-up evolved into a permanent wine-soaked dance party, where you can lose yourself on the black-and-white plaid dance floor under spinning disco lights while the room thunders to the lyrics of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Natural wine devotees will be drawn by a menu that’s limited to bottles with no chemical additions, about a dozen of which can be sipped by the glass and enjoyed with a menu of Korean-influenced small plates from Inner Sunset suprette Queens.