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Comment by mrgordon | Hacker News Reader

If you think San Francisco has poor quality food, you clearly haven’t spent much time there (as you admit) or you don’t have very discerning taste. California grows the majority of the country’s produce and most everyone else is getting the same ingredients a few days later. Farm to table is the standard instead of something that starts at $25/plate like in most US cities

The city could be more dense in some areas but it’s far more walkable than almost any US city outside of NY. Maybe go to the Mission next time and show me how LA, Miami, etc. are more walkable after

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I don't know about Miami but LA is known for its sprawl. Imo using possibly the worst possible example of a thing to compare it to only makes the other persons point for them.

It's like pointing at little people as an example to show that 5'6" is heaps tall.

Most cities are known for sprawl here. It’s not my fault.

Sure I could compare to Portland but it’s small and honestly not that different from SF in terms of the kind of farm to table food and wine that’s served

What are the numerous cities I am missing that have better food and are more walkable than SF and not counting NY? I honesty haven’t found them

> If you think San Francisco has poor quality food, you clearly haven’t spent much time there (as you admit) or you don’t have very discerning taste.

Or just are following shallow, presentation-focussed hipster-targetting marketing and being surprised that it leads you to presentation-focussed hipster-targetted food offerings.

or, follow me on this. i just walk out onto the street, type "restaurant" into google, and pick something with 4 star and up reviews. no marketing or presentations involved - just what people around there reviewed as good. and the food is average. this isn't bad, but average food with some gems you have to know about and take an uber to, is not a reason to live in a city - and it was presented as such in the comment to which i replied.

If you're seriously suggesting that a Google search for "restaurant" is going to get you a marketing-free, accurate picture of the world around you, I'm not sure what to do with that.

> or, follow me on this. i just walk out onto the street, type "restaurant" into google, and pick something with 4 star and up reviews. no marketing or presentations involved

Heh.

Reliance on numerical ratings in online reviews isn't particularly different than reliance on marketing with a specific demographic targeting and, yeah, surprisingly enough it does tend to lead you to the more instagram-ready establishments.

right.. when someone eats at a place and gives it a number of stars rating how good it was, it tells you the same about how good it is as instagram marketing. here's the point - you go to sf, get a place around you with good reviews, and the food is overpriced, overpresented, and average in taste.

The OP literally stated a reason to live in SF is the food. That's simply false. It's not poor quality, but it's no reason to live there. It's not better than in an average city.

> right.. when someone eats at a place and gives it a number of stars rating how good it was, it tells you the same about how good it is as instagram marketing.

There are distinct demographic trends in online reviews activity that are broadly similar to those involved in instagramming meals, which makes the biases in using aggregate ratings similar to those in favoring Instagram or marketing targeting the same demographic, yes.

(You can get better information from online reviews, but it takes more than blindly following aggregate ratings.)

i did not say poor quality food. i said very average food, overpresented artistically and overpriced. farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better. aged about a month. sushi -yes. except very little sushi from what i saw in sf. a lot of weird rolls, which is not sushi to me. good sushi was in tokyo, where i have lived for several months.

fresh produce is shipped overnight anywhere nowadays. being near a farm no longer gets you fresher produce. and keep in mind, produce is grown in many, many places. heck, in chicago we got farmer's markets every few blocks.

miami is one little street that's walkable, and a run down city of trash. i never said it was better. la was the example i gave of a city that is not walkable, like sf is not walkable. so density is not sf's pro, which the comment i replied to claimed.

as far as discerning taste, i've lived in moscow, versailles, catalonia, and tokyo. i've had good food. sf wasn't it. it was regular food, presented in weird ways, just to be different. putting avocado on something or drinking sake cold doesn't make it good -it just makes it different.

San Francisco has functional public transit which escapes almost every American city and the cool neighborhoods are in fact quite dense, like the Mission. This is why people view it as one of the most walkable cities in America even though it may not be a compact area built around a train station like much of Europe, for example. I would like that, but that’s not how any of America is.

You went to a few sushi roll places and now you want to demean the quality compared to Tokyo? Give me a break. I’ve spent months in both and you’re not painting a very fair picture. Tokyo is the sushi capital of the world. No one would dispute that the Japanese have the widest variety of amazing sushi. But San Francisco is way up there and if anything the problem is there are too many unaffordable omakase menus with the best fish from Tsukiji market in Tokyo or from Monterey Bay. There are places that sell California rolls to tourists like everywhere, but San Francisco has so much actual Japanese food and so much omakase that I find it absurd that you characterize it that way. There is no way Chicago can go toe to toe on Japanese restaurants and you know it.

As for drinking sake cold, if you spent much time in Japan you’d know they typically serve crappy sake warm to disguise the impurities of not having polished the rice enough before making it. A good Junmai Ginjo will be served cold. You are welcome to have sake however you want, but don’t blame San Francisco for knowing how to drink sake properly. In fact, San Francisco has the only sake store in America (True Sake) because there are so many Japanese people and it’s so popular.

i did not go to mission, so my comment about density may not be correct. which is why i asked. that's one neighborhood though.

as far as sake.. i don't drink anymore, for a while now, but you're wrong. serving it warm brings out the taste, and makes any cheap nastiness worse. serving it cold is what hides it. having a store that only sells sake does not make it 'the store for sake.' there are many stores stateside that have a good sake selection. they also sell japanese beer and plum wine. and in the style of true sf culture, you just said japan has crappy sake, which is why they serve it warm, while sf is doing the traditional japanese wine correctly. this -people like you on every corner, is why i didn't like sf. it's the culture -or lack thereof.

Honestly, I can’t take anything you said seriously if during your 3 weeks here you didn’t step foot into one of the most unique/distinctive neighborhoods in the city and then proceed to berate the availability of tasty food. I read all of your comments here and was trying to decide whether you were uniquely knowledgeable or full of shit and this right here tells the whole story. I have also been all around the world and SF has a wide collection of high quality cuisines from all around the world — not just Japanese food in Tokyo and Russian food in Moscow.

Once again, the Japanese know very well that a nice polished sake like a Junmai Daiginjo will be served cold.

https://boutiquejapan.com/sake101/#:~:text=At%20the%20risk%2...

"At the risk of overgeneralizing, many sake experts say that ginjo and daiginjo sakes are usually best not warmed (since being served chilled enhances their flavors and aromas)"

It is bizarre you go on these rants about how people on Hacker News aren't cultured like you after all your time in foreign cities, but you didn't visit the main neighborhoods, chose a few bad restaurants on Yelp, and clearly don't know how the locals prefer to drink their sake even after bragging about all your experience. Since you don't even drink, maybe you should listen to the people who do and who have toured the sake factories.

Way to be totally obnoxious and ruin the normally polite discourse here. You're posting on a brand new account and already getting flagged for abusive posting. You're not even trying to have a productive conversation. Go argue with people on Reddit.

Actually, sake can be enjoyed cold, warm, or hot. Having the sake serve at a warm temperature doesn’t mean there is anything inherently wrong with the sake itself.

The purpose of changing the temperature, as you pointed out, is to change the flavor notes. Having a particular sake cold may bring out fruitier notes while warming it up gives it an extra layer of vanilla. This is just an example. All sake have different notes and it can be really subjective on what notes are being registered. The ability to change the flavor drastically just by temperature is what makes sake interesting. This legit use isn’t just limited to subpar sake, but to the entire quality spectrum sake as well. So it really depends on many factors like the intended temperature consumption by the brewery or the establishment you are consuming the sake at (they want particular notes to come up so it goes well with the pairing of a dish, for example), or the most important: consumers palate.

Playing with the temperature is akin to whisky drinking: neat vs on the rocks vs water dropper. Each preparation changes the flavor and aren’t necessary bad.

You are correct that warming up bad quality sake can mask the undesirable attributes.

https://boutiquejapan.com/sake101/#:~:text=At%20the%20risk%2...

"At the risk of overgeneralizing, many sake experts say that ginjo and daiginjo sakes are usually best not warmed (since being served chilled enhances their flavors and aromas), while many junmai and honjozo sakes do well either way (since warming these types of sakes tends to draw out their complex flavors and smooth them out a bit)."

Sure. This excerpt you shared supports what I just wrote in my post, no?

Partially but it affirms my point that you disagreed with. My point from the beginning was that “nice” sake that was polished more and costs a lot (a Junmai Ginjo or Junmai Daiginjo for example) will be served cold. Many of the more alcoholic sake styles and cheaper sakes will be served hot or cold. The heat can help hide impurities but it can also play down (or change) the heavier alcohol flavors.

So yes I agree certain styles will be served warm and might have different and interesting taste profiles depending on temperature like your whisky example. But ultimately, warming the sake will tend to hide the subtle flavors that the sake maker did all the extra rice polishing to achieve, so it wouldn’t be recommended for a nice Junmai Daiginjo. The poster I replied to tried to falsely claim that hot sake would better pull out these subtle flavors, which I cannot find any reference for and does not agree with my experience drinking and reading about sake.

> "farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better."

"farm to table" does not mean the meat is not aged. It just means the restaurant buys directly from the farm. No good restaurant would ever serve you an un-aged steak.

> sushi -yes. except very little sushi from what i saw in sf. a lot of weird rolls, which is not sushi to me. good sushi was in tokyo, where i have lived for several months.

Ok, you lost me there. I've lived in SF for 10 years and there's sushi all over the place. Actual, real sashimi, nigiri, whatever you want. A la carte, set meals, omakase, whatever. Some of it is pretty high end, and you'll pay more in SF for an equivalent meal in Tokyo.

Beyond that, it's a little weird to bring up Tokyo as an example... the sushi in Tokyo is better than the sushi in pretty much any place in the US, perhaps in pretty much any place outside Japan. Not really a fair comparison.

Regardless, I kinda just think that you were visiting the wrong places when you visited SF. I agree that there's an annoying amount of of mediocre food that seems to exist more to look nice than to taste amazing, but that's true of many cities. (But these places tend not to last that long.) There's lots of fantastic food in SF, and frankly it's not even that hard to find, so I'm baffled by your bad experience.

The majority of the country's produce? I call bullshit.

https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/news/3-states-produced-76-p...

Well you called bullshit and the number is 56.7% per the article the other user helpfully linked. This is why "California cuisine" has been farm to table for so long and why it is more affordable to eat fresh, tasty, in-season produce there.

Yep. The only reason CA hasn’t seceded yet, the rest of the country would starve without them.

If you're going to call out people for "bullshit" when they post facts you could easily Google, then you could at least apologize after you were shown to be both wrong and rude.

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