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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

I’m honestly surprised so many people put Bay Area/SF food on the same scale as NYC and LA. It only makes sense when you consider top-tier fine dining (like, Michelin star(s)) IMO. For middle-tier dining I think SF and the Bay Area don’t even come close to either of those cities. In fact I think those hip young college towns are much better, in my experience. It’s just that it’s going to be a different set of foods: more barbecue, Mexican, Central European, soul food, and less asian/what I would call “California health” foods.

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Agreed, I feel like SF restaurants are relatively pricey, so in order to get the good stuff you'll have to pay a lot more than in many other places in the world.

Sf has some great hole in the wall places that aren’t too expensive. E.g. Tonga room isn’t that badly priced

Dropping 50$/person on dinner & drinks in sf isn’t that much money when your rent is 50x+ that figure.

This is enough to say that then it isn't comparable. "There exists" is only a useful quantifier in mathematics. "There exists" better food elsewhere if you idk pay a world reknown chef to cook you a meal herself for $5000.

A bar inside the Fairmont hotel could hardly be described as a “hole in the wall”

Tonga room is a terrible example because, as someone else mentioned, it's a bar in the Fairmont.

If you want a great literal hole in the wall, try Yamo in the Mission. Burmese food, grand total of 6 seats (all at the bar) in the restaurant, and the entire kitchen is right in front of you. $6 entrees.

The SF Bay Area as a whole has some great holes in the wall, and there's even still some in San Francisco proper if you dig around, but in addition to being a bar in the Fairmont as others have noted, the Tonga Room is a world-famous tiki bar that opened in 1945, with two themed dining rooms that wrap around an artificial lagoon with a "rainstorm" every thirty minutes. That's a really weird definition of hole-in-the-wall. :)

While I haven't been up to SF proper for food and barhopping in a few years now, the Lark up in the financial district is much more of what I'd call a good cheap bar. I tend to bristle a bit at people dissing the SF food and drink scene, but I have to remind myself that with few exceptions my favorite places in the Bay Area aren't actually in SF itself. The metro area as a whole has virtually everything you can imagine at a very wide range of price points. I suspect one could make a case that the most interesting stuff happening is in the East Bay and South Bay, though.

I lived in LA for a long time and I would say NYC has it beat by a large margin when it comes to bourgie restaurants. Most of the hip places in LA are uniformly terrible, the places that have been around a long time are about as good as the same kinds of places in NYC, and the various ethnic restaurants are better in LA (assuming they’re in their neighborhood enclaves).

I would say middle tier food in SF is easily better than NYC.

Well, agree to disagree. Personally I've found food in the $15-40 range in NYC to be better executed and be a better value, with more options. I think other cities also blow SF out of the water with execution and value for that price range, but few are able to compete on the diversity of options.

Only if youre eating mexican or clam chowder.

> It only makes sense when you consider top-tier fine dining (like, Michelin star(s)) IMO

Within a narrow window. The diversity and turnover of New York or London’s food offerings compared with the Bay Area’s is on par with the latter’s offerings in relation to Fresno’s. If anything, the Bay offers its uniqueness in the middle tier of immigrant fusion.

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