> Doesn't SF have the highest concentration of Michelin star restaurants ?
No, that's Tokyo.
San Francisco is okay because of its access to high end seafood but no where near its costs based on a multitude of criteria if you've been (let alone cooked) outside the US, but its far from mediocre as many are portraying it here.
Granted, I think guys like Patterson in SF were doing interesting work aesthetically, but as a chef/cook I'm more inclined to say the East bay had more exciting and appealing stuff going on culinary speaking before COVID than SF has had in the last decade. People were taking more risks, then just banking on selling the same offerings year after year.
Just because a place is fully booked and selling mediocre entries and upselling bottles of wine to yuppies and silicon valley's mid-tier earners pretending to be nouveau riche doesn't mean its exciting to someone who actually has an eye for these things professionally speaking.
Also, most chefs will tell you Michelin guide stars, especially those that earned them before the mid 80s, are the equivalent of gloried yelp ratings for how front of house made them feel that day. It's well known that the people that visit the restaurants for reviews do not have a background in culinary arts, beyond writing articles or going on TV, despite being well paid 'food critics.'
Very few have ever worked a service in their life, and even less have any idea of what is involved in pairing and matching flavours in a balanced way, what most see is: nice decour + professional staff + pretty plate of food + some exclusivity = Star.
In fact, for the last part of the decade many of chefs/cooks sought to create a different platform (Repsol's Sun guide had actual chefs on staff) to advertise their restaurant but this is mainly just marketing, and COVID really messed things up so may be entirely irrelevant soon, and to be honest I'd like to see a US based one with actual chefs (mix of active and retired with multiple unannounced visits) to gauge things that food critics can easily overlook. Most French cooking is sauce based because it tended to use mediocre cuts of meat in France, these were words straight from Paul Bocuse, the Godfather of modern French cuisine and would be well understood by most cooks, even those like myself that find French cuisine entirely blase.
So much of the reputation it gets is clearly an over emphasis on its French roots in France, rather than taking a local understanding of seasonal offerings to match the local palette, which in the US is very meat/protein based. So, while a Bouillabaisse has no place in a place like landlocked Idaho, but a place offering it could do really well amongst the locals and thus should be judged on its own merit, rather than what someone who just came back from weekending in Marseilles has to say on the matter.
Personally speaking, I've eaten enough oysters, and blue fin tuna from all over the World for a lifetime by the time I was in my 30s, so these places don't impress me much anymore as my pallet has grown weary from small variations of high end/expensive proteins and its predictable executions; so, to me a place like Pho 79 in N. Orange County that got a James Beard award (I had no idea until I got there) despite having ABYSMAL front of house service but literately the best broth and ox tail I've ever had was really pleasant.
To me it was well deserved as they even had the little chairs outside, like in Vietnam, in the Winter when I went last year. It was charming, and the cramped small parking lot and long line gave me pause as I knew it had all the hallmarks of what walking into a well kept secret amongst many locals looked like.