In his most recent blog entry, Chronicle food guru/restaurant critic Michael Bauer highlights the conspicuous absence of yakitoris and izakayas in the San Francisco dining scene. He also lambasts the cookie-cutter nature of the city’s Chinese, Thai and Indian restaurants while bemoaning the lack of non-taqueria Mexican restaurants. The commenters have overwhelmingly voted bagels as the missing culinary piece to the city, so excluding bagels, here’s our list of what’s missing from San Francisco.
5. BBQ: Yeah, there’s Big Nate’s Barbeque (Go Warriors) and Memphis Minnie’s BBQ, but neither are anything close to being destination spots. Give us a place with smokey ribs, succulent pulled pork and homemade corn bread and we’ll call it a day. As a whole, the Bay Area is really lacking good barbecue; what gives? Even LA has got us beat here …
4. Jewish Deli: We already mentioned the bagel hole (bad joke–sorry), but the lack of a decent place to get a traditional stack o’ pastrami on rye with a dollop of mustard has long been a source of aggravation for many displaced New Yorkers.
3. Sushi: Yeah, there are about 3,285 sushi restaurants in the city, but only a small fraction of them are good. How is this possible? San Francisco is on the Pacific Ocean! How does a restaurant even get subpar sushi? San Francisco is such an ingredient-based city, yet in terms of sushi, it’s still in the second (or even third tier) of “sushi cities” (behind NYC and LA). There’s only ONE ingredient in sashimi … the fish.
2. Korean: Our kingdom for dolsot bibimbap to be more widespread.
1. Filipino: According to Wikipedia, there are well over 250,000 Filipino-Americans living in the Bay Area, with Daly City housing 25,000 alone. Yet why is there ONE Filipino restaurant in San Francisco proper? Why are Filipino restaurants few and far between across the Peninsula? Why does New York City have seven times as many Filipino eateries? We need to know these things, because we could use some lumpia and pancit.
