Category Archives: Newspapers

Nov 18, 2007

VEGETARIANISM is a simple idea — don’t eat animals — with an ancient pedigree. According to the Vegetarian Resource Group, 4.7 million American adults are vegetarians or vegans (people who avoid all animal products, including cheese and eggs).

Yet even in San Francisco, with its countercultural and fresh food traditions, only about one in a hundred restaurants in the Zagat Survey is vegetarian. And while new vegetarian restaurants have been opening in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco’s scene has been expanding differently as beloved restaurants open new locations.

Read it on the NYT site…

September 9, 2007

THE wine bar is a simple idea, yet it can be fraught. A wall of unfamiliar labels, obscure descriptions and extravagantly wine-schooled patrons can evoke a nagging vertigo.

But in San Francisco, a city known for both its casual culture and obsession with quality food and drink, a visit to a wine bar can be an unpretentious pleasure. The city has long had wine bars — the London Wine Bar, downtown, opened in 1974 and is said to have been the first in the United States. Now, a wave of new wine bars has been opening, often in unexpected neighborhoods.

I met with Alder Yarrow, the obsessive and opinionated writer behind vinography.com, a blog that exhaustively chronicles San Francisco’s wine bars. We sat at the long zinc bar at Nectar (3330 Steiner Street; 415-345-1377; www.nectarwinelounge.com), a wine bar in the Marina District. The place was just starting to fill up, and summer evening light flooded the tall, narrow space.

Read it on the NYT site…

September 2, 2007

Part of a worldwide wave of re-envisioned mid-20th-century hotels, this once-drab Best Western reopened in June after a thorough transfusion of Japanese hip. Plasma screens shimmer with anime and monster movies under a muraled ceiling in the lobby. A vending machine sells T-shirts and cuddly things from the Asian-American pop culture brand Giant Robot. In an interesting hybrid, the hotel remains affiliated with Best Western but is managed by the Bay Area hotel company Joie de Vivre.

Read it on the NYT site…