What are you doing this Saturday and Sunday? If you want to see some of the best bets in sustainable products — like cork stools or miniature trees in gift tins — produced by local and international designers, visit Branch during its two-day “flash store” launch event. After the success of its Web site, this…
Chocolate with pink peppercorns. Chocolate infused with chili powder. Chocolate from Spain, Belgium, even Chicago’s Vosges Chocolate. If you love the brown stuff — and I do — a visit to Chocolate Covered in San Francisco’s hip Noe Valley is well worth the trip. It features shelves of uber exotic chocolates, including those with 100%…
I enjoyed a great lunch last week at Chic’s Seafood Restaurant and Bar with my friends Martina and Sharon. The view from this floor-to-windows second story wood and glass eatery at Pier 39 is absolutely amazing, sweeping from the East Bay hills and Alcatraz Island to the Golden Gate Bridge and Pier 39’s fleet of…
This green pioneering house makes Earth Day proud. It features a rainwater catchment system that collects up to 20,000 gallons of water annually, cleans it and stores it in tanks below the house. It uses 100-year-old railroad ties from Southeast Asia for flooring in its great room. It has solar panels on its roof that…
My grandparents survived the quake and my father was born five months later. Tomorrow morning around 4:30 am, they’ll be there in spirit with about 25,000 people at Lotta’s Fountain at the corner of Kearny and Market Streets to celebrate, commemorate and salutate the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire —…
Last week, my wife paid more for the toll on the Golden Gate Bridge ($5) than she did for her dinner of a Margarita ($2) and a huge taco ($2.75). Let me explain… She joined her brother for $2 Happy Hour Margaritas at Rouge, one of San Francisco’s newest and most dazzling dancing and drinking…
The SF Chronicle features an Earthquake Week column each Friday. This week, it shows there were 103 quakes in the Bay Area. 103!!! The average is only 65, but most are less than a magnitude of 3.0 those of us who grew up with earthquakes hardly notice them. Seismologists say “the big one” is coming….
Take a French book, a few famous bridges, a national landmark that travels at 9mph, temperate weather, and hundreds of remarkable restaurants. What do you get? The promise by the Michelin Restaurant Guide to publish its first ever SF Bay Area book. Michelin introduced New York City as its first American guide last November with…
We’ve all gone from coffee shop to hotel lobby in search of the holy grail for staying in touch: Free Wi-Fi. By the end of the year all across the 40 hills of San Francisco, if all goes right, you’ll be able to pull in a no-fee, high-speed Internet signal, courtesy of Google and Earthlink….
As a native, there are only a handful of SF hotels I’ve actually stayed in. The Westin St. Francis at Union Square is one of them. Maybe it’s because it was built in 1904 and served those left homeless after the 1906 quake. Or because it’s renowned for its food and service as the site…
My home town is known for its eclectic restaurants. Seafood. Chinese. Cal Asian. Mexican. American. Mediterranean. Pizza. Barbecue. You name it, we got it. SF Chronicle critic Michael Bauer just published his annual list of the Top 100 across the North Bay, the Peninsula and South Bay, Berkeley and Oakland, and the city itself. It…
Charles Hodgkins is loco for burritos. So loco, in fact, that he has a Website called BurritoEater.com. He has reviewed 325 burritos (not tacos or enchiladas) at 170 San Francisco restaurants. The best get nine mustaches out of a possible 10 and only seven have received that lofty honor. His favorites? Taqueria San Francisco at…