One Night in Frisco...

[dfunghi]

B'Klyn, I would just add that if you have time and are in SF for breakfast go have some Dim Sum. The Dim Sum in NYC cant touch what is served in SF. I know from what I say since I lived in NYC for the first 30 years of my life and drove a yellow taxi and learned from Chineese cabbies about Dim Sum and I am from Flatbush so trust me on this. There are many options for Dim Sum from fancy and amazing to run down and delicious. There are dimsum in SF threads on this board. Other than that you have all the info already and it is just time to choose. Ah, choosing is always the hardest part.

[Catherine Nash]

I'm jumping on the Zuni bandwagon. The setting is rustic, but elegant in a relaxed way: copper bar, glittering bottles of booze littering the wall behind it, urban views of Market Street (which somehow manages to look nice from inside the restaurant), the semi-open kitchen and wood burning oven crackling in the far room. The service is excellent, not just because it's well done but because the staff knows their menu and their wine list exceedingly well. We've never been steered wrong. I never fail to find one ingredient on the menu that I can't identify, which is always fun (unless you're an egomaniac who hates being stumped, or a professional who's better informed than I am). The roast chicken salad is simple, hearty, almost peasant food but it's damn good and worth the 45 minute wait. The oyster selection is fantastic and I've literally never had a single bite there that didn't make me sigh with happiness.

[MaxH]

And if you can get across the bay to Berkeley, there is always the quintessential experince of Chez Pannise.  You could dine in the Cafe.

I second this and I thank artisan02 also for distinguishing what are, essentially, two separate restaurants on the two floors of The House At 1517 Shattuck. (Lately, some people have been from arriving out of town, even posting notes about the place, without knowing that.)

Both are notably moderately priced for their quality level. (Downstairs is the restaurant, upstairs the Café. In French terms -- as used in France rather than the US -- I think the former might be called a bistro or auberge, the latter more like a brasserie.)

Chez Panisse (the restaurant), 510-548-5525, was for many years the French Laundry of its day in the sense of being the hip restaurant that "you can't get into." The style however is very different from FL, it always aimed at something like a country-inn style, but emphasizing fresh and intense ingredients. Whence the journalistic term "California Cuisine." By the way, in the 1980s a number of New Yorkers arrived there owing to the buzz, found that they couldn't order cocktails or caviare, and then boasted that they saw through its reputation. (I'd mentioned that online in years past.)

This site has lots of recent reporting about CP and CPC if you search.

[MaxH]

Background info, tongue-in-cheek type, already pretty well known by everyone here anyway, I assume.

Don’t Call it Frisco was the 1953 Doubleday book by late local columnist-laureate Herb Caen, I just looked at my copy. (Caen was from Sacramento and did not move to SF until 1936, but was otherwise genuinely local.)

To say “Frisco” in the region is of course to mark oneself as an out-of-towner, possibly but not certainly redeemable. Equivalent to, in Oregon, pronouncing “William-ette” when you read Willamette; or pronouncing the state OreGON, like polygon. (As a sometimes Oregon resident I never heard anyone from there say that, anyway.) I think that saying “Avenue of the Americas” for 6th is almost as taboo, though I’ve heard the occasional New Yorker do so. (None of these shibboleths is in the same category as mispronouncing Scheveningen, which under some circumstances in the past would actually get you shot.)