The Kinora Guide to San Francisco

San Francisco Proper

1100 Market Street, Mid-Market

Kelly Wearstler’s flagship hotel design in America, opened in 2017 in a 1907 flatiron building at the corner of Market and McAllister. Every surface is considered — the wallpaper in the lobby, the millwork in the halls, the way the light falls in the elevators. Charmaine’s on the rooftop is one of the best hotel bars in the American West. Villon downstairs handles the restaurant side. If you want San Francisco at its most design-forward, this is where.

The Battery

717 Battery Street, Jackson Square

Technically a private club, but the 14 rooms on the upper floors are open to non-members, and staying there is one of the more particular San Francisco experiences you can have. A five-story social club built in a former marble works building, with a library, a rooftop garden, and a members’ dining room that runs at a level most public restaurants can’t touch. Come for a stay. Leave with a story. Half the fun is figuring out you were somewhere most guests don’t get to.

The Palace Hotel

2 New Montgomery Street, SoMa

The grand dame of San Francisco hotels, opened in 1875, destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, and rebuilt in 1909 exactly as it should have been. The Garden Court with its glass dome ceiling is one of the great American hotel rooms — twenty thousand square feet of stained glass and marble that still hosts high tea most weekends. Six hundred rooms, all recently renovated, all with the kind of proportions that only work in a building of a certain age. Come for the history. Stay for the Garden Court.

Hotel Drisco

2901 Pacific Avenue, Pacific Heights

A 1903 Edwardian on top of Pacific Heights, more like a small European hotel than a San Francisco one. Forty-eight rooms, complimentary morning car service to Union Square, evening wine and cheese in the lobby, and a location that puts you in one of the quietest, most beautiful neighborhoods in the city. Perfect for a longer stay. Perfect for anyone who wants San Francisco to feel more like a residential city than a tourist destination.

Cavallo Point Lodge

601 Murray Circle, Sausalito

Technically not San Francisco — it’s on the Sausalito side of the Golden Gate Bridge, in the former Fort Baker army base — but close enough to the city that it counts, and better than most hotels inside city limits. A collection of restored 1900s military officers’ quarters, plus new contemporary buildings, all inside a national park with a view directly under the bridge. Cooking school on-site, morning yoga, hiking trails at your door. The kind of hotel that changes the trip. Worth the fifteen-minute drive from downtown.

State Bird Provisions

1529 Fillmore Street, Western Addition

Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski’s Michelin-starred room, opened in 2011 in the Fillmore, and named the best restaurant in America by Bon Appétit the year it opened. The trick is the dim sum cart service — small plates rolling past your table on carts, all night, all changing constantly. You point at what you want. It arrives. You point at more. It’s a menu without a menu, and it still works fifteen years later. Reservations are the hard part. There is usually a line before opening for walk-ins.

Nopa

560 Divisadero Street, NoPa

The room that defined a neighborhood, opened in 2006 and still one of the best late-night dinner spots in the American West. California cooking done with wood fire, a menu that changes with what’s coming in from local farms, and a room that stays loud and warm until close. Order the flatbread. Order the pork chop. Sit at the counter if you can. This is what a great neighborhood restaurant is supposed to feel like.

Zuni Café

1658 Market Street, Hayes Valley

The room that helped invent California cuisine, opened in 1979, still doing the same roast chicken for two that has been on the menu since day one — brick-oven roasted, served with a bread salad, and it takes an hour, and you order it when you sit down and don’t ask why. The wood-fired oven has been running for over forty years. The room is unmistakable. Come for lunch. Come for late dinner. Come for the chicken.

Californios

355 11th Street, SoMa

Val M. Cantu’s Mexican tasting-menu restaurant, and one of the two Mexican restaurants in the United States with two Michelin stars. Sixteen seats. One seating a night. The menu draws on Cantu’s Texas-Mexican heritage but refracts it through California ingredients and modernist technique. If you want to see the highest expression of Mexican cooking in America right now, this is where.

Mister Jiu’s

28 Waverly Place, Chinatown

Brandon Jew’s Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant, in an upstairs banquet hall in the heart of Chinatown. California-Chinese cooking, done with real seriousness — hand-pulled noodles, whole fish, a menu that draws on Cantonese tradition without being a museum piece. The room overlooks Waverly Place through big windows. The bar is worth its own visit. This is Chinese food written for the twenty-first century.

Kis Café

432 Hayes Street, Hayes Valley

Luke Sung came out of retirement in 2025 to open this small Hayes Valley café, and it has quietly become one of the more interesting California cuisine rooms in the city. Small, ingredient-driven, unpretentious. The menu is short. Everything on it is worth ordering. Sit at the counter. Order the special. This is the California cuisine you were told existed and thought was gone.

Trick Dog

3010 20th Street, The Mission

The Mission cocktail bar that has been on every “best bars in America” list since it opened in 2013, and still deserves it. The menu is themed and completely changes twice a year — the format has been everything from a horoscope to a Chinese takeout menu to a Pantone chart. The drinks are always excellent. The room stays loud. Come at seven for a table. Come at ten for the scene.

Charmaine’s at San Francisco Proper

at San Francisco Proper, 1100 Market Street

The rooftop bar at the Proper Hotel, and one of the best-looking rooms in the city. Kelly Wearstler-designed, with 360-degree views of San Francisco. Cocktails are properly done. The room stays elegant even when it fills. Come at sunset. Order whatever the bartender’s excited about. This is the rooftop the rest of the city is quietly measuring itself against.

The View Lounge

at the Marriott Marquis, 780 Mission Street

The 39th-floor bar in the Marriott Marquis, and the least-cool famous bar in the city — meaning most locals don’t go, which is precisely why you should. The view is the point. Order a drink. Watch the fog roll in over the city. Feel very briefly like you’re in a movie.

Comstock Saloon

155 Columbus Avenue, Jackson Square

A restored Barbary Coast saloon, in continuous operation as a bar since 1907, redone with proper pre-Prohibition cocktails and a menu of oysters and other classics. The room is unmistakable — pressed tin, dark wood, an oil painting behind the bar. This is the San Francisco bar you imagine when you imagine a San Francisco bar.

Bar Agricole

355 11th Street, SoMa

The award-winning cocktail bar that reopened after a pandemic pause and is doing some of the most rigorous drink work in the city. Farm-to-glass sourcing, seasonal menus, and cocktails that hold up to real scrutiny. The design of the room won a James Beard award. So did the drinks. Come for the seriousness. Stay for the ease of it.

Sightglass Coffee

270 7th Street, SoMa

The San Francisco roaster that helped define the third-wave coffee movement, in a soaring converted warehouse in SoMa. Pour-overs, espresso, and a room that gets treated like a co-working space in the mornings. The upstairs balcony is the best seat if you can grab it. Sit for an hour. Watch SoMa wake up.

Ritual Coffee Roasters

1026 Valencia Street, The Mission

The Mission coffee shop that has been at this corner since 2005, one of the original serious-coffee San Francisco spots, and still one of the best. Long wood counter, a small selection of pastries, and a Valencia Street corner that stays quietly busy from opening. Order a cortado. Read a book. This is a working coffee shop, not a photo op.

Saint Frank Coffee

2340 Polk Street, Russian Hill

The Russian Hill coffee shop where the neighborhood actually gets its coffee, in a bright corner room on Polk with big windows and better light than most cafés bother with. Espresso done well. Pour-overs done well. The pastries change, and are always worth the visit. Come mid-morning. Sit by the window. Watch Polk Street.

The Presidio

Presidio of San Francisco

The former army base at the northwest tip of the city, now a national park with fifteen hundred acres of trails, beaches, forests, and hills. Walk the Batteries to Bluffs trail for the best coastal views in the city. Walk the Ecology Trail for the best forest walk. Eat at the Presidio Social Club for lunch. The Presidio is what San Francisco was before it was San Francisco, and you can walk through it in an afternoon.

Golden Gate Park

Bounded by Fulton, Lincoln, Stanyan, and the Great Highway

One thousand acres of urban park, larger than Central Park, and better used by locals than tourists. The Japanese Tea Garden is worth the small entry fee. The de Young Museum is one of the best contemporary art museums on the West Coast. The California Academy of Sciences has a rainforest inside it. You could spend three days here. Give it at least half a day.

A Walk Across the Golden Gate Bridge

Presidio to Sausalito

Yes, everyone does it. Yes, you should too. The walk is a mile and three-quarters across, and if you time it for late afternoon you’ll get the best light. Bring a jacket, even in July. On the Sausalito side, walk down to the ferry terminal and take the ferry back to Fisherman’s Wharf. That way you get to see the city from the water on the return. Give it three hours.

The Ferry Building

1 Ferry Building, The Embarcadero

A 1898 building on the Embarcadero that has become the city’s best food market and one of the best in America. Blue Bottle, Hog Island Oysters, Cowgirl Creamery, Acme Bread, Boulettes Larder — all under one roof, most of them the original locations of what have become nationwide brands. Come on Saturday morning for the farmers’ market outside. Come any day for the shops inside. This is what a real food hall looks like.

Alcatraz

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay

Yes, it’s touristy. Go anyway, and book the night tour if you can. The audio tour is genuinely well-done — narrated by former guards and inmates — and the boat ride out and back is one of the better ways to see the city from the water. Two hours on the island. Give yourself the whole afternoon.

A Walk Through the Mission

Valencia Street, 24th Street, and Balmy Alley

Not a destination. A walk. Valencia Street is the Mission’s main artery — bookstores, boutiques, taquerias, coffee shops. 24th Street is where the neighborhood’s Mexican character still lives most fully. Balmy Alley is one block of murals that have been repainted continuously since the 1970s. Combine all three into an afternoon and you’ll see the real Mission, not the tourist version.

City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus Avenue, North Beach

The independent bookstore that Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened in 1953, still standing on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, still one of the best independent bookstores in America. The poetry section upstairs is the reason to come. The staff picks are actually curated. Give yourself an hour. Buy something you’d never have bought otherwise. That’s the point of a bookstore like this.

Heath Ceramics

2900 18th Street, The Mission

The Sausalito-founded ceramics company’s flagship San Francisco factory-store, on the corner of 18th and Alabama in the Mission. All the ceramics are made in the factory attached to the shop — you can watch through the windows. Modernist California design at its best. Every dinner plate you own after a visit here will make you want to throw out every other dinner plate you own.

Aggregate Supply

806 Valencia Street, The Mission

The Mission’s best-curated general store, with a mix of vintage denim, workwear, home goods, and small-batch pantry items. The kind of shop where you go in for a T-shirt and leave with a hand-forged knife and a jar of olive oil. Owner-selected, with a good eye. Worth the browse.

Bi-Rite Market

3639 18th Street, The Mission

Not a boutique in the strict sense — it’s a grocery store — but the best grocery store in San Francisco, and one of the best in America. Curated wine, cheese, meats, and produce, plus their own ice cream across the street. If you’re staying anywhere with a kitchen, this is where to shop. If you’re not, this is where to grab picnic supplies for the Presidio.

Erica Tanov

3652 Sacramento Street, Pacific Heights

The San Francisco designer’s Pacific Heights boutique, and one of the more considered women’s shops in the city. Erica Tanov has been making quiet, well-cut clothing since 1990. The store carries her own line plus a small edited selection of others. The kind of shop the locals go to when they want to buy something they’ll wear for the next decade.