The Slow Food Guide to San Francisco

And the Bay Area: Restaurants, Markets, Bars

Discover the rich culinary landscape of San Francisco and Northern California from a uniquely Slow Food perspective.

“The Slow Food Guide to San Francisco is an excellent book. It’s a wonderful reading experience, besides being eminently useful. It’s already replaced my Zagat. Congratulations on a terrific job.”

—Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

"The Slow Food Guide is a trip and a treasure... I'm having a great time with this book"

—Boz Scaggs, singer/songwriter

The San Francisco area, one of the world’s most popular travel destinations, boasts a tremendous food culture all its own. From the wine country of Sonoma and Napa counties to the agricultural lands farther south and inland, Northern California is blessed with a climate—both natural and human—in which good food and superlative cooking thrive.

The Slow Food Guide to San Francisco is the third in a series of destination city guides for “eco-gastronomic” travelers—those adventurous people who seek out quality, tradition, and the use of fresh, seasonal, and locally grown ingredients when they explore the restaurants, markets, and bars of a city.

Readers will find more than five hundred recommended restaurants, everything from Indian restaurants in the city’s Tenderloin District, to those temples of California cuisine that have helped define the way Americans look at food today.

Slow Food stands for quality and uniqueness in an age of bland conformity and sameness. And this latest guide reflects the passion and knowledge of local food experts, who share both the well-known and undiscovered treasures of this special city and region.

About Slow Food USA

Slow Food is an international movement, founded in Italy in 1986. Today it has some seventy thousand members in more than forty-five countries. Slow Food is dedicated to preserving regional cuisines and food traditions worldwide. In addition the organization advocates biodiversity, taste education, conviviality, and the pleasures of the table. Participants in the Slow Food movement are committed to finding alternatives to the standardization of the world's tastes while promoting local, seasonal foods and virtuous globalization.

Slow Food U.S.A. is a nonprofit organization that oversees the activities of its more than 12,500 members and 150 local chapters, or convivia. Each convivium advocates sustainability and biodiversity through educational events and public outreach that encourage the enjoyment of pure foods that are local, seasonal, and organically grown.

About the Editors

Sylvan Mishima Brackett was born in Kyoto, Japan, and grew up in the woods of the Sierra Nevada foothills. After starting a lunch stand at his high school, he cooked professionally in Portland, Oregon, San Franciso, and Grasse, France. Sylvan received his BA from Reed College where he wrote his senior thesis on the development of the idea of "good taste" in pre-revolutionary France. He is now Alice Waters's assistant at Chez Panisse and lives in Oakland with his wife.

Sue Moore works in the culinary field and belongs to a Slow Food chapter in the Bay Area. Wendy Downing is a former chef and a member of Slow Food Portland, Oregon.