This is a little late but my girlfriend and I are going be in San Francisco tomorrow from 8 AM to 6 PM and I don't have a very clear idea of what to do or how to get around. I was wondering if you guys had any ideas?

My plan so far was to go to a farmers market taking place near golden gate park, maybe rent a bike and ride over the bridge and check out Sausalito, Then uber it over to fisherman's wharf. Walk around a bit and head over to china town.

Not super sure on what restaurants to go to. Yuet lee is on the list. Oh also maybe the tonga room, is the tonga room cool or just a gimmick?

I wouldn't mind completely scrapping the plan I have so if you guys have any ideas let me know. A little info about us, we don't really drink much. Anything animal related is a plus. Preferably the food price range is between 10-25$ each. I would appreciate any help, thanks.

Hey,

How are you getting here? Where will you be at 8 and where do you need to head to at 6?

That's sort of a crazy agenda for 8-6.

Cheap food you have a lot of solid options. Yuet Lee for chinese is a good one. Various taco/burrito places in the mission. Ike's place for crazy sandwiches. Lots of excellent Vietnamese places.

Def drop tonga room from the list. It's a silly super gimmicky tiki and really only fun to go get really drunk with a big group, and there's not much else you'd want to do around there.

Golden gate park is cool you can take the muni or bus out there and go all the way to the ocean.

Sausalito plan doesn't really make sense time wise with the rest of your plan. If you want to do that that'll eat up most of your day. Riding across the bridge is cool, and taking ferry back is cool too.

Sounds like you're on a budget. UberPool and Lyft line are really cheap for getting around.

Fisherman's wharf is prob a good touristy thing to visit, and there are seals.

I think walking around Chinatown is great.

Thanks a lot El Diablo super helpful stuff. Ok I guess we'll plan on just doing golden gate park, fisherman's wharf, and china town.

We land in SFO and need to leave for Sacramento around 6. I don't know the best way to get from SF to SAC, I think the mega bus or greyhound seem reasonable. Please let me know if there is a better way.

Aside from Yuet Lee do you have any recommendations in chinatown?

For dinner I am debating between Suppenkuche, Little Star, and Magnolia Brewings' BBQ place.

Appreciate your, advice now that I look at it my original plan had a 0% success rate.

Hey,

In Chinatown there are lots of awesome little bakeries where they sell dim sum and chinese pastries for super cheap. Just look for ones where lots of elderly chinese women are fighting to get to the counter.

Suppenkuche is kinda overpriced and boring imo, but certainly tasty german food. Little star and magnolia are both great, but I'd definitely recommend little star. ****ing love their deep dish pizza.

Don't really know about getting to sac other than driving. I know there are buses and trains, and it's not a long trip so I doubt it really matters that much what you take.

Hey, you should check out some food trucks. I really enjoyed that part of SF.

I'm considering taking a job in Los Gatos - any nice areas to live down there? Either a decent downtown with lots of stuff to walk to. Or maybe a place with a deck and some trees - up in the hills to the west maybe?

Lots of very nice places in the area. They are also correspondingly priced, unfortunately.

Downtown Los Gatos is excellent, as is nearby Saratoga, so if you can afford it, both are good options. To the east, there's Willow Glen and Campbell, both of which are quite nice. To the north is Mountain View. The downtown area of San Jose itself is pretty good these days, too.

Lots of options, all with different flavors and tradeoffs. I've been in the area (just south of Willow Glen, personally) for about 8 years now and love it.

School districts, housing prices, etc, all vary a fair bit. You'll want to do a lot of research and driving around exploring before making a purchase or signing a lease.

Thanks a lot that's good info. You're my new and only BFF in the San Jose area!

Seems like a decent place cost/value-wise to explore some nearby RV living (if you have any interest in that sort of thing).

Used to go out there a bunch. Fun little downtown like a lot of the SF Peninsula towns (though technically it might be too far South to be classified as such )

RV living sounds very very interesting actually.

I like the fact that it's further south. I'm hoping the Silicon Valley douchiness isn't as strong that far down. I have no desire to life in SF again and commute that far (or pay SF rents).

SVD is still gonna be strong in Los Gatos-proper, but it's probably at the Southern tip of all that?

At least you can flee to the hills/trees/parks.

Google says it's only 30 minutes from Santa Cruz to Los Gatos. If I come in late and leave late I could probably live with crusty stoner douches instead of SVD.

Coming over the hill from Santa Cruz is a pretty nice drive, but during anything remotely close to normal commute times, it gets crazy crowded. Sounds like your work schedule is pretty flexible, though, which may help you avoid the worst of that.

Oh, and Los Gatos doesn't have too much of the SVD vibe. It, and Saratoga even more so, tend to be more old money than SV tech money. Santa Cruz is much, much more laid back than either.

Is there anywhere reasonable to live in the hills between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz? I always love that drive on Skyline Blvd. I'd love to rent a little place with a deck where I can look at trees.

There's gotta be some spots in the Santa Cruz mountains that fit the bill, esp. if you don't mind commuting a ways. Boulder Creek, et al.?

Spending a weekend in SF in June and going to the Giants/D-Backs game Sunday afternoon. Any pre-game suggestions?

Are Ryoko and Sakana still the top two SF Sushi recs?

This weekend is the start of a 2-week California vacation/road trip my wife and I are planning. I'm trying to decide between two routes out of town:

Both start:

Drive down Geary to Cliff House, stop there or somewhere along the way for breakfast.
Geary to HWY 1 to Half Moon Bay.

From Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz I'm trying to decide between two options:
1. 92 to Skyline to Big Basin to 9 to Santa Cruz
2. HWY 1 the whole way, with a stop at Ano Nuevo

Which drive is more scenic? Which park is more unique? Since we only need to make it to Monterey, I would probably plan on some hiking at whichever park we pick.

Our stops the rest of the trip are Monterey, Paso Robles, Sequoia/Kings, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Sonoma.

Hey, cool thread. El D referred to this thread in a LCP thread; I didn't even know this forum existed.

I noticed there wasn't a lot about Oakland posted, at least not in the past ~500 posts. I've lived in the Oakland / Emeryville / Berkeley / Albany area for almost 20 years now. Any interest in me posting some East Bay stuff?

Cal,

Def!

I'll start it off with some East bay places I really like

Angeline's - awesome Louisiana/southern food

Tupper & reed - new fancy cocktail place. I haven't actually been yet but know some of the bartenders there and they are great.

Boss burger - awesome burgers, like high end fast food burgers.

Little star - awesome deep dish pizza

Honor - more tasty fancy cocktails

Trappist - great beer bar

Rare barrel - excellent sour beer brewery

China village - take a guess

Haven't been to Trappist but can confirm love for it from a couple people I know.

Let me first address the elephant in the room. Yes: Oakland is dangerous. No: Oakland - at least most of the places one would go - is not any more dangerous than the rest of the Bay Area.

Property crime is endemic to the whole urban area. So if you're going to take it personally when someone steals your car or your kid's tricycle (really, thieves? ), I guess move out to the suburbs. Rich areas get targeted for property crime as much ad poor areas.

Violent crime, on the other hand, is less widespread. As a matter of fact, as scary as the murder numbers are, what's scarier is that they're almost entirely in 5-6 neighborhoods. This map is a little dated (the data is from one month in 2008), but shows the general pattern of violent crime - murders, robberies, assault, and rapes. Each violent crime is a red dot, and I've added green and orange circles to sort of highlight that most neighborhoods have little violent crime.



Actually, since 2008, Uptown has been radically gentrified, carving out a little violence-free bubble. Downtown west of Broadway has also been gentrified.

This pattern basically holds for most of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. Whether you're visiting or looking to live in the area, your exact neighborhood is going to matter a lot more than the name of the city.

The bottom line is that you should take Standard Big City Precautions when you're in the area - whether you're in Union Square or at UC Berkeley or Downtown Oakland - but you don't need to fear anything above Standard Big City Precautions.

Unless, of course, you wander into red-dotted neighborhoods looking for drugs, prostitutes, or gang members. (Few large-scale gangs exist any more, most violence is perpetrated by micro-gangs with small turf sizes.)

Restaurants I like

Lungomare (Jack London Square): Italian, great squid ink pasta.

Le Cheval (Downtown): Vietnamese, hard to pick favorite foods but I do love their Vietnamese coffee.

Restaurant Peony (Chinatown): Chinese, but I basically only go for dim sum. Fair warning: non-Chinese people, including bananas like me, are brutally discriminated against. Totally worth the harassment though.

Shooting Star Cafe (Chinatown): Hong Kong style cafe, open really late at night and an overall happening spot.

Hawker's Faire (Uptown): omg omg omg pr0k belly

Oliveto's (Rockridge): Italian. Don't remember much of the main courses but I always end up eating way too much antipasta.

Cactus Taqueria (Rockridge): Mexican, one of my favorite stops for a quick bite with my kids.

Zachary's (Rockridge): Chicago deep dish pizza. Better than Chicago's Chicago deep deep pizza IMO.

Smitten (Rockridge): Ice cream. They make it on the spot with big tubes of liquid nitrogen. The only real competition for best ice cream is Ici in Berkeley.

Bake Sale Betty's (Temescal): Awesome chicken sandwich. Not-awesome line that you have to wait in if you want said sandwich. Get there before they open.

Koryo & Sahn Maru (Temescal): two separate Korean restaurants but they're right across the street from one another and both have great BBQ.

Commis (Piedmont): Oakland's only Michelin-starred restaurant so I feel obliged to mention it. I've only been there once, when it first opened, and by accident (we had intended to go to Restaurant Jojo but didn't realize Commis had taken over), and to be honest, it was not memorable (reviews at the time seem to have agreed, it got better over time).

Jong Ga House (Adam's Point): my favorite Korean restaurant. BBQ is good, but their panchan is top notch.

Mijori (Grand): Our "everyday" Japanese place. Not the world's best sushi but really good and it's reasonably priced.

Ikaros (Grand): Greek. Lamb chops FTW! And the kolokithia (zucchini strips).

Cheese Steak Shop (Lakeshore): Best Philly cheese steaks, better than Pat's or Gino's IMO although a friend from Philly insists neither Pat's nor Gino's has Philly's best cheese steaks so YMMV.

Growler's Den (Glenview): English pub food, but with crack in it or something because everything is just so ****ing good. "Mushy peas" sounds terrible but is in fact anti-terrible and will annihilate your expectations to form a Higgs boson and a gamma ray burst.

Bellanico (Glenview): Italian. The food is good but the real reason I go there are the desserts, especially the affogato.

Full House Cafe (Laurel): Diner, but I heard the owner retired. New owners are supposedly changing a lot of things, but they used to have the best beet hash. When my son was at that age where he could sign but not talk, I taught him to sign "boat" to refer to the restaurant.

Sparky's (Redwood Heights): Burgers. Blue cheese burgers, salmon burgers, they're all great, but the real reason to go there are the deep fried zucchini. Don't attempt to take it home, just scarf it there and burn your mouth, totally worth it.

Someone once used my identity to purchase a mobile line and a land line with an address in Oakland. I said to the cop "You have the address, why don't you go check it out?" He basically rolled his eyes at me like "You watch too many movies son." True story.

Emeryville

Rotten City Pizza (New York style pizza). I'm sitting here eating a mushroom slice right now. Aw yeah.

Prizefighter (bar): a happy hour favorite. They often have weird drink drink specials. Just get a pitcher of the special IMO. No food but they don't mind if you bring snacks.

Los Moles (Mexican): the Americanized faire is good, but the authentic stuff is why I go. I had some Aztec chicken dish with chocolate sauce which was really good. The menu rotates.

Honor (bar): I've heard the dinners are good but we mostly go there for drinks and appetizers.

Arizmendi (bakery / pizza): I actually forgot to mention their Lakeshore location in my Oakland post, but they have an Emeryville location too. Daily pizza (vegetarian) sells out, with good reason, so get there early.

Homeroom (mac & cheese): this may technically be in Oakland but whatever. You can choose cheese and toppings but the premise of the restaurant is simple. The clientele is a little hipstery for my taste but I'll put up with it.

Call,

Prizefighter is great.

Homeroom I think is suuuuuper overrated and there are tons of places with way better Mac and cheese.

I'm willing to entertain suggestions.

I also forgot:

Bucci's (Italian): This is our go-to fancy but not that fancy lunch place, like where we'd take interview candidates. Paninis are great.

Hong Kong East Ocean (Chinese): Dim Sum. Plus it has a great view.