SF Weekly’s “Best of San Francisco” highlights hot spots near hostels

Posted by Mary on May 25, 2010

Every year, SF Weekly publishes their "Best of San Francisco" list of bars, restaurants, people, shops, and other random recommendations from its editorial staff.

And every year, some pretty cool places near our three San Francisco hostels make the list.

The 2010 Best of San Francisco publication is a whopping 153 pages long, so we’ve winnowed it down to the things we know you’ll care about most: anything within 7 blocks of your hostel.

All the descriptions below are from SFWeekly.com. Check out their site for the rest of the Best of 2010 listings.

Near the Downtown and City Center hostels

Best Pecan Pie: Farmerbrown
Where: 25 Mason Street (at Market)
Distance: 2 blocks from the Downtown Hostel / 7 blocks from the City Center Hostel

Pecan pie may be the most satisfying, deeply pleasurable dessert known to humankind. It’s simplicity itself: nothing but pie crust filled with corn syrup, butter, and nutmeats. Too often, though, the crust is dry, the syrup is gummy, and the pecans are chewy, burnt, or practically nonexistent. Farmerbrown, a stylish nouveau soul restaurant in the Tenderloin, crafts a triumphant pecan pie with a flaky crust, a luscious filling, and an abundance of rich, buttery, crunchy pecans. The flavor is candylike without being too sweet, the texture is moist and succulent, and there’s a warming hint of bourbon in the filling. The house mint julep makes a fine accompaniment.

Best Cheesecake: Fish & Farm
Where: 339 Taylor Street (at O’Farrell)
Distance: 5 blocks from the City Center Hostel / 2 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

If "cheesecake" conjures up an image of a dense, possibly lethal, ivory-colored brick, you haven’t tried Fish & Farm’s cheesecake. Housemade ricotta is packed into a mason jar with layers of cranberry jam, parfait style. The light, lemony cheese contrasts delectably with the tart, brisk jam, and a generous topping of butter crumble adds crunch and heft. The jar, a bit of shtick concordant with the restaurant’s rustic ambience, makes scarfing the stuff in big spoonfuls all too easy. Yet, even if dessert were preceded by fried chicken, fish and chips, or a jumbo Niman Ranch pork chop, you won’t leave the table in a coma.

Best Kombucha: Crepe O Chocolat
Where: 75 O’Farrell Street (at Stockton)
Distance: 3 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

Hungry Union Square shoppers gravitate to this counter for its namesake crepes and beautiful French sandwiches. However, it’s also a wonderful spot to try potent, housemade kombucha, a fizzy, fermented tea touted as a health elixir for digestion, healthy skin and hair, liver function, and body alkalinity. Flavors change seasonally, but skew away from the overly sweet flavors typical of mass-marketed kombucha and toward more sophisticated tastes like rose, ginger, noni (a tropical fruit), and cayenne.

Best Sound System (Club): 222 Hyde
Where: 222 Hyde Street
Distance: 2 blocks from the City Center Hostel / 7 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

The newly reopened 222 Hyde finally has a clean yet bass-booming sound system — featuring speakers from U.K. designer Turbosound — to suit memorable nights of thumping techno badness from the club’s always-exciting rotation of local and out-of-town DJs. For a relatively small room, the sound-system upgrade makes an enormous difference. Most importantly, there’s a drastic reduction in the ringing of your ears afterward, so the sound doesn’t follow you home in the dark.

Best New Club Night: "Icee Hot"
Where: 222 Hyde Street
Distance: 2 blocks from the City Center Hostel / 7 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

The city’s newest club night, "Icee Hot," is the brainchild of DJs Disco Shawn, Low Limit, Ghosts on Tape, and Rollie Fingers. Collectively, the globe-trotting beat aficionados import fresh talent from overseas for the monthly party, like buzzworthy funk and bass music producers Shortstuff and Martin Kemp, who assist in the sweaty, late-night delivery of future house, garage, and wonky beat tunes through 222 Hyde’s awesome soundsystem. Icee Hot’s offering of free admission before 10:30 p.m., and charging only $5 thereafter, doesn’t hurt its appeal.

Best Bar Dance Party: "1964 Night" at the Edinburgh Castle
Where: 950 Geary Street (at Larkin)
Distance: 2 blocks from the City Center Hostel / 6 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

This dance party gets the records spinning every second and fourth Wednesday of the month. While the red Christmas lights could come across as gauche, they prove to be casually intimate as you and other stylish fauxhemians are transported to 1964. That’s right: The Shirelles, the Sapphires, the Poppies, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas abound. Whether you’re tragically hip or completely clueless, once you’ve tried the handy selection of whiskeys and taken in the sounds, there’s no way you won’t be dancing with a smile on your face.

Best Friendly Wine Bar: Rosebowl Florist and Wine Bar
Where: 601 Van Ness Avenue (at Golden Gate)
Distance: 4 blocks from the City Center Hostel

The Rosebowl has to be the tiniest, friendliest, most fragrant wine bar in the city. Tucked behind the fountain at Opera Plaza, it’s a cozy, sweet-smelling place to buy a bouquet or a boutonniere, but the shop’s centerpiece is the seven-stool bar in back where gregarious owner Deidra O’Merde spins stories and pours the grape juice. The bar’s focus is on little-known family wineries O’Merde has discovered in her travels throughout the state: Dehlinger’s Russian River chardonnays, Rancho Sisquoc’s Santa Barbara tre vini, and the cabs and pinots of Napa’s Arger-Martucci. There are generally 60 bottles on the menu (just about everything is available by the taste, half-glass, glass, or flight) along with cashews, pistachios, and a selection of cheeses and crisps. The vibe is mellow, the price is right (O’Merde can’t imagine charging double digits for a glass of wine), and it’s open every weekday until 7:30 or 8 p.m. — perfect for that after-work or preconcert pick-me-up.

Best Place to Drink Around the Globe: Tommy’s Joynt
Where: 1101 Geary Street (at Van Ness)
Distance: 4 blocks from the City Center Hostel

In an age when pubs ply patrons with 200 esoteric Belgian offerings at insane prices, isn’t it nice to know you can drink beer from well over 30 countries and rarely drop more than $5 per beer to do so? Bar and beer manager Zack Katzman is Tommy’s Joynt founder Tommy Harris’ third cousin, helping keep this breweriana-laden watering hole in the family for 63 years. Among the selection of 100-plus bottles, barflies can globe-trot through the alphabet of beer from Armenia, Brazil, and Croatia all the way to Vietnam without so much as leaving the barstool. And with nearly all the imports cruising down your throat for $3.50 a pop, you can set sail and get three sheets to the wind. Not to mention the buffalo stew is out of this world.

Best Piano Bar: Lefty O’Doul’s
Where: 333 Geary Street (at Powell)
Distance: 1 block from the Downtown Hostel

The piano bar is a dying institution ripe for resuscitation, a happier, friendlier retro-karaoke experience where an interactive audience is gathered around a live musician instead of a glorified jukebox, and a good time is had by all. The institution is alive and well at Lefty O’Doul’s, where piano man Frank O’Connor tickles the ivories every night at 9 and coaxes warbling and camaraderie from the assembled crooner-tipplers. The playbook tends toward the lounge lizard-like, with "Dust in the Wind," "She’s a Lady," and a selection of Irish schmaltz proffered in full-synthesizer chicky-boom splendence, and the sports fan/hipster/tourist clientele is entertaining, to say the least. Lefty’s is an old-school cafeteria and hofbrau with generous platters of turkey, ham, and corned beef and cabbage; an abundance of vintage baseball memorabilia; and a long, convivial bar with two dozen beers on tap.

Best New Digital Art Hub: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
Where: 55 Taylor Street (at Turk)
Distance: 4 blocks from the Downtown Hostel / 6 blocks from the City Center Hostel

If you fancy yourself an art technologist — or an art enthusiast with a penchant for beautiful data visualizations and a curiosity about what something like the city’s taxi usage looks like in real time from a bird’s-eye point of view — you’ll love Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Born out of a revamp of a porn movie theater in the Tenderloin, it provides a supportive workspace for local digital artists — including Aaron Koblin, who produced the Radiohead video for "House of Cards" with the cool 3D depictions of faces. Visit Wednesday through Friday, 4 to 8 p.m., or check out the calendar on its Web site.

Best Free Famous Murals: Diego Rivera’s San Francisco Pieces
Where: 155 Sansome Street (at Sutter)
Distance: 7 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

There’s no beating the Mission for outdoor murals. Yet no art lovers should miss three of the city’s indoor walls emblazoned with the work of the Mexican godfather of the art form himself: Diego Rivera. Start at the City Club of San Francisco (check in with the ground floor lobby guard from 8 to 10 a.m. on weekdays for permission to go up to the 10th floor), where Rivera’s Allegory of California shows the Amazon deity Califa (our state’s namesake) dwarfing a tableau of workers from the region’s industries. Continue to the San Francisco Art Institute to take in The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Rivera painted himself and assistants at work on scaffolding right onto the mural. Then head out to City College’s Ocean Avenue campus, where you can easily spend an hour taking in the densely packed details — Frida Kahlo! Josef Stalin! — in the expansive Pan American Unity (check the Web site for weekday hours).

Best Bar to Shoot Pool: Jillian’s Billiards Club
Where: 101 Fourth Street (at Howard)
Distance: 6 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

San Francisco is a tough town for hustlers of all varieties, but the kind who carry pool cues are particularly hard up. Every bar with a billiards table seems crowded with douchebags, be they the sort with popped collars or those wearing their wallets on chains, and all are jockeying for the chance to show their dates that they can’t shoot worth a damn. Praise be that no-nonsense pool players still have a refuge at Jillian’s, a lonely bright spot amid the otherwise desolate Metreon shopping center. Featuring 10 top-grade billiards tables at $13 per hour on weeknights and $15 on weekends, Jillian’s is blessedly devoid of contrived atmosphere. It’s a fine place to spend an afternoon or evening when your only goals are to relax and take a good friend’s money in a game of nine-ball.

Best Camera Store: Camera Heaven
Where: 746 Larkin Street (at Ellis)
Distance: Less than 1 block from the City Center Hostel

Old cameras don’t die; they go to Camera Heaven. Which is to say they are repaired, not replaced, because nothing hurts owner David Tran like good glass from a vintage Rolleicord discarded before its time. Anything with a lens is within his scope, whether your point-and-shoot needs a mere cleaning to regain its autofocus, or your ancient shutter needs new gears made from scratch. Need a low-light lens pronto, or aren’t sure what flash you need to keep your photos from looking like crap? World-class pros and novices alike are treated with patience and respect, whether it’s learning what a lens filter does or getting a friendly reminder that cameras dislike dunks in water. Any fool with money can get geared up; it’s the repair and refurbishment savvy to stay geared up for a reasonable price quote — that doesn’t increase with time — that’s heavenly.

Best Rare Bookstore: Argonaut Book Shop
Where: 786 Sutter Street (at Jones)
Distance: 4 blocks from the Downtown Hostel

Careful where you step at Argonaut: There’s probably a $500 book or six in those stacks by your feet. One false move could mean a swift kick to a first-edition Mark Twain, Bret Harte, or Jack London. The bookstore specializes in rare books with a San Francisco or California connection. Not only does it offer the works of local literary masters, but you can also find pictorials depicting, say, the history of Telegraph Hill (bet you didn’t know that before Coit Tower was built, the peak sported a sign reading "WELCOME"). There’s also a stunning collection of paper ephemera, including 19th-century maps and World War I propaganda art.

Near the Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel

Best Swim: Aquatic Park
Where: Hyde Street (at Beach Street)
Distance: 0.2 miles

Swimmers intimidated by the Pacific’s wild waves can head instead to 415’s equivalent of a tidal pool in the extremely accessible, calm waters of Aquatic Park. There’s no need for membership in the nearby Dolphin Club (with its private beach, pah!): Note the many people cheerfully stripping down and jumping in for a few laps beneath the watchful eyes of tourists waiting for the Hyde Street cable car. Bathers range from marathon swimmers to doggy paddlers; then there are those who simply plop on the surrounding sand without bothering to get wet. After your dip, stroll on the pier — dodging the Segway tours — and observe the crabbers pulling Dungeness crabs and starfish from the Bay. No need to tell them where you elected to pee.

Best Sing-Along Aboard a Tall Ship: Sea Chantey night at the Hyde Street Pier
Where: Hyde Street at Jefferson
Distance: 0.5 miles

Most people don’t know they know a sea chantey, but they do — whether it’s "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?," "Good Night Ladies," and "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," or something incredibly obscene that after 150 years of social progress still isn’t fit for polite company. That’s because sea chanties are sailor songs, and people out at sea for months at a time tend to lose touch with niceties like manners. Since the Bay Area is the epicenter of America’s folk music scene, you can bet that the monthly Sea Chantey Sing on the Hyde Street Pier is recognized from coast to coast as a place where the masters of the music come to lead the crowd. It’s held from 8 p.m. to midnight on the first Saturday of every month; after 11 p.m., even the filthy songs are fair game. If that isn’t enough to get you to go, it’s held on board the historic tall ship Balclutha; hot chocolate, coffee, and cider are served; and it’s all free.