The plates that define San Francisco: what they are, and where to eat the canonical version.
The plates that define San Francisco. what they are, where they came from, and where to eat the canonical version.
The Mission burrito is San Francisco's defining sandwich: a giant flour tortilla packed with rice, beans, meat, salsa and sometimes cheese or sour cream, foil-wrapped to the table.
Where: La Taqueria, El Farolito, La Cumbre, Taqueria Cancun, Taqueria El Buen Sabor
Price: $11 to $16
Cioppino is a tomato-and-wine seafood stew of Dungeness crab, clams, mussels, prawns and white fish, invented by Genoese fishermen in San Francisco's North Beach.
Where: Sotto Mare, Tadich Grill, Anchor Oyster Bar, Scoma's
Price: $38 to $58
San Francisco sourdough is a tangy, open-crumb white loaf made with a wild starter unique to the city's foggy climate, used for sandwiches and as the base of cioppino bread bowls.
Where: Boudin Bakery, Tartine Bakery, Acme Bread, Josey Baker Bread, Jane the Bakery
Price: $8 to $14 a loaf
Dungeness crab is the sweet, brown-meat Pacific crab the city eats from mid-November to June, served steamed and cracked at Swan Oyster Depot, Tadich Grill and the Wharf.
Where: Swan Oyster Depot, Tadich Grill, Sotto Mare, Anchor Oyster Bar
Price: $45 to $75 a whole crab
San Francisco dim sum is the longest-running Cantonese tea service in the United States, with carts at Hang Ah on Sacramento Street and bamboo-steamer counters citywide.
Where: Yank Sing, Hang Ah Tea Room, Good Mong Kok Bakery, Dragon Beaux, Z & Y Bistro
Price: $25 to $55 a head
Hangtown Fry is a Gold Rush omelette of oysters, bacon and eggs, named for the mining camp of Placerville and kept on the menu at Tadich Grill in San Francisco.
Where: Tadich Grill, Sam's Grill, Brenda's French Soul Food
Price: $24 to $32
Chinese chicken salad is a California Chinese American plate of shredded chicken, romaine, fried wonton skins and a sesame-soy dressing, popularised through San Francisco.
Where: Mister Jiu's, Z & Y Bistro
Price: $22 to $32
The American Irish coffee was perfected at the Buena Vista Cafe by the wharf in 1952, a glass of black coffee, brown sugar, Irish whiskey and a layer of softly whipped cream.
Where: The Buena Vista Cafe, Tosca Cafe, Vesuvio
Price: $13 to $16
Mission-style tacos are the doubled, soft, charred-corn-tortilla tacos served the length of 24th Street and Mission, with lengua, carnitas, al pastor, asada and pollo.
Where: La Taqueria, El Farolito, Tacolicious, Taqueria San Jose, Taqueria El Buen Sabor
Price: $4.50 to $7.50 a taco
Rice-A-Roni is the boxed pilaf of rice and broken spaghetti born in 1958 in San Francisco's Mission, marketed as the San Francisco Treat across the United States.
Price: $3 to $5 a box
The Mission burrito is San Francisco's defining sandwich: a giant flour tortilla packed with rice, beans, meat, salsa and sometimes cheese or sour cream, foil-wrapped to the table.
History: The shape was set in the late 1960s on 24th Street. Febronio Ontiveros at El Faro on Folsom is widely credited with the 1961 rice-and-foil package; La Cumbre on Valencia popularised the same wrap a few blocks west. The Mission style differs from a Sonoran burrito in three ways: rice is inside, the tortilla is steamed before rolling and the package is overstuffed to the point that the foil is structural. By the 1980s the form had spread from 24th Street to college towns across the country; Chipotle's founder Steve Ells trained in San Francisco before he opened his first room in Denver in 1993. The burrito is the rare American dish with a specific birth address.
Where to try it: La Taqueria, El Farolito, La Cumbre, Taqueria Cancun, Taqueria El Buen Sabor
Watch out for: Gluten, Dairy (if cheese added)
Cioppino is a tomato-and-wine seafood stew of Dungeness crab, clams, mussels, prawns and white fish, invented by Genoese fishermen in San Francisco's North Beach.
History: Cioppino was born in San Francisco. It dates to the 1890s, when Ligurian fishermen working out of Fisherman's Wharf would 'chip in' a piece of the day's catch to a communal pot, simmered with tomato, garlic, fennel and white wine. The name comes from the Genoese ciuppin, a fish stew of the home country. Bazzurro's, an early Italian room on Fisherman's Wharf, served it from the late 1800s, and Sotto Mare on Green Street keeps the standard now. The dish is Dungeness-led between November and June; outside the season, kitchens substitute King crab. Eat it with the bib, the fingers and a torn loaf of Acme sourdough.
Where to try it: Sotto Mare, Tadich Grill, Anchor Oyster Bar, Scoma's
Watch out for: Shellfish, Fish, Sulphites
San Francisco sourdough is a tangy, open-crumb white loaf made with a wild starter unique to the city's foggy climate, used for sandwiches and as the base of cioppino bread bowls.
History: French baker Isidore Boudin started Boudin Bakery in 1849 at the height of the Gold Rush, keeping a starter alive his descendants still use; a lactic acid bacterium isolated in the loaves was named Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis in 1971. The bread's sour profile comes from the local microbial mix, not the recipe. Acme Bread, founded 1983 across the bay in Berkeley, raised the city's bread standard a generation later; Tartine, founded by Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt on Guerrero Street in 2002, redefined what a country loaf could look like.
Where to try it: Boudin Bakery, Tartine Bakery, Acme Bread, Josey Baker Bread, Jane the Bakery
Watch out for: Gluten
Dungeness crab is the sweet, brown-meat Pacific crab the city eats from mid-November to June, served steamed and cracked at Swan Oyster Depot, Tadich Grill and the Wharf.
History: The Dungeness fishery, named for a tiny harbour on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, opened commercially in San Francisco in the 1850s. Crab Louis salad emerged at Solari's Grill near Union Square in the early 1900s. The modern season is set by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and usually opens the second week of November, with delays for low meat or marine biotoxins (most recently 2015 and 2020). Swan Oyster Depot on Polk Street, opened 1912, is the cracked-crab benchmark; Sotto Mare runs cioppino with it through winter.
Where to try it: Swan Oyster Depot, Tadich Grill, Sotto Mare, Anchor Oyster Bar
Watch out for: Shellfish
San Francisco dim sum is the longest-running Cantonese tea service in the United States, with carts at Hang Ah on Sacramento Street and bamboo-steamer counters citywide.
History: Cantonese tea houses arrived with the first wave of Chinese immigration during the 1850s Gold Rush. Hang Ah Tea Room, opened in 1920 on Pagoda Place, is the oldest dim sum house in the country still operating; Yank Sing opened on Stockton in 1958 and moved to its SoMa flagship in 2002. The Bay Area's Cantonese diaspora kept the tradition closer to Hong Kong than New York's, where Toisanese dialects dominated; that means more har gow, more cheong fun and less Americanised chop suey. The cart tradition is mostly gone (cost of waitstaff), but Hang Ah still serves a fixed steamer menu, and Good Mong Kok on Stockton runs the takeaway window the city actually eats at on weekends.
Where to try it: Yank Sing, Hang Ah Tea Room, Good Mong Kok Bakery, Dragon Beaux, Z & Y Bistro
Watch out for: Gluten, Shellfish, Soy, Sesame
Hangtown Fry is a Gold Rush omelette of oysters, bacon and eggs, named for the mining camp of Placerville and kept on the menu at Tadich Grill in San Francisco.
History: The dish is one of the few American breakfast plates with a documented 1849 origin. A miner who struck it rich in Placerville (then called Hangtown) walked into the Cary House Hotel and asked for the most expensive meal on the menu. Oysters, brought up the coast in barrels, eggs, scarce because of the gold rush, and bacon, imported from the east, were the three most costly items. The cook scrambled them together. The dish migrated to San Francisco's gold-flush restaurants within a year and has been continuously on the Tadich Grill menu since 1850. The omelette is usually folded with pan-fried, panko-crusted Pacific oysters and crisp bacon, with chopped chives or scallions on top.
Where to try it: Tadich Grill, Sam's Grill, Brenda's French Soul Food
Watch out for: Egg, Shellfish, Gluten
Chinese chicken salad is a California Chinese American plate of shredded chicken, romaine, fried wonton skins and a sesame-soy dressing, popularised through San Francisco.
History: The salad's modern shape came together at Trader Vic's, Madame Wu's in Santa Monica and Cecilia Chiang's The Mandarin in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square through the 1960s and 1970s. Chiang opened The Mandarin in 1968 and introduced San Franciscans to the regional cooking beyond Cantonese (Sichuan, Shanghai, Hunan); the salad as a composed plate of cool chicken with crisp aromatics was on her menu. It moved into chain kitchens (Wolfgang Puck's at LAX, P.F. Chang's nationally) by the 1990s, then back to the chef-driven rooms (Mister Jiu's serves a refined take). The dish is now closer to the city's Cal-Chinese vocabulary than to any single mainland origin.
Where to try it: Mister Jiu's, Z & Y Bistro
Watch out for: Gluten, Soy, Sesame, Egg
The American Irish coffee was perfected at the Buena Vista Cafe by the wharf in 1952, a glass of black coffee, brown sugar, Irish whiskey and a layer of softly whipped cream.
History: The drink as Americans know it was developed at the Buena Vista Cafe on Beach Street in 1952 by owner Jack Koeppler and travel writer Stanton Delaplane. Delaplane had drunk a version at Shannon Airport in Ireland; Koeppler spent months on the cream technique (the fresh, slightly aged 48-hour double cream that floats cleanly on the hot coffee) and the precise sugar dissolve before he was satisfied. The Buena Vista now pours roughly 2,000 Irish coffees a day, in a line of glasses prewarmed with hot water, finished with cream poured over the back of a spoon. The recipe has not changed in 70 years.
Where to try it: The Buena Vista Cafe, Tosca Cafe, Vesuvio
Watch out for: Dairy
Mission-style tacos are the doubled, soft, charred-corn-tortilla tacos served the length of 24th Street and Mission, with lengua, carnitas, al pastor, asada and pollo.
History: The city's tacos draw on two distinct Mexican waves: post-1910 Revolution arrivals from central Mexico, who set up the early taquerias, and a 1970s and 1980s influx from Jalisco and Michoacan that brought al pastor and carnitas to the same blocks. La Taqueria on Mission, opened by Miguel Jara in 1973, treats the meat with restraint (no rice, no beans, doubled corn tortillas with a touch of cheese and avocado), and the room won a James Beard America's Classic in 2017. El Farolito on 24th, opened in 1980, runs the late-night standard. The taco here is not a tasting room project; it is a 24-hour ledger of immigration.
Where to try it: La Taqueria, El Farolito, Tacolicious, Taqueria San Jose, Taqueria El Buen Sabor
Watch out for: Dairy (if cheese added)
Rice-A-Roni is the boxed pilaf of rice and broken spaghetti born in 1958 in San Francisco's Mission, marketed as the San Francisco Treat across the United States.
History: The Italian American DeDomenico family ran the Golden Grain Macaroni Company on Bryant Street from 1912. In the 1950s, Tom DeDomenico's mother-in-law made an Armenian rice pilaf with broken spaghetti for a tenant; Tom's wife Lois adapted it, the family added a dehydrated chicken broth packet, and the product launched as Rice-A-Roni in 1958. The 1960s jingle, with the cable car bell, fixed San Francisco in American pantry memory more firmly than any tourism campaign. Quaker Oats bought the brand in 1986 and PepsiCo absorbed it in 2001, but the box is still produced and the recipe is still recognisable. It is not exactly cooked in San Francisco kitchens, but the city owns the invention.
Watch out for: Gluten, Soy
Peak food season in San Francisco is year-round.
Local dining hours: lunch around 12:30, dinner from 19:30.
service is typically included; small extra is welcome but not expected.
If you only have one meal, eat Mission burrito. It is the dish most associated with San Francisco.