For chef Samin Nosrat, the Bay Area and its restaurants represent key moments through the last 30 years of her life. “I was born and grew up in San Diego, and I moved to the Bay Area in 1997,” she says, “and that’s when my relationship to San Francisco as food place really began.” First, it was eating burritos in the Mission district, as a college student. Then, a couple years in, she began working at the apotheosis of California cuisine and definer of the genre, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, which took her interest in the city’s food scene to a whole new level.
“I remember they weren’t ready to let me have any cooking responsibilities at the restaurant, but there were full-time drivers who would drive to farms, and farmer’s markets, to pick up the produce,” Nosrat says, “and one of them was away for a while so I filled in, driving the big van with the chef’s shopping lists to the temporary farmer’s market where the Ferry Building now is.” The city’s bounty was at her fingertips—and the experience would be one of many watermarks in her life against which she could bear witness to the city’s transformation.
Nosrat has now called the Bay Area home for the majority of her life. “I definitely have my own experience of nostalgia, because this city was the beginning of my interest in food,” Nosrat says. “There’s the pizza slice place that I love in North Beach, and the place I’ve been going to forever for buns in Chinatown, and I remember the beginning of that peak farm-to-table time, then the locavores.” But throughout so many different eras, including the pandemic which had a huge effect on San Francisco’s restaurants, newness continues to emerge. “It’s been really nice to see smaller things reappearing, and this newer generation where it’s almost implicit that everybody has to buy their stuff at the farmer’s market, and then it’s, ‘Okay, what else are you going to do? What personal spin from your own background are you going to put on it?’ It’s been nice to see that happen.”
As much as Nosrat loves a good meal, she’s a home cook through and through. (To no surprise, her cookbook, Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love, out today, focuses on just that.) But each culinary pilgrimage to one of the city’s great restaurants is a reminder of how much her home kitchen is fueled by the dining scene outside her door. “Sometimes I go out and eat something, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh my God,’” she says. “Like a whole new wave of inspiration, a whole new wave of flavor dawns upon me, and then I’m like, ‘Oh, I can take this home and try to figure out how to incorporate some of that.’”
Below are some of her favorite haunts for a great bite in San Francisco. The places that get her excited to cook, that make her eyes go wide, and those that pluck at the strings of nostalgia. Fair warning: “None of these feel like they’re razzle-dazzle, pizzazz—there’s nothing on the surface that yells, ‘Look at me!’ about any of these like places, or any of these foods,” says Nosrat. And that’s exactly the point. “What makes something really special is often actually invisible to the eye.” Read on for the cheese-laced quesadillas and chewy udon that, after sitting at so many tables in San Francisco, are her ultimate favorites.
