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7 Adams, Excelsior listings, Mourad, Foursquare, Flamingo Resort, best Union Square restaurants, Unhinged Hotel, MORE
RESTAURANTS • First Person
Half marathon
7 Adams, which celebrates its first birthday this week, might have produced San Francisco’s solution to the tasting menu conundrum. Prix-fixe formats are often a Goldilocks affair — too short feels like a glorified à la carte order, too long and/or too expensive often translates to a marathon of tweezered food. But at five courses ($87 per), this contemporary Californian spot from chef couple Serena Chow-Fisher and David Fisher seems to have found the sweet spot.
Everyone starts with Chow-Fisher’s buzzed-about milk bread and the same two openers, which on a mid-summer visit were the most intricate and thrilling of the savory options — a delicate scallop crudo with a gazpacho-evoking green strawberry vinaigrette dotted with homemade koji-dusted sunflower seeds, and an equally delightful chilled corn velouté with burnt avocado and serpent cucumbers.
For the remaining trio of dishes, guests select their own pasta, main course, and dessert from a list of two to three choices. When the chefs were at their prior stop, Bernal Heights’ Marlena, pastas were the star. They’re great here, too. (See: A playful dish of cocoa pappardelle and braised lamb with smoked cotija and lime crema.)
Desserts also stand out, especially Chow-Fisher’s signature semifreddos — which on this visit brought me chocolate with ripe strawberries.
In addition to the five-course prix fixe, there’s a more traditional six-seat chef’s counter experience, which runs eight to 10 courses and two and a half hours ($157 per). On a recent chef’s counter visit, dishes included a terrific Buffalo-style deboned chicken wing stuffed with homemade chicken sausage as an ode to Fisher’s native Western New York, and a brilliant summery tart with oolong bavarois, two kinds of melon, and blackberry lemon verbena jam.
While those 8 to 10 courses are full of thrills and a touch more culinary innovation, the heart of 7 Adams is worth considering as a special occasion tasting menu restaurant — without the commitment. –Trevor Felch
→ 7 Adams (Lower Pacific Heights) • 1963 Sutter St • Mon-Thurs 530-9p, Fri-Sat 5010p, Sun 5-9p • Reserve.
SF RESTAURANT LINKS: In SoMa, Mourad abruptly shutters • An overview of SF’s private dining scene • Park Tavern to reopen on Washington Square Nov 15 • Oakland hidden delight Sun Moon Studio books diners via email and eschews signage • What even is ‘American IPA’?
GOODS & SERVICES • FOUND Sponsor
Water & all that we love
Ryan and Arjan here, the co-founders of Jolie, a beauty wellness company focused on purifying the quality of one’s shower water for better skin and hair. We’re both fans and readers of FOUND, which is why we decided to sponsor this newsletter to reach like-minded folks like you.
As much as we love discussing water’s impact on skin and hair, we’re equally enamored by the connection of water to all else that we love in life — art, coffee, surfing, food, oysters, ceramics, and so much more. That’s why we created a fun video series, Water &, which looks at these topics through the lens of water. Some highlights:
We spent an early morning in Montauk with artist Joe Henry Baker who used the salty ocean water to paint with and wet his canvases, resulting in a crystallization in the painting as it dried.
We spent an evening with Esben Piper, the founder of the renowned Danish coffee company, La Cabra, at their Soho location in New York. Did you know that the parts per million of minerals in water (or the water’s “hardness”) made to brew La Cabra’s coffee is finely tuned to extract flavor while not making the coffee taste sour?
We joined designer Cynthia Rowley for a morning surf out east on Long Island, where the water is both a calming force for her and “balance” to her planned out, calendared work days.
We’ve always loved oysters, but we loved them even more once we started spending time with both the Billion Oyster Project and Montauk Pearl Oyster’s Mike Martinsen. Oysters clean the water by filtering water as they eat, removing ecosystem-destroying pollutants such as nitrogen. They also act as a natural storm barrier and help foster biodiversity. (The Billion Oyster Project, our non-profit of choice, is restoring the oyster reefs in New York’s harbors to clean the Hudson and East Rivers. Last we checked, 122 million oysters have been restored in New York’s harbor over the last 10 years.)
You can watch all of our Water & videos on our website here.
We worked with these partners because we think they are the best at what they do. If you are thinking about buying a Jolie, we encourage you to do so via the link below. We are picking five FOUND buyers to gift a year’s worth of La Cabra coffee to make at home.
The role of water is all around us. –Ryan Babenzien & Arjan Singh
→ Shop: The Jolie Filtered Showerhead (Jolie) • available in brushed gold, modern chrome, brushed steel, jet black, and vibrant red • $148.
REAL ESTATE • On the Market
Ever upward
As San Francisco tech workers return to their Peninsula offices, neighborhoods with quick access to 280 and 101 are experiencing a bit of a moment. With its abundance of 1930s-era single-family homes, the Excelsior is a great example of this trend as developers and architects are snapping up the area’s less-tended-to residences, returning them to market after a head-to-toe glow-up.
The southern SF neighborhood isn’t just close to the freeway, it’s also adjacent to the dog-and-hiker-beloved John McLaren Park and contains some of Mission Street’s most intriguing dining blocks. Buyers are taking notice — 60 homes changed hands over the last 12 months at a median price of $1.11M, per Compass. Here, three listings ranging from the refreshed turnkey to unpolished gem:
→ 90 Valmar Ter (Excelsior, above) • 4BR/3BA, 1983 SF home • Ask: $1.695M (up from $1.65M on 8/7) • upgraded George Rescalvo design with 360-degree views • Days on market: 43 • Agent: Rose Karta, FlyHomes.
→ 937 Russia Ave (Excelsior) • 4BR/4BA, 2145 SF home • Ask: $1.399M • Freshly renovated 1930 classic • Days on market: 61 • Agent: Kenix Zhong, Re/Max.
→ 331 London St (Excelsior) • 2BR/1BA, 1528 SF home • Ask: $698K • storybook cottage with distinctive profile and endless potential • Days on market: 5 • Agent: Kecia Clark, Sotheby’s.
SF WORK AND PLAY LINKS: 5.4-acre Bayfront Park opens between Chase Center and the waterfront • The strange origins of Salesforce Tower private club The Institute • One of SF’s oldest homes, an 1850s Russian Hill mansion, listed for $22M • Airbnb extends SF lease for 13 years • Should you be able to take a test to become an accredited investor?
WORK • Social
Foursquare and seven years ago
Saturday night, after we were seated at Le Veau d’Or on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I checked in on Swarm and a tip popped up on my phone from Lockhart, my friend on the social app since back when it was called Foursquare.
After it launched with a bang in 2009, Foursquare was for a time the most exciting thing on the New York tech scene. It was both an A+ connector and a robust discovery tool, with reported nine-figure acquisition offers and buzz of a bust on social’s Mt. Rushmore.
In those very early days, Curbed sublet a table in our 3000-SF office at 36 Cooper Square to Foursquare when it was just two guys and a plan. In that open room with butcher block desks and wide columns, we watched them raise a ton of money and staff up in a blink. Soon, they’d take a whole floor in the building and sublet a corner back to us, flipping the script.
It was fun to be in the middle of it. Curbed raised an exponentially smaller amount and was finding its way to profitability piece by piece, by necessity. Foursquare was playing a different game. But the companies shared a lot of DNA — NYC projects run by real people, with an interest in enhancing how users engaged with their respective cities and spaces.
The Curbed team all got hooked on Foursquare immediately, checking in with each other at The Scratcher, The Mud Truck, and wherever else we went in the neighborhood and beyond. In 2014, when they split the app — into a city guide still called Foursquare and Swarm for check-ins — we dutifully downloaded Swarm. Today, it contains an unbelievably rich history of the places I’ve been over the last 15 years. Sometimes I still get tips from Lockhart (he was right, Le Veau d’Or is reason enough to live in NYC!).
Last week, Foursquare sent an email to users announcing they were sunsetting the City Guide app on December 15. Fortunately, Swarm will live on, but the company has long since pivoted from its beginnings as a consumer social app to its current B2B data model. It never did get that place on app Rushmore, but it did find a way to generate enough revenue to make it through to the other side of the VC grinder.
In the meantime, social discovery remains an uncracked code. In fact, the state of restaurant discovery has progressed so little that Eater just launched a “new” app with "essentially the same functionality" as the first Eater app we launched back in 2013.
Maybe this is the decade someone will figure it out. Maybe it’ll be Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal with Blackbird, his ambitious new restaurant loyalty and payment platform. Or maybe it’ll be Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, another serial builder of cool things, who’s working on a new audio city guide called BeeBot. Or maybe FOUND will take its trove of city-specific recommendations and intel, and build some tech ourselves.
Last week, Crowley lamented Foursquare’s sunsetting on Threads. Others chimed in with reminiscences and valedictories. It was a great run, but nothing’s forever. And there’s still a lot of 36 Cooper Square out there in the world, pushing forward on the next big thing. –Josh Albertson
CULTURE & LEISURE • Spooky Scary
I Walked with a Zombie • 1943 • Stanford Theater (Palo Alto) • Thurs @ 730p • GA, $7 per
Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal • The New Parish (Oakland) • Fri @ 8p • GA, $85 per
Unhinged Hotel • Winchester Mystery House (San Jose) • Sat @ 7p • GA, $86 per
GETAWAYS • Santa Rosa
Pink flamingos
Midcentury modern revival The Flamingo Resort, with its roots as a celebrity hideout for Hollywood stars like Humphry Bogart and Jayne Mansfield, is akin to a jaunt to Palm Springs (without leaving the Bay Area).
Designed in the wheel-and-spoke style popular among 1950s hotels, the Flamingo surrounds a central courtyard hosting the resort’s main attraction — a swimming pool heated year-round. Fall is the perfect time to visit, as rowdy summer crowds and Sunday DJ sessions give way to a more relaxed vibe. A vintage poolside trailer serves up everything from frosé to shrimp Louie, delivered to a lounge chair or private cabana.
Newly renovated rooms and suites are airy and light-bathed, filled with design nods to the hotel’s history — retro room dividers, period artwork, and brass finishes. More au currant touches include Malin & Goetz bath products and sleek Fellow kettles.
There’s daily poolside yoga and meditation, as well as a sprawling sports club offering tennis and pickleball courts, a Peloton-equipped cycling studio, a separate lap pool, and a modern weight room. The spa offers the expected menu of massage and facial services, but it’s also the only Sonoma County resort spa to offer the Hydrafacial, a suite of treatments popular with the influencer crowd.
The property’s indoor-outdoor Lazeaway Club serves an all-day Cal-Pacific menu with dishes like a heirloom tomato and pickled melon salad and grilled maitake “magic” mushrooms with miso-garlic dressing. The most popular item on its cocktail menu is a signature guava punch slushy, made with Bayou white and spiced rums.
Some use the Flamingo as a jumping-off point for tasting room visits, and some local wineries host pouring events on-site. But with all its amenities, the hotel works just as well as a standalone destination for a weekend (or longer). –Allison McCarthy
→ Flamingo Resort (Santa Rosa) • 2777 4th St • Rooms from $286/night.
GETAWAYS LINKS: Sonoma County’s Sea Ranch Lodge unveils major renovation • Is our love for Big Sur killing it? • Ski area Mt. Waterman sold to new owners, upgrades planned • American Airlines launches boarding group enforcement tool.
ASK FOUND
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What SF bar welcomes work groups the best?
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Got answers or more questions? Hit reply or email found@itsfoundsf.com.
RESTAURANTS • The Nines
Restaurants, Union Square
The Nines are FOUND's distilled lists of SF’s best. Additions or subtractions? Hit reply or found@itsfoundsf.com.
AB Steak (above), new Korean steakhouse from Akira Back with wagyu for tabletop grilling