World's best potatoes
Plow, Outside Lands, Diamond Heights listings, Of All Places, Berkeley midweek dining, best SLO hotels, River Lodge, office pods, MORE
RESTAURANTS • FOUND Table
Off the bench
Fourteen years after a neighborhood brunch spot’s debut, it’s reasonable to assume that on weekdays, at least, the restaurant won’t still have a line. But on a recent Friday visit to Potrero Hill bacon-and-eggs shop Plow, the wait was about 20 minutes. It was a good excuse to sit on the benches affixed to the side of the building, watching people go by, contemplating the best breakfast potatoes in San Francisco (if not the world).
It’s hard to not start any conversation about Plow without mentioning those potatoes — how the skin crisps, but magically holds on by an edge, creating two distinct layers of texture and flavor. To go with those potatoes, poached eggs, two little pillows with velvety runny yolks. Also, those coaster-sized lemon ricotta pancakes with a sweet zesty finish, and that standout prosciutto and gruyere toast.
Owners Maxine Siu and Joel Bleskacek’s emphasis on locally sourced ingredients makes a difference, from Fatted Calf bacon to cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, produce from farmers market staples like Capay Farms, and eggs from The Hen Pen. It’s all worth the wait. –Adrian Spinelli
→ Plow (Potrero Hill) • 1299 18th St • Mon-Fri 7a-2p, Sat-Sun 8a-2p.
SF RESTAURANT LINKS: Cow Hollow’s new Motoring Coffee is part java joint, part private club for car enthusiasts • Chef Marc Zimmerman abruptly closed SoMa whisky and wagyu spot Gozu, replaced it with live-fire The Wild • Japantown’s new Sobakatsu is SF’s only handmade soba restaurant • The Caesar salad turns 100.
CULTURE & LEISURE • Outside Lands
Foggy fiesta
This weekend’s Outside Lands, the three-day music, food, and retail festival on the far western end of Golden Gate Park, will certainly have its fair share of happy, sunburnt fans content with a cup of Bud and seat in the mud, but (unlike 1990s-era fests), that’s not the only way to fly.
Begin with the tickets, which at base level run $226 a day or $528 per for the whole thing. A simple upgrade to GA+ ($349/$784 per) gets you fast-tracked entry and your own bathrooms, but you can double your outlay to purchase VIP passes, which add on elevated viewing spaces and separate entrances. (The fest’s Golden Gate Club pass, with an experience curated by design legend Ken Fulk, might be overkill at $2366/$5304 per — but the golf cart access you get at that level is a boon for the less mobile.) There’s a strange stigma, in some circles, against music fest upgrades that evokes the veneration of the saints. Take off your hairshirt, player, there’s no virtue in using a filthy porta-potty.
But even the lowliest GA ticketholder has access to the Michelin-cred food court the event calls Taste of the Bay Area. Nearly every buzzy Bay Area spot has a booth there, from Francis Ang’s lauded Filipino-Californian restaurant Abaca to cult fave Oakland taqueria Xolo. This is the only time you’ll find all these places within the same space, which is why some folks attend for the food and drinks alone.
If you well and truly can’t resign yourself to three days mixing with Grace Jones, K. Flay, or The Killers fans, there’s one more option: Amazon streams all three days of the festival live for Prime users. For those who want a bit of OSL flavor but who have to get some work done, the livestream’s a dream come true. And you get to use your own bathroom at no extra charge. –Eve Batey
→ Outside Lands (Golden Gate Park) • 25th Ave-Chain of Lakes • 12-10p Fri-Sun.
CULTURE & LEISURE • Mix It Up
NightLife Remix: Track 2 • Cal Academy (Golden Gate Park) • Thurs @ 6p • Nightlife Plus, $74 per
Sofia Kourtesis + Anish Kumar • SPACE 550 (Apparel City) • Sat @ 10p • GA, $38 per
MonoNeon • Yoshi’s (Oakland) • Sat @ 730p • Premier, $84 per
WORK • Wednesday Routine
Taking stock
CELIA & JOE CATALINO • owners • Of All Places
Neighborhood you work in: Thousand Oaks, Berkeley
Neighborhood you live in: Albany
It’s Wednesday morning. What’s the scene at your workplace?
We own and run Of All Places, a tiny market that specializes in small-batch and artisan groceries and boutique wines. Most of our new stock for the week comes in on Tuesdays, so Wednesday mornings are typically pretty chill. We get to work at around 1045am, clean up, pick a great song to start our day with, and open our doors at 11.
What’s on the agenda for today?
Lots of placing orders and email correspondence. We have some pop-ups on the horizon with Cali Kitchen, Requisite Matcha, Bonjerk, and Tutuli Coyotas, and ironing out all the details in advance makes everyone's life easier. Midweek is also a great time for us to look into new possible products to bring into the shop. We're always on the hunt.
Any restaurant plans today, tonight, this weekend?
Working retail requires you to be on all the time, so we enjoy heading to spots with a relaxed feel. Bar Sardine (Berkeley) is perfect for a casual and cozy midweek dinner. They have fantastic wines by the glass and their simple menu of crostini, salads, and tinned fish is always stellar. This weekend, we'll probably stop for tacos at Tacos El Autlense, the taco truck in the Hotsy Totsy Club parking lot in Albany; we're huge fans of their pastor. We've also recently loved sharing paella and a couple of glasses of Txakolina at La Marcha in Berkeley.
Any weekend getaways?
If it's a day trip, we like to head north. Ruth Lewandowski is one of our favorite California wineries and they have a great tasting room in Healdsburg. Valley, in Sonoma, is one of our favorite restaurants in the Bay. And if the weather is nice, we like heading up to the Marshall Store for oysters. For a longer weekend trip, we met and lived in Los Angeles for many years, and it makes for a fun, familiar getaway. The food scene in LA is outrageous right now.
What was your last great vacation?
Right before opening our shop, we knew we wouldn't be traveling for a while, so we planned a last-minute trip to Guadalajara. We love traveling to Mexico; the food, the people and the culture are unreal. We stayed in Colonia America, which is a great neighborhood for dining and relaxing. Highlights include fresh conchas at Café Tenango, a fun dinner at El Habanero Negro, and a day trip to Tequila to check out Fortaleza and Cimarron.
What store or service do you always recommend?
Picnic in Albany offers the best rotisserie whole chickens to go. It's funny that we own a grocery store, but we're often too swamped to feed ourselves decent meals. Being able to pick up an easy and thoughtfully made dinner on the way home is a life saver.
SF WORK AND PLAY LINKS: Curating food for Outside Lands is a year-round job • Chevron moves HQ from East Bay to Houston • ‘Masculine’ Portola Valley mansion sells after $65M chop • Trending: PowerPoint parties.
WORK • Offices
Pod life
Fifteen years ago, when we leased 3K square feet of space off Cooper Square in the East Village for a team of 20-30 people, we kept the room open. Since it was a digital media company, everyone was very much online and mostly library quiet, banging away on their laptops and chatting on AIM (pre-Slack!). We also had desk phones, which were mostly for the sales people, who had to cut through the silence to perform their pitches. It was incredibly awkward, even for the extroverts in the group.
Eventually, we commissioned a couple of “private” spaces, a corner boxed in by a glass wall — a semi-soundproof terrarium of sorts — and a carved out “conference room” with an opaque pleated wall that didn’t make it to the ceiling (and wasn’t at all soundproof). All meetings were unintentional all-hands.
We were resisting the office culture of our parents’ generation, breaking down walls or some such, and even though the office was generally full of good vibes, it was all very clumsy, and definitely not for everyone.
If we were blocking out that space today, we’d have considerably more options. Boosted first by a tech-led shift to flexible working environments and then the pandemic — when employees got used to the privacy upgrades their home setups provided — makers of pods and other adaptive furniture have flourished over the last decade. Companies like Framery, Nook, and OmniRoom are pushing the form with space-age single-user phone booths and modular rooms that fit together like Legos.
The result can be awkward in its own way: employees posted up in a series of isolation chambers, in offices where attendance is required to foster teamwork. But the modern workplace is an evolutionary process, and we’ll support whatever it takes to keep the cubicles at bay. –Josh Albertson
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GETAWAYS • Paso Robles
Lodge life
The most popular style for hotel revamps in California these days is a converted motor lodge — and nobody does a better roadside inn flip than Nomada Hotel Group. Already known for their Los Alamos property, Skyview, the cozy Hotel Ynez in Solvang and another recently-opened Paso Robles property, Farmhouse Motel, their work on River Lodge is especially notable as it balances modern updates while still preserving a beloved piece of local history. It reopened in June.
Originally built in 1947, River Lodge is a prime example of Googie architecture, the Jetsons-esque futuristic style characterized by bright colors, angular shapes, and other hallmarks of America’s once feverish obsession with the Space Age. Safeguarding the hallmarks of this style — while addressing a serious need for renovations — meant converting a former parking lot into an in-ground pool inset with checkered green tile, adding an onsite Italian-inspired restaurant, Ciao Papi, and constructing an eight-foot wall around the entire property to add privacy to the space.
While plenty of the more-reserved examples of the mid-century modern architecture have been protected and refurbished in and around California, lots of incredible Googie history has been demolished. This only makes the surviving examples that much more rare, and the original sign for the property is part of a design process which worked to keep as much of the historic building intact as possible.
In the lobby, a cylindrical brick fireplace is another retro hallmark, but rose gardens, fire pits, front yards with hammocks, and a poolside cocktail bar are brand new amenities that bring the 28-room property firmly into the 21st century. Some rooms have brick or tiled fireplaces, outdoor showers, and private backyards. All rooms are dog-friendly for an additional fee, but none are kid-friendly — this hotel holds a firm 21-and-over policy, including the heated pool, hot tub, and restaurant, a rarity along the Central Coast where family-friend accommodations are more commonplace. –Caitlin White
→ River Lodge (Paso Robles) • 1955 Theater Dr • Weekend king rates from $474.
GETAWAYS LINKS: Tahoe tasting menu destination Smoke Door Lake Tahoe Saryo doesn’t want your Instagram follow • Bodily fluid scandal rocks Half Moon Bay Ritz-Carlton • Truce in Palm Springs battle over tourist-destination statue relocation • Benu owner Corey Lee opens his first restaurant in Singapore • What it’s like to travel to Maui one year after the wildfires.
GETAWAYS • The Nines
Hotels, San Luis Obispo region
The Nines are FOUND's distilled lists of the Bay Area’s best. Additions or subtractions? Hit reply or found@itsfoundsf.com. For the full archives, click here.
Granada Hotel (Downtown SLO, above), cozy rooms w/exposed brick and Persian rugs, plus acclaimed bistro and hidden speakeasy, $948