The Bay Area is obsessed with food

A passion for matters of the table is nothing new to San Francisco.

Think pop-ups are a recent phenomenon? The distinction could date to 1849, when a trio of Croatian immigrants sold charcoal-grilled fish from a tent on the wharf, an idea that evolved into the bricks-and-mortar Tadich Grill. “From the very first days of the Gold Rush, San Francisco earned a reputation as a restaurant town,” writes Erica J. Peters in “San Francisco: A Food Biography.” “Ships brought exotic ingredients from all over the world, as well as people used to many different cuisines. Early reports emphasized the diversity of restaurants, the fact almost all meals were either eaten in public or brought home ready-to-eat, and the vast amounts that San Franciscans were spending on food.”

Since at least the 1930s, San Francisco had restaurants where diners could see cooks at work, but the design trend blossomed in the 1980s along with the rise of celebrity chefs. Sitting close to the fragrant wood-burning oven at Zuni Café or watching Ravi Kapur in his screaming-yellow kitchen, set smack in the center of the Liholiho Yacht Club, forges a bond between patron and restaurant.

Some of the most popular foodstuffs and dishes in the country originated in San Francisco: sourdough bread, the seafood stew called cioppino, crab Louis, the oyster omelet known as Hangtown fry, Ghirardelli chocolate, Rice-a-Roni. Yet another San Francisco treat is the mai tai, said to have been created in 1944 at the legendary Trader Vic’s. (Coffee, in contrast, was so bad that in 1963, the subject got front-page treatment in the San Francisco Chronicle. “A Great City’s People Forced to Drink Swill,” the headline scolded. Thankfully, that hasn’t been true for many years, and the city has been just as influential in coffee circles as culinary ones; the city’s own Blue Bottle Coffee almost a decade ago imported the Japanese style of pour-over that has become de rigeur at high-end coffee shops from coast to coast.)

In recent decades, San Francisco produced such revolutionary restaurants as the now-shuttered Stars, an American — not French — bistro created by Jeremiah Tower; Square One, Goldstein’s love letter to Turkey, Morocco and Italy-beyond-the-obvious; Zuni Café, the soulful, ingredient-driven Cal-Ital retreat nurtured by the late Judy Rodgers; and the Slanted Door, its menu by Charles Phan an exciting twist on Vietnamese fare. Five years ago, chef Corey Lee, a native of Korea and a veteran of the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., advanced the cause of fine-dining with Benu, a serene East-meets-West proposition.