San Francisco tastes different in 2024. High-caliber Asian restaurants have dominated. Tasting menus have proliferated. Chefs are wearing more hats, kitchens have gotten more creative, and the city is littered with buttery shards of extraordinary croissants.
And we are less drunk. (Well, some of us.)
Of course, restaurants haven’t had an easy go of it at a time when costs continue to rise and crowds sputter in the wake of the pandemic. But this is exactly why there’s been a tectonic shift in our culinary landscape. An already scrappy industry keeps getting scrappier, trying on new things for size (hello, tiny dining rooms!) and ditching old, expensive necessities for good (bye, hulking oven hoods!).
The pivots have at times been painful, but we are all beneficiaries of the city’s boundless appetite for reinvention. To help our city’s restaurant scene continue to thrive, all we have to do is eat it up. Here, a survey of the changes defining the dining scene at this most critical — but still delicious — moment.
