“You can taste the love” sounds like a cliché until you actually taste it and realize you are poor cynical human being who has never been to Alicia’s tamale stand! Especially on foggy days, these lovingly wrapped warm packages of deliciousness are indispensable.

This place makes my heart sing. I’m so happy it’s only 2 blocks away. This teeny tiny little Cuban restaurant/bar is always warm, welcoming, and vibrating with visual over-stimuli. Surreal toy sculptures cover every square inch, and I always find something I’ve never seen before while slurping down my sangria.

I fell in love with San Francisco at first site, the buildings and the light, so much grooviness to dig. The signature building style I call "Wonkatecture" -a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of giddy pioneer freedom and gilded age excess. It's a modernists nightmare! A prime example is The Vedanta Society HQ, built in 1903 to house a religious sect which fostered a multifold path to God and reflected its openness architecturally. More more more.

Worker-owned, hole in the wall bakery worth waiting in line for.

If you can get past the bourgie factor and/or you work down the street like I do, you will come to love this place. It has some of the best food in the city, a Blue Bottle coffee, and an observation deck from which you can watch the ferries come and go, emitting their weird beeps and disgorging tourists. The people who work here are great too (whether or not I dated a baker from the Acme Bread kiosk because of a Craigslist missed connection will be left to history).