A humble shopping street crowded with Mexican and Salvadoran
mercados, 24th Street proffers a profoundly ungentrified
institution. Roosevelt Tamale Parlor, founded in 1922, is where you
can buy an inexpensive and fiery lunch - chorizo tostadas or pork
tamales or flautas - without encountering such foodie silliness as
choosing a vintage mineral water.
The real reason to stop on 24th is Balmy Alley, a tiny streetlet
between Harrison and Treat, where you'll come face to face with The
Mission District's recent vibrant tradition of mural art. Go when
the sun is shining (not hard to do in this good-weather zone) and
catch artists' and children's murals blazing to life on otherwise
nondescript stucco walls, garage doors, and fences.
If Victorian inns make you feel as if you're stuck in an Addams
Family rerun, secondhand bookshops give you the
hives, and murals
make you think of the Red Guards, you still have to go to The
Mission for restaurants like Foreign Cinema, where you can dine on
lobster-and-monkfish bouillabaisse in the garden courtyard as you
watch a movie on an outdoor screen (and listen to dialogue through
the drive-in speaker hooked to your table), or Blowfish for
cutting-edge northern pufferfish sashimi, or the Café
Valencia for
Cuban beef stew with yucca, or the elegant Flying Saucer for
applewood-crusted venison. There isn't another neighborhood to
match The Mission when the issue is dinner.
POTRERO HILL
Across Media Gulch from The Mission, Potrero Hill has become one of
the choicest residential neighborhoods in town. Walk these quiet
pastel streets, sunny and windy and steep, for great views of
downtown and the shipyards in the bay. You'll get a bright, vivid
sense that you couldn't be anywhere but SF.
Compact, hilly, tucked away, Potrero offers sunshine, neighborhood
atmos-phere, and a sense of why San Franciscans love the place so
passionately.