Some controversial cuts were going to be inevitable when the Chronicle's two main food critics set about reviving the Top 100 restaurants list this year. But, call me crazy, just-OK taco shops do not belong in the top 20 when over a dozen Michelin-starred spots are getting snubbed completely.

The top 50 of the Top 100 is now out, and yes, there are some surprises.

Maybe the problem was trying to do a ranked list, which actually feels less useful given that apples and oranges are being compared more often than not. And there's going to be a lot of "Wait, what did they rank higher than Benu?"

In the interest of transparency, critics MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez tried to explain their ranking methodology in a Q&A they published last week, but it honestly doesn't explain the arbitrariness of how they chose to rank the quality of the tacos at Oakland's Tacos Oscar (#11) — which are good, don't get me wrong, but maybe not even that stellar? — well ahead of all the Bay Area's one-, two-, and three-star restaurants according to Michelin, except two (#9 SingleThread, and #6 The Progress). It feels like they were trying to be deliberately contrarian about the Michelin pantheon, and also Michael Bauer's tastes, which is fine but also transparent in its contrariness.

"The Bay Area has a long history of culinary titans, many of which were propped up by Chronicle, but I hope this list helps create new ones," Hernandez says in the Q&A. Reading between the lines there, does that mean that the likes of Thomas Keller, Nancy Oakes, and Alice Waters were merely "propped up by the Chronicle"?

I'm not saying that the French Laundry, Boulevard, and Chez Panisse are still restaurants in their prime and keeping things fresh every night. But in creating a guide to the region's best restaurants, should all of them be ignored in favor of the new? Did these two critics even go to all three of these restaurants recently, given budgets and time constraints?

Most of the Michelin two-starred restaurants in the region were left off the list, including Saison, Birdsong, Lazy Bear, Acquerello, and Commis — and again, did they really make it to all of them to judge?

The critics also say in their intro, "There are other lists that will tell you which restaurants are the fanciest or the buzziest, but is that really how we eat?" And then they proceed to rank the two currently buzziest Bay Area restaurants, in terms of the national press, in the #1 and #2 spots: Burdell and Four Kings.

Yes, some of the wrongs of the Michelin inspectors are righted here, like vaulting Rich Table to the top 5 three years after the Michelin Guide callously decided the restaurant needed to lose a star, mid-pandemic. But other deserving restaurants that have been snubbed by Michelin remain snubbed by the Chronicle on this list, like Pearl 1601, SPQR, Ernest, Routier, Frances, and Octavia. All of those should have been in Top 100 contention, surely.

Sure, the list is always going to reflect the particular tastes of the critics themselves, but was the wisdom or fairness of making all these snubs in favor of a deli in Oakland (OK's Deli, #32), and a taco truck in Hayward (Tacos Mama Cuca, #23) really thoroughly debated? I'm sure both are good, but are they substantially better to be ranked higher than Flour + Water (#39) and Mister Jiu's (#66)?

Don't even get me started on the fact that La Taqueria made the cut but Taqueria Cancun did not.

The full list, thanks to a Redditor, is gridded out below. And the full, interactive list with capsule reviews is behind the Chronicle's paywall.

After more than five years in which the San Francisco Chronicle has published a bevy of shorter lists devoted to specific dishes and cuisines, as well as the often bizarrely curated Top 25 and things like Top Splurge Restaurants, the big grandaddy of them all, the Top 100, is making a comeback.

Yes, the Chronicle Top 100, which former restaurant critic Michael Bauer loved to humble-brag and complain about, and which many readers and foodinistas loved to hate but still maybe relied on, was retired one year after Bauer's retirement in 2018. The list, which had been updated annually since 1996, was curated partly by former critic Soleil Ho in 2019, and partly by the rest of the Chronicle's food team, but the pandemic made the task impossible in 2020, and it's been on pause for five years.

And there has been a noticeable void ever since, without the Bay Area's paper of record weighing in on the region's fantastic and varied restaurant scene, newcomers especially are left fending for themselves with the array of smaller, less authoritative lists out there, many of which tend to ignore the farther reaches of the Bay Area.

The sheer abundance and diversity of great food in the Bay will always make for controversy when it comes to compiling lists like this — not every great spot will make the cut, and now it will be up to two people, primarily, to make the judgment calls that will impact readers' ultimate opinion of the Top 100. Will it snub sacred cows like Chez Panisse or the French Laundry in favor of more small, under-the-radar mom-and-pops that could use the attention? Or will it, like some complained under Bauer's tenure, ignore too many smaller, ethnic restaurants in favor of the more established, modern, Cal-Italian, Cal-Mediterranean, and/or French spots that tend to get the most accolades?

We shall see! Critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan explained in a newsletter piece published Tuesday that she and Associate Critic Cesar Hernandez have been keeping it under wraps, but the reason why we haven't been seeing any restaurant reviews in the paper some weeks is that they've been prepping this monster project.

Chung Fegan admits the Top 25 list is "an exercise that has always struck me as a bit disingenuous," given that 25 "is a miniscule number of slots for such a big region." But, that quarterly updated Top 25 is going to continue to live on as "a companion" list to the Top 100, she writes, "as an opportunity to highlight places we are hyped on right now."

This new Top 100 will be ranked, not in alphabetical order like Bauer's, and the 51-100 list is due out on March 31, with the Top 50 revealed the following week. And the Chronicle is hosting an event to fete the Top 100, for which they will be selling tickets at some point soon.

And, when the first half of the list arrives, we will surely hear the caveats from Chung Fegan and Hernandez, like we did in Bauer's day, about how some cuts feel arbitrary, and how they wish it could be a Top 200. But the established restaurants that are likely going to find spots back on this list which haven't had much media attention since the last Top 100 are likely going to be grateful for it.

Photo: Jay Wennington

The Hearst Corporation is looking to revive a stalled condo tower project on the site of the former SF Examiner offices — a building at 110 Fifth Street that is connected to the Chronicle headquarters by a bridge over Minna Street.

As the Chronicle tells us today, the newspaper's entire staff, along with the staff of SFGate, will be relocated downtown to a 16-story building that Hearst is in the process of purchasing at 450 Sansome Street. The move is expected to happen this summer.

The 100-year-old Chronicle building, which just had its 100th anniversary of opening in November, will not be touched in the planned construction of a 400-unit condo tower behind it, at 110 Fifth Street. However the bridge that connects the building to the former Examiner headquarters is getting demolished along with 110 Fifth Street, and the two buildings share an HVAC system, among other things, so both buildings reportedly need to be evacuated before demolition can begin.

There's no word on how long the newspaper staff will be displaced — the Chronicle's longtime ground-floor coffeeshop, operated by the same family since the 1990s, would probably like to know when they can expect their customers back.

The tower at 110 Fifth Street, which has been fully entitled since before the pandemic, represents the last phase of the 5M project — which also includes the 25-story office tower at 415 Natoma, completed several years ago, and The George, a 302-unit apartment tower at 434 Minna Street. Hearst will be the sole developer of the condo tower, the Chronicle tells us.

The paper of record in San Francisco was once the San Francisco Daily Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst, and first owned by his father, former SF Mayor George Hearst.

By the 1920s, when the Chronicle's current headquarters was built, both papers were vying for supremacy. The Chronicle building was built for 20th Century newspaper production, with an enormous printing press in the basement, and long horizontal floors where teams of reporters, editors, copyeditors, and photographers worked in tandem.

The Hearst Corporation didn't acquire the Chronicle until 2000, at which point it divested itself of the at-that-point diminished Examiner.

110 Fifth Street had been the home to Yahoo offices for over two decades, but Yahoo gave up their lease in 2023.

The enduring legend and unsolved case of the Zodiac murders in the Bay Area has now haunted multiple generations of both police detectives and crime reporters in the city. Kevin Fagan is one of them, and he's retiring, effective today.

Kevin Fagan would like everyone to know that, first of all, he has not good theory of his own about who the Zodiac Killer was, and he trusts that police don't either. Only one suspect was ever named, he died over 30 years ago, and whoever the real Zodiac was, given these killings occurred in the late 1960s, he is likely dead too.

In a goodbye missive about the case in the Chronicle, Fagan writes that he has been inundated with tips and theories by amateur sleuths and those with too much spare time since he wrote his very first piece about the Zodiac Killer in 1996 — long after the original reporters on the case were themselves retired or moved on. After suddenly receiving a boatload of these tips, his editor at the time said, "I guess you're on the Zodiac beat now."

But it sounds like Fagan never really wanted to be on this beat, even though crime reporting has been his bread and butter. (If you missed a few years back, his podcast about another unsolved case from the 70s, the Doodler murders of gay men in San Francisco, is great and worth a listen.)

The Zodiac, or "Z" as many amateur sleuths call him, is a figure who holds some special place in the minds of far too many obsessives, Fagan says. And while he's followed up on hundreds of tips over the years, yielding very little, he's now officially off the clock.

"The overwhelming majority of the amateur sleuths who have reached out to me were polite, sincere and intelligent," Fagan writes. "But I have also been stalked, threatened and badgered for not anointing some tips as the absolute truth — and I’m done."

Fagan also notes that the most compelling update in the case came four years ago, in 2021, when some code experts claimed to have cracked the "340" cipher sent by the Zodiac to the Chronicle in November 1969. And it wasn't even that compelling.

"I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me," the cipher says. "I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice [sic] all the sooner because now I have enough slaves to work for me." (The Zodiac Killer had previously said he believed his victims would become his "slaves" in the afterlife.)

As Fagan writes, "The word 'crazy' is considered improper in polite journalism. But this stuff from Z is crazy. And did that cipher solution satisfy the sleuth world? Not really."

Another possible update in the case came one year ago, when the remains of a purported twelfth victim of the Zodiac were identified by DNA. That victim, 25-year-old Donna Lass, disappeared from the Lake Tahoe area in September 1970, and it would be over 50 years until a skull found off a highway in Placer County was positively identified as hers.

Following her diappearance, the Chronicle's newsroom received a postcard from Lake Tahoe that seemed to imply a Zodiac connection to Lass's disappearance, and Lass's sister received a similar postcard four years later.

When it comes to future updates in the case, Fagan says, you should take it from him, this isn't fun and games, and there were real victims to remember, and family members whose lives were destroyed by the killings.

"Murder is anything but infotainment, but that’s how a lot of people regard it unless and until they’re forced to grapple with the genuine horror," Fagan writes.

Related: Internet Sleuths Decide On New Zodiac Killer Suspect, Many Sites Take the Bait

Much like her predecessor in the job, Soleil Ho, newly installed Chronicle restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan took on a Bay Area sacred cow for her first review at the paper, Zuni Café.

Ho famously wrote a not-that-great review of Chez Panisse in their opening set of columns back in 2019, calling Alice Waters's beloved bastion of California cuisine "stale." And they wrapped up their tenure at the paper with a soft pan of The French Laundry in 2022, a few months before stepping down from the job.

But essentially, save for those and a couple of capsule reviews, the Chronicle has not done any update reviews of the Bay Area's most prominent restaurants since Michael Bauer's tenure ended in 2018. Bauer was always a stalwart about making return visits to update his Top 100 each year — though he might have complained a bit about the task. But that process has not continued after him. And the paper has taken to publishing many smaller lists instead of his one big one — and their recent Bay Area-wide roundups of best restaurants have been unhelpful at best, and incoherent at worst, given how poorly they actually represent the region's food scene.

Chung Fegan enters this void with a pretty daunting list of things to cover — and though she grew up in San Francisco, and her family owns the Henry's Hunan mini-chain, she has not lived here in a long while, and her food-writing career was centered in New York.

So, before beginning to check off the list of newer restaurants that have yet to receive their Chronicle due, Chung Fegan decided to listen to the many readers who wrote in to suggest that a Zuni Café review would be a good litmus test.

"It’s a benchmark," wrote one Chronicle reader, "and will tell a lot about her as a critic."

And, as Chung Fegan herself writes, quoting some others, "For those scryers eager to divine whether I’m a 'well-rounded food critic' or a feckless Millennial only interested in 'restaurants with one syllable names,' this one’s for you."

The review is now out, and I assume it was in the Sunday paper. (Does anyone still get the Sunday paper? Just wondering.) It is neither disrespectful nor glowing, but it leans toward the positive when it comes to the food under chef de cuisine Anne Alvero. Chung Fegan admits that the restaurant is not the touchstone for her that it is for many readers of the Chronicle food section, but it will likely become one.

Does she rave wildly about the famous wood-roasted chicken with bread salad? No! But she does call it "good," and adds, "I would argue that no earthly chicken can live up to the reputation" of Zuni's much-vaunted chicken. And she says it's a pretty good value, even at the current price of $75, since it feeds two.

Chung Fegan was a bigger fan of Judy Rodgers's famed omelet, which is apparently back on the menu at dinner sometimes — it comes filled with Cowgirl Creamery Wagon Wheel cheese and mustard croutons. And a special citrus risotto with seafood that was on the menu in January was a "joy."

She also writes a whole special column devoted to the Gâteau Victoire, a throwback to the 90s flourless chocolate cake craze — though it actually predates that trend, as Chung Fegan discovers. "It’s been on Zuni’s menu for about 40 years, predating Judy Rodgers’ tenure, and may it be there for 40 more."

It's a simple, soufflé-like affair with only six ingredients, and remains a masterpiece. "It’s in your mouth, and then it’s not," Chung Fegan writes, like "chocolate foam."

The only thing that gets a ding, besides a few less stellar dishes, is the service at Zuni, which Chung Fegan says is uneven. Many Chronicle readers are likely quick to blame this on the fact that a crew of experienced servers left Zuni after they instituted greater pay equity, moving away from the traditional tipping model that had front-of-house staff making a much better living wage than those in the kitchen. But, Chung Fegan writes, "if the trade-off for [losing] that level of hospitality is that cooks and dishwashers are able to save for retirement, that’s a no-brainer for me."

As for how regular Chung Fegan's reviews will be, or what will be coming next, we'll have to see! She wrote earlier this month that she does not plan to keep up the anonymity charade, and much like Ho before her, the internet is full of pictures of her — and she allowed the Chronicle to publish a new one as well.

It is certainly a practical impossibility to be completely anonymous these days if you've had any internet presence at all during your civilian days, but Chung Fegan says she had a taste of pure anonymity for a few weeks while restaurants were still figuring out that she had finally landed in town. (Her hiring happened nearly a year ago, but there appeared to be some sort of maternity leave agreement that delayed things, per her Instagram.)

And, Chung Fegan points out another factor, which is that the treatment an "average" diner receives in, say, a fancy restaurant, varies based on who that person appears to be, society being what it is. So what's the point of grasping at anonymity to receive treatment that may not be "average" anyway?

"Am I, a multiracial queer Millennial, the average diner at Tadich Grill? Daytrip? King of Noodles? If you and I were to walk into the same restaurant, would we be treated identically?" she writes.

So, she is bound to get more special treatment as she's recognized more, but she won't be doing the dance of pretending she's not who she is — though she will book tables under aliases, which the restaurants with PR budgets will quickly learn to spot.

We do know that a "clubby tasting menu spot" and an "eye-wateringly expensive" restaurant both gave her less than stellar treatment when she was not recognized. So, stay tuned.

Top image: ZuniCafe/Instagram

Longtime Chronicle staffer Heather Knight, who has been the paper's most-noted weekly columnist on San Francisco's foibles, politics, and more for the last five years, has landed a job as San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times.

Starting in September, Knight will take over from Thomas Fuller, who has been SF bureau chief for the Times since 2016.

"Thrilled — with more than a twinge of sadness — to announce I'm leaving [the Chronicle]," Knight said in a confirmation tweet Monday morning. "I'll be the Times' lead writer covering San Francisco and Northern California starting in September. Can't wait!"

National Editor Jia Lynn Yang and California Editor Kevin Yamamura announced the news in a release Monday, saying that after Knight became a columnist in 2017, "She quickly became a must-read and local residents’ go-to journalist for tips, complaints and concerns about life in one of the world’s most fascinating and frustrating cities."

Yamamura tweeted, "We can't wait to begin working with Heather! I've been a fan of her reporting for years, and we're excited to add another Californian with extensive knowledge of the Bay Area and the state."

The Times editors make special note of how Knight made hay last year over that $1.7 million public toilet project in Noe Valley, which spurred action from Governor Gavin Newsom, and a subsequent cheaper version is now being built.

With her weekly columns — which have been less frequent since June — Knight came to fill the role vacated in 2016 by now semi-retired columnist C.W. Nevius. SFist noted Nevius's column on many occasions during his tenure as the Chronicle's resident curmudgeon, serving as a kind of pragmatic, let's-quit-this-progressive-nonsense voice as he often wrote about the city's homeless and drug problems.

Knight has typically taken a softer approach, though her wars of words with the progressive wing of the Board of Supervisors have been notable, as she, Nevius-style, called them out for kowtowing to NIMBYs and slow-rolling housing development in general.

Fuller, in his role as SF bureau chief, has at times sounded tired of San Francisco and ready to move on to some other assignment. This was most evident in 2020 when he was stuck covering his fourth consecutive bad wildfire season.

"Some residents here have the same feeling of powerlessness [as I do], a sense that this will come every year no matter what anyone does," Fuller wrote at the time.

Now, the Chronicle's opinion desk will need to shift someone else into the role of bureaucracy cop, or whatever you want to call it. And the Times will gain a bureau chief with deep knowledge of this city — Knight has been at the Chronicle since 1999.

Photo: Heather Knight/Twitter

The San Francisco Chronicle is standing like a kid who cried "Fire!" amid a rush of sirens and chaos asking what all the fuss is about, as it has a front-page story today about the ramifications of the "doom loop" narrative the paper itself amplified.

While the Chronicle has spent the last few months jumping on the "doom loop" bandwagon and even finding new angles on it wherever they could, a story today by longtime reporter Carolyn Said makes only the slightest acknowledgement of her newsroom's role in promoting this narrative. The story quotes SF business figures like Rodney Fong, CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, who's appalled at outlets like CNN and Good Morning America that have done recent hit jobs on the city.

"They're making stuff up," Fong says. "It is absolutely unfair."

Those of us who've lived here long enough know these boom and bust cycles pretty well, and we know that SF has, historically, always bounced back. That seems to be Said's ultimate point in the Chronicle piece. It's just a little late in the game given how the Chronicle has essentially spearheaded the campaign to declare that the sky is falling, that all is lost, and San Francisco is circling the drain.

The bottom of the Chronicle piece lists a bunch of headlines from other outlets and only one from the Chronicle itself — this March 30 piece that either helped introduce or singlehandedly introduced the term "doom loop" to the local vocabulary.

The piece points to Nellie Bowles's June 2022 piece in the Atlantic about our "failed city," pegged to the recall of Chesa Boudin, which itself was a bit sensational and personal — one of an entire genre of pieces that SFist has called out over the last few years, the basic gist of which are "I had to move out of San Francisco and let me proselytize about how it is terrible now and it's the liberals' fault."

The problem is that once the Chronicle joined the chorus, it kind of opened the floodgates for the likes of CNN and ABC News to do their own hot takes, and thus we have the national tidal wave of news stories about San Francisco's woes.

As Said points out, all this negative media coverage is hugely damaging to the city's post-pandemic recovery, given that we need tourists and conventions to come here, and the situation on our streets has been somewhat exaggerated — yes, downtown and the Tenderloin can look kind of bleak, but some of these streets we're talking about haven't seen better days in decades. Should tourists be wandering around mid-Market after dark? Probably not! But should they have been doing that 10 or 12 years ago when Twitter moved in and the fortunes of the city were brighter? Nope!

There may not have been the fentanyl crisis a decade ago, but open-air drug-dealing, opioids, heroin, methamphetamine, and mental health crises were daily features of many of these blocks, including Sixth Street, Jones Street, and the area around Seventh and Market 10, 15, and even 20 years ago.

Things are exacerbated now, to be sure, by the lack of workers downtown, but it's not exactly dead around the Westfield mall on any given weekday. The mall owner sees the big picture when it comes to American retail, especially malls in urban settings, and that is why it is backing out of the market broadly and told investors it was doing so a year and a half ago. The Chronicle didn't put that fact front and center, but instead went with the headline, "Westfield giving up S.F. mall in wake of Nordstrom closure, plunging sales and foot traffic."

Commercial real estate agents, who will be key in helping downtown turn around, need the media to stop being quite so frenzied in its rush to declare SF "doomed."

"When you get news article after news article, it starts to make people scared,” says Marisa Rodriguez, executive director of the Union Square Alliance, speaking to the Chronicle. "Anyone thinking about: ‘Is my next destination going to be a place I'm reading so many negative stories about,’ will probably think twice, and that’s not OK. If you were going to open a business, sign a lease, but keep getting a barrage of negative news stories about the area, would you have cold feet or second thoughts? Of course, that’s human nature."

At least now that Good Morning America is sending Matt Gutman out to stand on mid-Market Street in the early morning darkness to say that he's been told it's "too dangerous" to stand closer to the Westfield mall, the Chronicle can see that some of this is bullshit. And there's blood on their hands now, too.

Would such a dangerous and "failed" city have been able to host hundreds of thousands of Pride revelers this past weekend without anyone getting hurt or, like, stabbed with a fentanyl needle?

The New York Times picked up the narrative in early June that SF's neighborhoods are thriving while downtown "flounders." The Chronicle has tried to stay positive here and there, though this piece in early May painted a pretty grim picture about downtown office and hotel vacancy. And sure, it's hard to put a positive spin on a mall owner and a hotel owner writing off the city — though in the case of the Hilton owner, that could still be a negotiating tactic.

Maybe SF's busts will always be national news the way our booms are. And in being one of the country's "special" children — a city seen as quaint and darling and pretty that shouldn't, unless something is terribly wrong, have the same crime and drug problems as other places — our failures get the clicks and eyeballs that the media wants. The "San Francisco is on fire" story will always sell papers, as they say, even if the size of the blaze has been exaggerated.

But the Chronicle maybe should get its priorities straight the next time someone says "doom loop." We don't actually want to scare everyone off, do we?

Previously: It Will Always Be More Profitable/Clickable to Shit On San Francisco, So People Will Always Do It

Photo: Ameer Basheer

Four years, a James Beard Award, and a pandemic later, Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho is relinquishing the post — and without a whole lot of explanation.

It feels like just yesterday that Soleil Ho was taking on the esteemed job at the Chronicle that had been held by Michael Bauer for over three decades — and in some ways, it kind of was just yesterday, in restaurant time. A lot of us are having trouble remembering if something happened last year, or in 2021, or in 2019, and there's been a Groundhog Day aspect to the three pandemic years that have just barely passed. We are still about four weeks away from the anniversary of everything shutting down in SF, and for many restaurateurs it's been a long slog back to some sense of normalcy, with debts still to pay.

"While long tenures are more typical for food critics, who are like the Supreme Court justices of the journalism world, I think four years is the perfect length of time. (I lean more toward the presidential way of doing things, I guess.)," Ho writes in a farewell column today.

Well, it's not a farewell exactly — Ho is transitioning into the Opinion department, and they will become a cultural critic for the Chronicle who will sometimes write a food story.

Perhaps this trajectory makes perfect sense, given columns like this one in December, in which Ho questioned how the role of a restaurant critic might be fueling gentrification. (On the one hand, sure, but on the other, you've got one job and we're here to read about new restaurants.)

Ho doesn't offer much in the way of reasons for the departure from this very prestigious role, except to say "Four years doesn’t seem like a lot, but these particular years have been quite a ride." And certainly being a critic here through 2020 and 2021 had to come with a fair bit of existential discomfort. Who needed twee food criticism when most restaurants were just struggling to stay alive?

This news of Ho's departure, though, is troubling, if only because, agree or disagree with Ho's take on restaurants, they are undeniably a strong writer with a thoughtful critical voice, and it takes at least four years on this job just to get a lay of the land and understand something about the breadth of Bay Area cuisine.

And it took until just four months ago for Ho to finish their review of The French Laundry, after the long struggle to get a table there three times over!

It's not clear if the Chronicle will be hiring from within or conducting another national search — these jobs tend to be big media news when they come available. Stay tuned.

Previously: We Now Know Why the Chronicle Doesn't Think The French Laundry Is Worth the Splurge Anymore

Photo: XO Festival/YouTube

In the quest to do best-of lists at the Chronicle Food Department without actually replicating Michael Bauer's once-popular Top 100 Restaurants list, there have been some false starts since Soleil Ho began her tenure as critic two years ago.

Through the pandemic, it sounds like she's continued dining around in earnest — she moved here from the midwest and was notably not super familiar with the Bay Area restaurant scene when she started. And after that bizarre Top 25 list came out in January with a promise to update it quarterly, we now have something more akin to the Top 100 in its scope. Except it's not one list, it's four, covering San Francisco, the East Bay, Marin County, and the Peninsula/South Bay in separate lists, which makes some sense. And it totals 91 restaurants and pop-ups, which gets us close to 100 — leaving out the food-rich area of Wine Country, with no Sonoma or Napa representation.

People up in Sonoma and Napa counties still read the Chronicle, so this could ruffle some feathers — but maybe the Wine Country list just isn't done yet.

The San Francisco list of course omits some restaurants that haven't made it back open yet — including mainstays like Marlowe, Frances, and Octavia. But with 34 entries, this is at least a good swath of SF's best dining destinations — and unlike that Top 25, this one doesn't ignore heavy hitters like AL's Place, Mister Jiu's, State Bird Provisions, Rich Table, and Atelier Crenn.

The SF list makes room for El Farolito to represent for Mission burritos — SFist still stands by the superiority of Cancun — and includes longtime Michael Bauer pizza favorite Gialina's, along with Del Popolo and Square Pie Guys. And Ho does a better job than Bauer of finding some gems to include in Chinatown — she's a fan of Capital, barbecue spot Hing Lung Co., and dim sum spot Good Mong Kok Bakery.

Notable among the omissions, though, are Angler, Benu, Saison, Cotogna, and SPQR, to name a few, and Michelin three-starred Quince is likely left off because it hasn't been open for the last 15 months.

Interestingly, Nyum Bai, the popular and lauded Oakland Cambodian restaurant which was praised in one of Ho's first reviews after her arrival at the Chronicle, did not make the cut for the East Bay.

Ho refers to these combined lists saying "we essentially just put out an extra Top 100 list, simply for the hell of it." So, I guess it wasn't intentional that these four lists cover 91 restaurants, and once she gets around to dining in Napa and Sonoma a bit more, we'll probably have something more like a Top 115. Bauer always complained that the 100 limit seemed more arbitrary every year. And perhaps this is more digestible and more easily searchable this way, separated geographically.

For those of you who love a list, there you have them. And this is pretty similar to the collection of spots in that Top 88 they put out last year, when so many things were closed — though this time Yamo didn't make the list. Sad.

Previously: Chronicle Launches a Bizarre 'Top 25' That Will Be Updated Quarterly, Kind of Like the Eater 38

Top image: A salad at AL's Place. Photo: Jay Barmann/SFist

Former SF mayor Willie Brown will no longer be lending his gossip and opinions to the Chronicle as of next month. The controversial — and many would say highly problematic — "Willie's World" column is coming to an end after 12 years, and it sounds like it was not Willie's choice.

Politico reports that "Willie's World" is dunzo, with the January 24th column being the last and final. Brown tells reporter Carla Marinucci (formerly of the Chronicle) that the Chronicle simply informed him that the paper is "going in a different direction," and, he added, curiously, "They’re going digital," which sounds a lot like something they might tell an 86-year-old to let him down easy.

For over a decade, the Chronicle has cemented its status as the establishment-voice paper of San Francisco in no small part because it has employed a former mayor and a very much still active power-player in local politics as a columnist. Brown's chatty and often gossipy column, based on regular conversations he has with a broad swath of the Bay Area's — and Sacramento's — political elite, were often an interesting window into some behind-the-scenes drama. But the column caused no shortage of criticism for its obvious conflicts of interest — with the Chronicle on the one hand purporting to be the city's paper of record, and on the other giving a pseudo-journalistic platform to a prominent lobbyist and political player to do with as he pleased.

Also, it seemed like Willie was sometimes not-so-subtly doing the bidding of friends and legal clients, though the goals were not always clear. And whether or not he was ever compensated with an endorsement deal, there was a period in 2011/2012 where  he couldn't stop name-dropping Subway, the sandwich chain, in his columns, much to SFist's delight and confusion.

In September of 2020, Marinucci reported that the Chronicle had already tried to cut off Willie's column using the new state gig-worker law AB5 as an excuse — before Newsom amended it, the law put a limit of 35 contributions to one outlet on all freelance writers. And over the years, the paper can't have been thrilled with columns that, for example, defended Bill Cosby against rape allegations, or defended Donald Trump in 2016 over allegations of sexual assault.

But what was the final straw? Could it have been that December interview in which Willie expressed (arguably faux) surprise at all the drama surrounding a federal investigation into corruption at City Hall involving several people mentioned as proteges of his?

Speaking to KQED, Brown almost explicitly dismissed the entire probe by suggesting that this is just how government works. "I don't understand what the object [of the outrage] happens to be, frankly, because the kind of thing they're talking about, and the kind of thing they're doing, doesn't seem to have a whole lot of implications for the operation of city government," Brown wrote.

He also waved off the idea that Harlan and Naomi Kelly (the just-resigned City Administrator) and scandal pivot-point Mohammed Nuru were his proteges. "The news organization writes down that everyone is a protege of mine, period," Brown said. "They never say they're a protege of everyone else that might exist. I must have the most awesome influence of anyone alive. The story doesn't work unless they're a 'protege of Willie Brown.'"

The interview was published shortly after federal charges were filed against Harlan Kelly, the former head of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and one of Brown's proteges, who is accused of accepting an all-expense-paid vacation in China from indicted permit expeditor Walter Wong.

Many City Hall watchers have contended that the culture of quid pro quo "low-level corruption" in San Francisco government, while not uncommon in city governments across the land, can be traced back to Brown's tenure as mayor. The Chronicle itself did a five-part investigative series in 2001 on "Willie Brown Inc.," discussing what it characterized as graft and shady contract awards, in which "bidders who are associates of the mayor — or who have retained Brown's associates as lobbyists or consultants — have won out over others with less political clout, sometimes after intervention by the mayor or his aides."

The piece also talked about how Brown had assembled a "patronage army" at City Hall, having "created some 350 mayoral 'special assistant' jobs with an annual payroll topping $45 million." And how Brown and his associates allegedly courted "$4.8 million in unregulated soft money donations into political action committees backing the mayor or his favored candidates" from corporations seeking permits or "favorable regulatory decisions" from the city.

So, why, then, would the same paper decide it was good idea to give Brown a column for 12 years, apart from the fact that he's a well known local character who also liked to do things like give Oscar predictions? Way back in 2013, the ethical problems with having Willie as a columnist were brought up in the national media, but the Chronicle is only now deciding to end the column?

Brown also had the column throughout the entire tenure of Mayor Ed Lee, whom many saw as a virtual proxy for Brown and certainly beholden to Brown and pal Rose Pak for landing in the job.

To Brown's credit, there were often good predictions and tidbits over the years, but what was up with all the weird stuff directed at onetime romantic partner Kamala Harris? Like when he dished about her real age, or suggested Jerry Brown ought to jump in line ahead of her for Barbara Boxer's Senate seat, or when last August he argued that she should refuse the offer of the Vice Presidency.

Anyway, so long "Willie's World"! Though will he be without a platform for long? Marinucci already hints that with the sale of SF Weekly and the Examiner to local politico Clint Riley, Riley might be wise to poach Brown just for the notoriety.

Photo: Brown at the 2017 opening of 'Fun Home' at the Curran. Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images

It's seemingly been a struggle for the Chronicle food department and restaurant critic Soleil Ho in assuming the albatross of Michael Bauer's Top 100 list ever since Bauer retired and Ho took his place. And now, a decision has been made to scrap it in favor of a more dynamic, briefer list.

Bauer himself was fond of discussing the burdens of the Top 100, a popular and annually updated list covering the entire Bay Area that he first created in the early 1990s, and for which he spent a good part of his year doing research via revisits to old favorite restaurants and newly added ones of recent years alike. In addition to having to jettison classic Bay Area staples in favor of newcomers, Bauer ultimately complained of the arbitrariness of the 100-restaurant limit that was his own creation, especially as the Bay Area food scene truly came into its own in the early part of the 2010s.

Critics of Bauer's taste were quick to point out the lack of diversity in his list as well — the Top 100 tended to favor splashy, pricier restaurants, especially those in a Cal-Mediterranean vein, while family-run and smaller ethnic food spots were not generally in consideration. Bauer tried in his last years in the job to remedy this, but only by throwing La Taqueria on there, and a few other places. But dining out for him typically meant a nice sit-down dinner with cocktails or wine, and that's what the list reflected.

For the 2019 Top 100, which came quickly after Ho assumed critic's duties for the paper in January that year, Ho made some equivocations for the changes made saying things like "this list exists in dialogue with the ones that came before" and "I wanted to take a moment to really think about what 'top' means." The notably more diverse list was the work of at least seven critics and took pains to include nearly every type of cuisine available around the Bay. This was at the expense of former Top 100 mainstays like Frances, Boulevard, and others, but it was all in the name of shaking things up and creating a list that was "fresh, challenging and reflective of the way we eat now," Ho wrote.

2020 presented its own challenges, most obviously the fact that some restaurants closed permanently and no restaurants were operating as they normally would for much of the year. While some had pivoted to takeout or outdoor dining, with a limited window of indoor eating in the fall, others had simply gone dormant without actually closing.

The Chronicle responded with a Top 88, as a gesture to the 12 restaurants that might otherwise have been included.

But now, just a few months later, it's January. Outdoor dining remains prohibited in San Francisco as COVID-19 hospitalizations hit new highs. And the Chronicle has unveiled, sort of confusingly, a Top 25. It's like, they know that people like lists, but they don't want to be stuck with Bauer's 100-restaurant monster anymore, and they also want to reserve the right to change their minds.

So, this Top 25 is less of a "best of the Bay" list as it is a "here's what's trending" combined with "where we're eating now." It's meant to be updated quarterly, so there's a chance that half of the spots won't be on there in the next update, and it seems like it is less driven by one critic's opinion of excellence, and more of a broad brush for places worth traveling to or splurging at. Essentially, it's the Eater 38, less 13 restaurants, and that seems kind of lame and lazy given that the Bay Area has tens of thousands of restaurants and Eater's list only has to cover San Francisco.

Thus, on the Chronicle's Top 25, there are only 10 restaurants in San Francisco, and most with Michelin stars etc. have not earned mention.

Also, with the added burden of being very diverse in terms of cuisine, this is one of the oddest and most eclectic collections of restaurants you are likely to see, ranging from a Fruitvale District taqueria to the Michelin three-starred SingleThread in Healdsburg.

Is this list useful? You be the judge.

Here's what made the cut in this inaugural Chronicle Top 25 — and note that not all these places are even open right now...

Daeho Kalbijjim & Beef Soup
El Garage (Richmond)
El Paisa@.com (Oakland)
Ettan (Palo Alto)
Hết sẩy (San Jose)
Horn Barbecue (Oakland)
House of Prime Rib
Juanita & Maude (Albany)
Kusakabe
La Ciccia
Lion Dance Cafe (Oakland)
Los Carnalitos La Mejor Comida Chilanga (Hayward)
Nari
Pearl 6101
PizzaLeah (Windsor)
Pollara Pizzeria (Berkeley)
Red Chillies (Milpitas)
Rintaro
Shawarmaji (Oakland)
SingleThread (Healdsburg)
SmishSmash (Alameda)
Swan Oyster Depot
Yubu by the Shota
Zareen's (Palo Alto)
Zuni Cafe

The Chronicle's Top 25 Restaurants - Winter 2021

P.S. - Soleil Ho has also released a Top Pizza list, but Little Star is nowhere to be found, so...

Photo courtesy of Horn Barbecue

Following news last week that Facebook and/or its subsidiary Instagram was eyeing office space in the new 181 Fremont tower — with one rumor suggesting they might want to take the entirety of the tower's office space — the SF Business Times now has it that the company is also in talks for a lease at the Chronicle's iconic Fifth and Mission building. The move, as CNBC notes, would be especially ironic given the fact that the social media giant has "already replaced the daily newspaper as the primary news source for a lot of readers," and the Chronicle has been steadily giving up space in their own building over several years because they no longer need it.

Yahoo has occupied the 68,000 feet that's up for grabs at the Chronicle since 2013, and their lease is up next year — also, Yahoo is basically a thing called Altaba now, and they probably won't need more than a couple desks soon.

CNBC confirms that Facebook has signed a letter of intent for space in 181 Fremont, though it remains unclear how much space we're talking about. A source last week told TechCrunch that they were only considering a "test" space of sorts for 100 or so employees — which would be the first time Facebook had leased space in what's essentially their home city, having stubbornly kept all their employees on shuttle buses and in cars to and from Menlo Park all these years.

A source tells CNBC that Facebook is looking at both 181 Fremont and another space in SF, but did not confirm that other space was the Chronicle headquarters.

Facebook employees have been pushing the company to open an SF office — as other tech companies like Google and competitor Twitter have — for at least a year, and there's little doubt that being solely based in Menlo Park and requiring that 30-mile commute has impacted employee attraction and retention.

As TechCrunch pointed out, Facebook now has offices in 68 cities worldwide, and yet when staffers need to host a meeting in San Francisco they have to do so at their PR firm's offices.

Previously: Facebook Employees Actually Hate Commuting, Beg For SF Office

Responding to criticism about the list's usual lack of diversity, and starting last year, the San Francisco Chronicle took the annual Rising Star Chefs feature out of the hands of critic Michael Bauer and left the choices up to other members of paper's food department, including Jonathan Kauffman, Tara Duggan, and Paolo Lucchesi. They repeated that with this year's class, who were featured in Sunday's paper, and for the first time (I'm pretty sure ever) the list includes not a single white male. Also, notably, the rising stars have been plucked from places besides the more expected, lauded, and Michelin-starred kitchens of the Bay Area.

As the team explains, "These are changing times for the restaurant industry, which is going through its most significant upheaval in years, a perfect storm of rising costs, staff shortages, saturation and, to be honest, an industry-wide realization that things — business models, pay equity, general morality — need to change if a business is going to be truly sustainable." So, they say, this year's list reflects who they think are among the food scene's "thought leaders" and culinary talents, and they've scrapped the age limitations that have been used for this list in the past — this year's class simply has to have lead their own kitchen for less than five years.

And, also, not all of these chefs are actually running brick-and-mortar kitchens yet.

The 2017 Rising Star Chef class is Reem Assil of Oakland-based Arab food pop-up/farmers' market stand Reem's, whose brick-and-mortar bakery is set to open next month; Chris Kiyuna, chef-partner at The Perennial in the mid-Market neighborhood, whose resume includes Front Porch and Coi; Tu David Phu of Vietnamese pop-up Ăn, which he plans to open as a brick-and-mortar next year; Fernay McPherson, the chef behind roving soul food pop-up Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement; and Michelle Minori, the 30-year-old behind the pasta menu at Barzotto, one of a number of "fancier" fast-casual establishments that have taken root in the last few years in SF.

After announcing a list made up of entirely white male chefs back in 2010, Bauer and the Chronicle's food department have made conscious efforts to diversify things in recent years, particularly starting with their 2015 Rising Star class which was made up entirely of pastry chefs — a field that tends to be dominated by women, and indeed three of the five chefs that year were women.

And now that this list has been helping catapult careers for Bay Area chefs for over 25 years now, it's about time that things should look a lot more diverse.

Previously: Chronicle Names Six Rising Star Chefs, Including Aatxe's Ryan Pollnow and Californios' Val Cantu

This week Michael Bauer is marking 30 years at the Chronicle, where he's served as food editor and restaurant critic since 1986 after moving the Bay Area from Dallas. As part of his anniversary celebration, the paper just put up this cool feature you can scroll through in which Bauer reflects on the most important restaurants to come along in each of the 30 years he's been critic. Notably, when there is much talk in the food world about the dearth of female executive chefs, women were at the helm of three of the big restaurants in Bauer's first years in town: Judy Rodgers, who took over Zuni Cafe in 1987; Nancy Oakes who "took American food to a new level" at L'Avenue in 1988; and Suzette Gresham who opened Acquerello in 1989.

Mr. Bauer also reflects on bygone trends and weird missteps — dessert sushi, anyone? — and says that he only ever intended to work for the paper for five years, but then five became 10, and 10 became 30 at "warp speed."

And, as is sometimes the case, he makes some controversial choices in declaring the most "important" restaurants of the last several years — for 2009, for instance, he says it was Nopalito, with Saison merely a runner-up. And while he says that 2010 was definitely the best year of his time as critic, he declares Benu was the restaurant of that year, despite his love for Cotogna, Commonwealth, Mission Chinese Food, and Bar Agricole.

The Chron made a little review box for Bauer himself, giving his opinions four stars, and saying his anonymity at this point is, admittedly, at two and a half. And would you believe he's written 5,320 reviews? That's about three per week, even though these days he only writes two per week.

For some asinine reason, the Chronicle refused to endorse anyone in the June primary, deciding instead to pussyfoot around the Bernie vs. Hillary debate and come to the conclusion that none of the candidates this year were good enough for an endorsement. But now that a Trump-fueled Rapture is potentially around the corner they've decided to issue an early endorsement of Clinton, for whatever it's worth, saying, "The contrast could not be more profound. One candidate is fit for the presidency. The other is not."

Much like the typically Republican Houston Chronicle did last week, the SF Chron echoes the thoughts of many on both sides of the political spectrum, suggesting that everybody better wake up, stop chuckling, and get to the polls unless they would like to see the Constitution set on fire and nuclear winter arrive by 2018.

This is no ordinary race between a Republican and Democrat, or conservative and liberal, or reformer and defender of the status quo. It is a test of whether American voters have the wisdom to identify and dispel a demagogue with authoritarian instincts who is treating a run for the presidency as if it were a reality TV show where outlandishness is the coin of the realm.

In a separate piece, reporter John Diaz explains why the paper chose to run the endorsement this early, just a week after the conventions finished, noting that the earliest endorsement he's seen in his tenure was October 17th. "There is no need to wait or equivocate."

Nonetheless he takes the chance to undercut Hillary, attempting to justify why the paper's editorial board chose not to endorse her in June.

As anyone who has followed our pages over the years knows, our editorial board has not exactly been enamored with Hillary Clinton. We have challenged her actions many times, from the Whitewater scandal to her role in bringing soft money into her husband’s re-election campaign to her use of a private server as secretary of state. We endorsed Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 California primary, praising Clinton’s policy acumen and senatorial skills, but expressing concern about the unsettling signs of a resurrection of the “reflex to scorch the Earth” that typified the Clintons’ White House years.

He does make one good and obvious point:

It’s distressing to contemplate how trivial and vitriolic the campaign is going to become in the next three months. Immediately after the Democratic National Convention, Trump warned, “I’m taking the gloves off,” leaving anyone who has followed the 2016 election to wonder: Hasn’t that been the case from the start?

Brace yourselves, everybody.

Previously: Everyone Is Awful: Chronicle Declines To Endorse Anyone In Presidential Primary
Chronicle Called Out For Putting Bill, Not Hillary, On Today's Front Page