Closed circuit
Mestiza, Sparkle SF, St. Francis Wood listings, Studio Windy Chien, Sailing Collective, most flavorful tomatoes, best new North American hotels, hushed hybrid, MORE
RESTAURANTS • First Person
Feast mode
Deanna Sison opened her colorful new Filipino spot Mestiza in South Beach this spring, after years serving up fried chicken at Little Skillet, a neighboring soul food destination. The new restaurant is an homage to Sison’s Filipina heritage, with a focus on vibrant vegan offerings.
Located on a long block near the ballpark, what initially appears as a simple lunch counter changes once you work your way through the space, which opens up into a moody blue patio with live plants and lattices overhead. On the rear wall, a mural of a Filipina singer with closed eyes and open palms invites you to take a breath and a seat.
Lunch options include a mushroom tofu sisig and calabaza coconut curry, available as either a wrap or a bowl. Sit down for dinner, and those come as full plates with jasmine rice and papaya salad. A vegan take on lumpia rolls up sweet potato and brussels instead of the usual pork. But Sison caters to non-vegans too, serving up braised pork adobo for the fans.
The coolest experience is the full kamayan feast, which must be reserved in advance and is available only on Friday and Saturday nights. The staff lays banana leaves on the table and arranges a minor mountain range of food down the center: beef tenderloin, shrimp gambas, jammy eggs, garlic rice, fresh fruit — more than 15 items, all told. Per tradition, everything’s up for grabs to eat with your hands. Mestiza doesn’t have a full liquor license yet, so the cocktails run refreshing and light, from the calamansi spritz to the pineapple-hibiscus mimosa.
Sison clearly understands what the downtown crowd wants and needs, whether that’s a happy desk lunch or a jungle oasis worlds away from the office. Just remember: It’s nigh impossible to check Slack with a handful of crispy lechon. –Becky Duffett
→ Mestiza (SoMa) • 214 Townsend St • Tues-Sat 1130a-8p, kamayan feasts by reservation only Fri & Sat 6-8p • Reserve • Photo: Melissa de Mata.
SF RESTAURANT LINKS: Belden Place French institutions Café Bastille and B44 will shutter this month • Nopa and Pac Heights’ Octavia pivot to weekend pastry service • Citing “desolate convention center suck hole,” Aphotic announces December closure • Che Fico Pizzeria opens today in Thrive City • Cool kid Pakistani party food/cocktail spot Gold Palm opens in Oakland • How Sam Kaplan’s Memento Mori wines became a Napa Valley sensation.
REAL ESTATE • On the Market
Living history
St. Francis Wood is one of San Francisco’s most unusual neighborhoods: a purely residential area, with freestanding single-family homes and front — and back — yards. That means no walkable coffee shops, grocery stores, or restaurants; it also means you can forget you live in a dense and busy city until you hop in your car to get to one of those amenities. It’s a mini-vacation one can live in forever.
The planned community was established in 1912, and most of its homes still boast flourishes from that era. More often than not, interiors have been updated to contemporary standards, but properties in need of a spruce-up also lurk within the listings. In the past year, 12 houses have changed hands in St. Francis Wood, at a median price of $4.212M, per Compass. Here, three current listings to consider:
→ 93 San Pablo Ave (St. Francis Wood, above) • 5BR/3BA, 3483 SF home • Ask: $3.98M • 1927-built home fully updated in 2008 • Days on market: 19 • Agent: Corey Trevor, eXp.
→ 245 Santa Clara Ave (St. Francis Wood) • 4BR/4BA, 3230 SF home • Ask: $3.97M • Mediterranean Revival with backyard hot tub • Days on market: 75 • Agent: Tim Brown, KW.
→ 163 San Leandro Way (St. Francis Wood) • 4BR/2.1BA, 3170 SF home • Ask: $3.595M • Henry H. Gutterson-built home owned by same family for last 53 years • Days on market: 12 • Agent: Robert Callan Jr., Sotheby's.
SF WORK AND PLAY LINKS: Cannabis cafes are now legal in California • But don’t expect any in SF anytime soon • Heatwave prompts SF biz boom • And it’s opened up some plum 49ers seats • 372-unit development to rise over SF’s sole DMV • Is your company’s back-to-office mandate a covert layoff move? • Meet the HENRYs —high earners, not rich yet.
WORK • Wednesday Routine
Tying the knot
WINDY CHIEN • artist • Studio Windy Chien
Neighborhood you live in: After 34 years in the Mission, I recently moved to Twin Peaks.
It’s Wednesday morning. What’s the scene at your workplace?
My studio is in the Heath Ceramics building in the Mission. Because we limit studio visitors and meetings to Tuesdays, Wednesdays are for focusing on what we’re making. And I LOVE days like this. Our small, mighty team of three creates one large work every week. Our waiting list is six months long, so we’re working on something a collector or client has been anticipating for a while.
I eschew working with galleries and prefer to represent myself, so we’re not only making the works, we’re also negotiating sales, shipping, installing, and so much more. My production artist’s hands are full measuring, cutting and knotting rope, sanding wood, constructing shipping boxes, and more. My studio manager is communicating with the outside world, managing projects overall, and more. When not knotting, I’m experimenting, innovating and playing. The goal is to constantly evolve the art.
What’s on the agenda for today?
I’ll finish knotting a 5’ x 10’ piece for my home; we recently moved to a midcentury place on Twin Peaks and have a huge wall in the living room calling out for a beautiful rose gold Circuit Board. I can’t believe it’s taken me eight years to find the time to make something for my own house! Then I’ll start on a creamy white Circuit Board for a collector who lives on Vancouver Island. I also need to finish sketching a massive (200 feet wide) piece for a hotel on Maui.
Any restaurant plans today, tonight, this weekend?
I love getting an after-work cocktail at Osito, the restaurant catty-corner from the studio. Chef Seth Stowaway just redid the bar there with blue Venetian plaster walls. It’s a gorgeous space. I have a piece in their dining room — the composition of the knotting is inspired by the overhead forest canopy because Osito is a live-fire restaurant.
During the workweek, my all-Asian team and I like to order Hon’s Wun-Tun House’s pork and shrimp dumpling soup. Their broth is the best. We also love our neighbors at Flour + Water Pasta Shop for their Italian subs. You can see some of my pieces there too.
How about a little leisure or culture?
I love going to Minnesota Street Project to see what’s on the walls. This is boring, but if I’m honest, one thing I look forward to every week is the Noe Valley Farmers Market. I used to go to Alemany, but since I moved, NV is closest. It’s where I get my favorite food in the world: Early Girl tomatoes from Tomatero Farm. Those girls grow the most flavorful tomatoes I’ve ever had.
Any weekend getaways?
People sleep on The Inn at Newport Ranch, but it is an astonishingly beautiful place right on the wild Mendocino coast. You look down off the unfenced cliff edge and there are waves crashing hundreds of feet below. They also steward the redwoods on their land and cultivate their own food. The architecture is that ’70s hand-built wood style that Bay Area treasure Lloyd Kahn likes to champion. I’m teaching a workshop retreat there this November!
What was your last great vacation?
Every summer, I sail with the Sailing Collective. You get a catamaran that sleeps 10, bring a bunch of friends and a chef, and it’s utter bliss. We’ve sailed Sardinia and Corsica, Greece, the Amalfi Coast, Croatia, the Bahamas, and Cape Cod. Sailing, which I found through my work as a professional knot tyer, feels like discovering one of the keys to life. I plan to sail with them every year until I die.
What store or service do you always recommend?
Bryr Clogs makes the chicest, most advanced, and forward-looking clogs — with colors to die for. The Bryr shop in the Dogpatch is gorgeous, and everything is designed and made by women. Right now, I’m test-wearing a new style that’s going to break. the. internet. It’s that good.
WORK • Office Report
RTOver?
Amazon’s call for employees to return to the office five days a week continues to ripple:
In the wake of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s memo, other big tech companies were forced to react. Microsoft and Google execs said those companies wouldn’t force employees back unless (cue minor-key soundtrack) productivity slows.
Amazon employees are not happy! A survey of 2500 Amazon workers found that 91% are dissatisfied with the move and 73% are looking for a new job as a result. (N.B. FOUND is looking for good freelance sales people.)
In defense of Amazon’s policy, insiders said it was necessary to defend the company’s can-do corporate culture (previously defined by debilitatingly long hours in the office).
Meanwhile, the NYT says return-to-office has expired as a topic of interest because it is no longer interested:
[O]ver the summer, the phrase seemed to disappear: Its three-letter abbreviation appeared in The New York Times only four times from June 1 to Sept. 30. The words ‘return to office’ appeared only five times in the context of employers, employees and workplaces over those four months.
A novel theory! But maybe, splashy corporate memos and waning media trends aside, the RTO noise actually quieted down because employees unceremoniously took the issue into their own hands, pursuing a “hushed hybrid” approach in which they find a way to work flexibly even in the face of stricter mandates. Brace for more memos. –Josh Albertson
CULTURE & LEISURE • Flyovers
A Night at the Dream Bowl: 1940s • Blue Note (Napa) • Thurs @ 7p • Side Bar, $37 per
Fleet Week Air Show • Marina Green (Marina) • Fri @ 10a • Flight Deck Club, $425 per
Cleve Jones 70th Birthday Celebration • The Hibernia (Downtown) • Sat @ 8p • premium, $250 per
GOODS & SERVICES • Salons
Nailed it
Mission District nail salon Sparkle SF is the opposite of your neighborhood mani-pedi spot. The collective is appointment-only, no walk-ins, and patrons are expected to arrive with references and Pinterest boards as detailed as the ones they’d bring their interior designer.
That’s because, unlike your kitchen’s raw-edge shelves or artisanal bathroom tile, your nails are with you wherever you go — so the thought around how they’re finessed might be even more important. “People are always looking at each other’s nails,” founder and native San Franciscan Mia Rubie says. “But they only register if they look really bad — or really good.”
And nails look really, really good after a visit to one of Sparkle’s artists, many of whom are waitlist-only when it comes to bookings. Like Rubie, most also moonlight on film sets, head to tony homes and hotels to work on celebrity mitts, or book corporate nail gigs (Rubie, for example, is the nail pro whose work appears in Instacart’s ads and social media).
Tracking an artist you like via Instagram is a good first step, followed by a swift response when openings are announced. Rubie’s waitlist can stretch to years, for example, but once you’re in, bookings can be made within days. It’s a more complicated process than the strip mall nail salon most of us grew up with, but the results — and the compliments — make it worthwhile. –Eve Batey
→ Book: Sparkle SF (Mission) • 1380 Valencia St • by appointment only.
GETAWAYS LINKS: Big Sur stretch of Highway 1 reopens Friday • Sequoia High Sierra Camp on the market for $5.35M • Big Santa Anita Canyon welcomes back hikers • Amex closing all spas across Centurion Lounge network • At posh hotels, the rise of the robot massage.
GETAWAYS • The Nines
New hotels worth the trip*
Today’s Nines are courtesy our friends at Way to Go, the excellent weekly travel newsletter by the discerning founders of Fathom. You should subscribe to Way to Go for many reasons, chief among them its obsessive commitment to surfacing great hotels. (BONUS: 25% off for FOUND readers!)
Todos Santos Boutique Hotel (Todos Santos), sexy 10-key with elaborate F+B, $772
SHA Mexico (Yucatán), innovative medi/emo/wellness spa, $2052 (4-night program, 2 ppl)
Maroma (Riviera Maya), jungle meets beach resort, $1899
Silvestre Nosara (Costa Rica), bougie-boho surfer heaven, $947
The Ranch Hudson Valley (Sloatsburg, NY), for quick hike-based resets, $2291 (4-night program, 2 ppl)
The Weston (Vermont), big-time luxe, small town charm, $550
The Dunlin (Johns Island, SC), Lowcountry cottage core, $1169
Hotel Bardo (Savannah), historic mansion turned Italian-y clubhouse, $595
The Potlatch Club (Bahamas), Eleuthera gem on beachfront acres, $475 (3-night minimum)
*US, Caribbean, Mexico. All rooms November rates one night.
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