View Sidebar

Post Tagged with: San Francisco

Foreign-Born Uber Drivers Recommend their Favorite Home Cuisines (in the Bay Area)

Foreign-Born Uber Drivers Recommend their Favorite Home Cuisines (in the Bay Area)

If you love travel and food, as I do, you would have spent nearly every Uber ride in the last year talking with drivers about where they come from (an overwhelming number of them are immigrants) and, amongst other things, where they go to get a taste of home when they’re away from home.

What follows is my compiled list of restaurant recommendations from countless Uber drivers. Every establishment here was recommended by someone from the country of origin of that cuisine who regularly patronizes the business.

Korean

Han IL Kwan, 1802 Balboa St (at 19th), San Francisco
(415) 752-4447

Arang, 1506 Fillmore St (at Geary), San Francisco
(415) 775-9095

Turkish

A La Turca, 869 Geary St (at Larkin), San Francisco
(415) 345-1011

Pera, 1457 18th St, San Francisco (at Connecticut), San Francisco
(415) 796-3812

Moroccan

El Mansour, 3119 Clement St (at 32nd), San Francisco
(415) 751-2312

Cafe Zitouna, 1201 Sutter St (at Polk), San Francisco
(415) 673-2622

Yemenese

Saha, Hotel Carlton, 1075 Sutter St (at Larkin), San Francisco
(415) 345-9547

Indian

Mehfil, 2301 Fillmore St (at Clay), San Francisco
(415) 614-1010

Golden Gate Indian Cuisine & Pizza, 1388 46th Ave (at Judah), San Francisco
(415) 564-5514

Cafe Chaat, 320 3rd St (at Folsom), San Francisco
(415) 979-9946

Amber, 25 Yerba Buena Ln (at Market), San Francisco
(415) 777-0500

Japanese

Kirala, 2100 Ward St (at Shattuck), Berkeley
(510) 549-3486

Tibetan

Potala Organic Cafe, 1045 San Pablo Ave, Albany, CA
(510) 528-2375

Scandinavian

Plaj, 333 Fulton St (at Franklin), San Francisco
(415) 294-8925

Ethiopian

Addis Ethiopian Restaurant, 6100 Telegraph Ave (at 61st), Oakland
(510) 653-3456

Sheba Piano Lounge, 1419 Fillmore St (at Ellis), San Francisco
(415) 440-7414

Asmara, 5020 Telegraph Ave (at 51st), Oakland
(510) 547-5100

Café Eritrea D’Afrique, 4069 Telegraph Ave (at 41st), Oakland
(510) 547-4520

Nicaraguan

Las Tinajas, 2338 Mission St (at 19th), San Francisco
(415) 695-9933

Brazilian

Espetus Churrascaria, 710 S B St (at 7th), San Mateo, CA
(650) 342-8700

Minas Brazilian Restaurant & Cachaçaria (formerly Canto do Brasil), 41 Franklin St (at Market), San Francisco
(415) 626-8727

Cleo’s Steak House, 446 San Mateo Ave, San Bruno, CA
(650) 615-9120

Puerto Rican

Sol Food, 903 Lincoln Ave (at 3rd), San Rafael, CA
(415) 451-4765

Pakistani

Chutney, 511 Jones St (at O’Farrell), San Francisco
(415) 931-5541

Armenian

Royal Market Food & Bakery, 5335 Geary Blvd (at 17th), San Francisco
(415) 221-5550

Cantonese

R&G Lounge, 631 Kearny St (at Clay), San Francisco
(415) 982-7877

Peruvian

Limón Rotisserie, 1001 S. Van Ness Ave (at 21st), San Francisco
(415) 821-2134

Fresca, 24 W. Portal Ave (at Ulloa), San Francisco
(415) 759-8087

Palestinian

Old Jerusalem, 2976 Mission St (at 26th), San Francisco
(415) 642-5958

Nepalese

I was told about a food truck, Everest, that frequents Off the Grid at Fort Mason, but couldn’t find anything about it online.

I was also told about Curry Without Worry, a nonprofit founded by Nepalese chef Shrawan Nepali that runs a food truck, free of charge, for the poor in downtown San Francisco and Kathmandu, Nepal. The organization and its mission certainly qualify for an honorable mention.

March 15, 2015Comments are DisabledRead More
The Word

The Word

There’s a word in the English language that’s so taboo that it is only ever referred to by its first initial, and even then it stands in a class by itself alongside other initialed words casually dropped: F-, C-, etc. Unlike these other initialed words, this is the only word that, among most people, can never be spoken in public or even private life. It’s a word that destroys reputations and careers, makes headlines and ends friendships.

It is, of course, a word with a despicable racist past and carries with it a weight and power that is unmatched in the English language. It’s a word that everyone knows but almost everyone is afraid to say.

You know the Word, so I don’t need to write it here, but I have written and said it elsewhere on very few occasions. I’m sure most people of all races have, whether they admit it or not. When I have used it, it has only ever been in reference as a refutation of the power falsely ascribed to language and in defending my very strong belief that words are not, in themselves, evil, but depend on a context and a speaker (and even using the Word in making that point has caused trouble). I have never used the Word against someone or in hate or used it casually as an epithet, and most of the time when I have heard the Word used in this manner—fortunately not on many occasions—I have found it obligatory to say something to the person using it. So I have participated, willingly and non-willingly, to the aura of power ascribed to this Word.

I don’t believe any word should have this power. It’s a scary thing to think that uttering one word has the potential to cause so much damage, both to the listener and the speaker. Therein, I suppose, lies the essence of taboo: something that presents itself as so unthinkable that it beggars belief why anyone would cross it.

I think I understand. Taboo is toxic to human brains. Humans hate to be prisoners, and nothing is worse than a prison of your own mind. In many ways we are wired to challenge convention, to be independent, to break things. To me, the taboos of everyday life are like desperate parasites clawing at the inside of my brain. They are sometimes all I can think about—not because I want to break them, but just out of a desire to unburden myself from thoughts I am not allowed to have.

When I hear people using the Word, I sometimes think that they’re doing it because they simply can’t accept a world where they don’t have the freedom to say something they want to say. I wonder how many people out there use the world without any malice but simply out of a desire of expanding their expressional arsenal?

I bring this up because recently I had an experience at one of my favorite San Francisco restaurants. I had become friendly with the GM there, but nothing more than casual pleasantries when I patronized his restaurant. This one time I was there with some friends and he came and sat down at the table toward the end of the evening. The conversation ranged, but eventually he found a way to steer it to his favorite topic: how much he hates, well, you know.

It was weird. The last time I had—in the words of a friend—”put a quarter in a racist” was in South Africa, but that was a different experience altogether. I’ve written about South Africa’s frank and refreshingly honest ongoing conversation about race before. At first, it was shocking to an American ear, but after a while you start to realize that South Africans are far closer to the racial discussion than we are. They say what they’re thinking outright and it is probably even cathartic for them. But here in San Francisco, to hear this sort of prejudice is quite surprising, and offensive to say the least. And it was made more offensive by the fact that he didn’t think about how his usage of this word made us dirty by comparison; he made us listen and be complicit in his prejudice.

One of the things the GM at this restaurant said, even as we tried to change the subject and leave the restaurant awkwardly, was that the Word “is my favorite word because I’m not allowed to say it.” That struck me as an odd thing to say. Obviously he had no problem using the Word (although he checked around to make sure there was no one else around when he said it), but the reason he liked using it was its taboo power. Because he’s not allowed to say it. He may have even felt justified saying it, being an immigrant and surely himself a victim of prejudice.

I often have wondered if we ascribe too much power to the Word, and here I received some confirmation. It was, indeed, a powerful word, and made more so by its forbidden nature.

(For the record, my friends and I now boycott this restaurant.)

Here is the strangest thing about the Word. It is perhaps the only word in the English language whose usage carries the privilege of being casually acceptable to some and brutally unacceptable to everyone else. In fact, the Word’s most frequent practitioners are in two diametrically opposed camps. In one, you have some of the worst kinds of people, whose determination to hate, cause pain, oppress, de-legitimize, and fear makes them a fearsome silent minority. The other frequent practitioners of the Word are those people whose livelihoods, freedoms, hopes, dreams, property and fortunes are frequently under real or implied threat by a society borne of the history and culture represented in the Word itself.

Thus, ironically, the Word is likely the only major commonality between how these two groups communicate; yet one group’s usage of the Word represents the past, and the other, the future. Herein lies the power of the Word to unite rather than divide.

I should hope that we all can agree: one day, we want to live in a universe where the racial prejudice and hatred bottled up in the Word have been forgotten to history, and the Word has been stripped of its undeserved power to outrage and offend.

October 7, 2014Comments are DisabledRead More
ReservationHop Does a Soft Pivot

ReservationHop Does a Soft Pivot

It has been a crazy holiday weekend.

In three days we went from relative obscurity to being the punching bag of the entire tech industry. I suppose some might envy me for all the media attention I’ve received for a side project I built in my underwear one night after waiting in line for a burrito, but that sort of attention does not a legitimate business make. Getting covered in CNN has its perks, to be sure, but a business needs customers, and most of all, trust.

Let’s start with customers. Opening a firehose of traffic on ReservationHop, with the sales that followed, showed that there is indeed a validated secondary market for restaurant reservations. Paid restaurant reservations are not only desirable, but the market is heading that way as people awaken to the inefficiencies in the current system. Some restaurants, annoyed by empty tables reserved for no-shows and short-sats, are moving towards ticketing and deposits anyway. Multiple chefs and owners have pointed to OpenTable as more of a problem than a solution. A paid reservation system makes sense as a way to dissuade no-shows, distribute covers throughout the week, and even increase fairness for customers. As Tyler Cowen put it in the New York Times, “Money is ultimately a more egalitarian force than privilege, as everyone’s greenbacks are worth the same.”

The biggest criticism we have received has not been about the principle of selling reservations, but rather the methods we initially employed to hack this project into existence. We appreciate the criticism and honest feedback, which is why today ReservationHop is doing a “soft pivot” to address the same customer demand, and in addition work with the restaurants directly to cut them in on the deal. We believe that restaurants can benefit from selling reservations for a couple tables per weekend. This will not only reduce no-shows and mediate demand for their peak reservations slots in favor of off-peak times, but they will also get paid for filling these tables, instead of the other way around.

It was never our intention to harm the restaurants. In fact, as we promised from the beginning, we called to cancel 15 or so reservations that didn’t get claimed this weekend 4-6 hours in advance, so restaurants would not have to deal with no-shows.

In addition, I spent a lot of time in the last couple days speaking and meeting with restaurant owners personally, offering my apologies for the troubles we may have caused them and discussing how we may work together in the future on the massive opportunity that has presented itself. It has not been lost on many restaurants that with the sort of media coverage ReservationHop is receiving and the hundreds of local customers begging for instant access to their tables, they are not only getting free advertising as the hottest ticket in town, but are given the opportunity to make money filling their best tables at near-zero risk of no-shows. This is of course an opportunity that we need to explore with them over the next couple of weeks.

This also means that ReservationHop will be evolving, as all early-stage startups do, as we experiment to find a product-market fit. We may find that our early assumptions about customers or restaurants are faulty, or there are better services we can offer to the foodies of San Francisco that are more scalable.  Or we may find that this entire venture doesn’t really have a large enough addressable market.  One of the interesting things about the last couple of days is how our initial in experiment in customer demand was taken to be “what we do,” with little acknowledgement or understanding (at least outside of the lean-startup-model-aware tech community) that rapid iterations on business models are the norm. As far as I can tell, it is rare for early stage startups to have this much press attention this early in the game. One of the challenges for us will be to navigate the extreme press scrutiny while simultaneously experimenting to find a model that works.

As we evolve, we will continue to let customers have exclusive access to the best tables in the city, while making a new promise to restaurants: we hear your concerns, and we want to work with you. As always, if you are in the restaurant business please drop us a line: admin@reservationhop.com.

July 8, 20144 commentsRead More
How I Became the Most Hated Person in San Francisco, for a Day

How I Became the Most Hated Person in San Francisco, for a Day

This morning I put the finishing touches on, and launched, ReservationHop.com, a site where I’m selling reservations I booked up at hot SF restaurants this Fourth of July weekend and beyond.

logo

I built it over the weekend after waiting at Off the Grid for 30 minutes for a burrito from Señor Sisig, and realized that there’s got to be a market for the time people spend waiting for tables at our finest city dining establishments.  Turns out I’m not the first person to think it, as there are two startups doing this very thing in New York City (here and here).

It’s a simple site with a simpler backend. I book reservations under assumed names, list them on ReservationHop, and price them according to the cost of the restaurant and how far in advance they need to be booked up. I don’t use OpenTable; I call the restaurants directly. And I have a policy of calling and canceling reservations that don’t get snapped up, because I don’t want to hurt the restaurants (the assumption being that on-demand restaurants with high walk-in traffic won’t have trouble filling those tables).

I anticipated some mild interest when I launched this morning, emailing the 20 or so potential customers I had interviewed at Off the Grid and some friends. I expected maybe having to make somewhat of an effort in order to get people to discover what I’m doing.  I never expected a maelstrom of internet hate.

Not all of the responses have been negative, but an overwhelming number of them has been.

I totally understand the frustration people have with SF’s particular brand of “innovation.” And it seems that everywhere you look cherished public resources are being claimed by startups, whether it’s Google laying claim to bus stops or parking apps laying claim to, well parking spaces. I’d half expect someone to come along one day and put picnic blankets down in Dolores park and sell them at $25 apiece.

I also understand that this represents, as one Tweeter put it, “a caricature of SF tech bro shithead.” And as someone who spends a lot of time complaining to my friends about how much of an insular bubble San Francisco has become, what with apps built by the 0.1% for the 0.1%, I completely agree. In fact, I would have much preferred the media raised this much a fuss about Drillbit or The Creative Action Network or any of my other startups over the years.

But there’s something peculiar about SF, in that our media seems to love hating on stuff like this, so I guess I’m not surprised that I got Valleywagged almost immediately, followed by a post from The Next Web. I responded to an interview request from TechCrunch so it’s written up there too.

Meanwhile, traffic has gone through the roof. Here’s my actual Google Analytics graph from today.

Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 5.50.59 PM

I guess you can say that any press is good press.

But let’s talk about the questions/criticisms everyone has. What was I thinking! How dare I sell something that’s free! Is this even legal? Is it ethical? Restaurants are going to hate this!

To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions. I built this site as an experiment in consumer demand for a particular product, and the jury’s still out on whether it will work. But I can tell you what I have thought through.

The initial criticism has been about the fact that restaurant reservations are free, and I shouldn’t be selling them. First off, reservations aren’t free. Restaurant tables are limited, in high demand and people wait a good long time as walk-ins to get them. Reservations take time and planning to make and the restaurant assumes an opportunity cost from booking them. My friend joked that it took me less time to build this site than most people spend hunting for OpenTable reservations in a given year.

What about ethics? We are talking about an asset that most people don’t think about having a value. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t have a value, or that people wouldn’t be willing to pay for it. For instance, no one would have thought that taking a cab during rush hour should cost more than a normal ride, until Uber launched surge pricing and we realized that people are willing to pay for it. Clearly, the service of booking a reservation in advance has value to patrons. This is evidenced by the startups doing this right now in New York City.

If someone does pay for it willingly, is it really unethical? The consumer has made a choice, the reservation stands, the restaurant gets a table filled as planned, and I have made money for providing the service. That seems perfectly ethical to me. I am aware that the ethical conundrum is around the “what if” question: If I book a table and no one buys it, the restaurant loses business, doesn’t it? I don’t know if that’s true yet, and I’m also working at a volume so low that it probably won’t matter.  I’m canceling the reservations 4 hours before if they don’t get bought, and certainly a restaurant that’s booked weeks in advance won’t have trouble filling a table with their high walk-in traffic, or someone who gets lucky and snaps up the reservation for free on OpenTable.

But more importantly, I think that a paid reservation lets customers get skin in the game, and that means that restaurants might even reduce no-shows if paid reservations become a thing. When Alinea introduced ticketing (pre-paid reservations), they dropped their rate of no-shows by 75%. That’s a pretty good deal in an industry with razor-thin margins.  I’m just speculating on whether this might provide value for restaurants; I can’t speak for them and need to parse this out over the next couple days.

So, back to becoming the most hated person in SF. I learned a lot today about how media, culture and technology in this city interact, and I have to say that overall, I think that the people who have sent me violent threats via email and Twitter, while excessive, may have a point. So in the interest of ethics and fairness, I want to talk to restaurants about working with them directly on a better reservation system. I’ve heard that OpenTable is loathed by many restaurants who don’t want to pay to fill tables. There may be a ticketing solution to high-demand restaurants. If you’re a restaurant, please drop me a line.

And if you’re a regular Jane or Joe, and you missed an opportunity to get a reservation at a hot SF restaurant for your first wedding anniversary this weekend, check to see if there are any reservations available for you at ReservationHop.com.

UPDATE: We have made a “soft pivot” to address feedback from the restaurant and tech industries. Read more here.

July 3, 2014132 commentsRead More
Towing is Extortion

Towing is Extortion

So, I got my car towed this morning.

I’ll rephrase. I got my rental car towed this morning, after parking overnight outside my apartment because there was no overnight drop-off.

I’ll clarify. I got my rental car towed this morning after parking six inches over the line, my Hyundai’s ass sticking into my neighbor’s driveway. In his defense, he had left me a very nice note on my windshield informing me my car would be towed if I didn’t move it.

I got a $100 parking ticket at 7:55am.
The city towed the car at 7:59am. The bill: $520.

Tow Truck Cartoon_fullNow, let me be clear. I screwed up. The tow zone was clearly marked. I took a risk butting the car into the driveway, and it was because I was lazy and tired and didn’t want to hunt for another space, and I thought I could get downstairs in the morning before anyone was leaving for work. I was wrong.

But let me ask you a question: isn’t $520 a ridiculously exorbitant fee to pay to get your own car back? Isn’t that an absurdly, unrealistically high amount of money to expect the average citizen in San Francisco to pay?

Now, I’m not poor, and I count my blessings that I have (had) the money to pay the $520 tow fee, plus the $100 parking ticket, plus the $20 cab ride to get to the car lot before the $56.50 daily fee kicked in.

But not everyone is so lucky. Most people can’t just conjure up $520 within the designated 4 hours of towing. I made a quick count of the “Auction List” of cars in the impound lot. 75 people in San Francisco were losing their cars today because, presumably, they couldn’t afford to pay to get them back.

The fact is, whether or not you live in San Francisco, you don’t even have to be remotely poor for $520 to be a lot of money. It’s a lot of money.

It doesn’t need to be this way, and it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for a carefully engineered, state-sponsored extortion racket.

As I discovered today, that $520 is neatly parceled between the city and the private monopoly contractor that does the towing. When you call the tower, they proudly tell you in their voice message that they are the “only” tow service for San Francisco. It’s their game. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the circle jerk at play here.

The towers get paid by the tow. They’re out there looking. All the time. 24/7. Their job is to tow as much as possible, and charge exorbitant fees backed by the force of law. And San Francisco walks away with half the fees anyway, so it’s not like they have a reason to change the system. And the fact that the $520 towers showed up 4 minutes after the city gave me a $100 parking ticket–two punishments for the same crime–only makes me more sure that there is a close cooperation happening here.

Public meets private: the worst of both worlds.

Law enforcement being mobilized to clear cars parked in the bad places is important, and of course people should be responsible for their property, and should pay the cost of towing their car. But if we are going to make towing the purview of municipal government, then the government has to actually step in and clear the roads, and those should be the only costs that people pay. If the city contracts out to a private monopoly, it is doing nothing more than creating a giant corporate subsidy. People must pay double or triple what they would have paid otherwise, and although most of the fee goes to a private corporation, it still is backed by the force of law.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love private enterprise. And we should privatize just about everything we can, especially services that could be provided competitively like transit. But towing is not a service, it is a form of law enforcement, which puts the incentives in the wrong place. It pays people to find–or create–lawbreakers. And what we have here is nothing more than state-sponsored extortion: making someone pay you for a “service” that you didn’t ask them to provide, on threat of losing your property. Extortion is extortion, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the mafia or the City of San Francisco.

But at least the mafia would provide some protection.

September 16, 2013Comments are DisabledRead More
My Sidecar Drivers

My Sidecar Drivers

I have been using Sidecar for about eight months. I don’t use other services, so I can’t say if my experiences with Sidecar have been unique, but the people I meet using Sidecar are the reason I do it. In just 10-30 minutes per ride, I have heard some amazing stories. I just went through my trip history to share some of them (I changed the names).

  • Kwame, from Ghana, joined the National Guard the month after getting his Green Card last year. He was shipping out in a week to Afghanistan for a yearlong tour. As a member of the army, he had to renounce his Ghanaian citizenship, and since he won’t get his US Citizenship for another three years he is currently a man without a country.
  • Tom is a truck driver for his day job. He used to be an avid gamer to battle his loneliness, but discovered Sidecar was a great way to meet new people. He was born into a Catholic family and has discovered recently that he’s an atheist. He thinks the hoopla over the new Pope is ridiculous.
  • Paul is a Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem, went to school in Zimbabwe, lived in Mozambique and South Africa, immigrated to Minnesota, married a Spanish teacher from Peru, and they moved to San Francisco. In Palestine, his father was a well-known politician, and in our conversation it seemed that he went through a lot of effort to separate himself from the family, for reasons unclear.
  • Kemal is a Yemeni immigrant. His brother owns a large textiles company in Yemen, and Kemal has been trying to help him outsource some high skilled jobs to the United States, which is proving to be extremely difficult. He loves soccer and currently is a soccer coach at a high school. When his wife first got pregnant, he was hoping it would be a boy so he could teach him soccer. But she had a girl. Then another. Then another. Kemal is now the proud father of five girls, and he jokes that soon he will have enough for a soccer team, if they showed any interest in learning it.

Who have have you met through your ride sharing service?

April 21, 2013Comments are DisabledRead More
“Startup”

“Startup”

This is a layperson guide* for what the guy you meet on the plane to Vegas means when he tells you “I have a startup.”

  • I’m building a Chrome plugin that lists all the parks in Salt Lake City on top of all Mormon-operated blogs using a proprietary Google search algorithm
  • I work full time as a product manager/blogger/evangelist/entrepreneur-in-residence/babysitter and I want an excuse to quit my job and/or get fired while saving face and/or something to talk about at my 5-year reunion
  • I have a tech cofounder who’s a full time engineer at Apple/Yahoo/Etsy and I promised him 5% of my company to do all the work
  • We’re not incorporated yet but the product is what’s really important
  • I talked to an investor friend of a friend who really liked the idea
  • Everyone thinks I work 90 hours a week but I spent a good 80% of my day yesterday on Reddit/Facebook/Chess.com
  • We are pre-launch but we’ve already had a reporter at TechCrunch promise to write about us: that’s our marketing plan. That and Viral.
  • Making friends/finding Salt Lake City parks is broken. So we’re fixing it with technology.
  • I’m friends with lots of other founders and they say there’s a need for what we’re building.
  • I have no college debt and my parents pay my rent so revenue isn’t really a concern. What we are going for is traction.
  • Traction will be easy because our product is free. We will even incentivize people to use it with mobile gamification and Reddit Gold
  • Acquisition will be easy because there are a lot of Salt Lake City mapping companies that would love to have our data
  • Mormons are our main market and there are 24 million of them
  • As soon as we Show HN our product we will all quit our jobs and go full time to double down on our traction
  • Even if everything I think about my “startup” is wrong, there’s millionaire in Korea/Japan/Santa Barbara who will probably invest in us anyway

*Written from unfortunate experience

January 18, 2013Comments are DisabledRead More