sarahcraves.com

Neighborhood wine bars abound in the Bay Area—and because San Francisco is so, well, San Francisco, there are many truly good options for sophisticated wine drinkers to choose from when the yen strikes to crack a bottle of something nice, even if it is only a Monday night. So if you’re going to open a wine bar in the city, you better make it good

No matter how many neighborhoods comprise San Francisco, and no matter that our disdain of chain businesses means an abundance of independently owned eateries in every one of them, that just-right neighborhood restaurant can be elusive. They’re either too hard to get into without reservations, too pricey to frequent on the regular, or just not that special

—in the form of finger-lickin’ buttermilk fried chicken and cornmeal waffles—are now being heaped upon plates from San Francisco’s Embarcadero to Uptown Oakland; those who’ve waited include not just soul-food-starved foodies across the city and the East Bay, but also the restaurant’s chef-owner Tanya Holland herself. For over a decade, Holland threw her Creole heart into cooking southern-inspired classics with soul at her West Oakland restaurant, making a name for herself and her signature fried chicken and waffles, and even drawing city folks over to one of The Town’s less desirable boroughs for a taste of what Oakland foodies were talking about. smoked chicken-and-rice gumbo let out a collective nooooo when the eatery closed its doors in 2017; and while word of Holland’s lease at SF’s Ferry Building, snagged from Daniel Patterson’s Il Cane Rosso back in 2016, has been making mouths water for years, the team needed time to raise funds for the project. That’s right, Holland has at last opened not one but two restaurants: The long-anticipated, fast-casual, counter-service version of Brown Sugar Kitchen at the Ferry Building, and a much larger (4,000 square feet! ), full-service restaurant with an expanded offering in trending Uptown Oakland, near Drake’s Dealership and Calavera.

Fresh from the oven at the end of 2018, Breadbelly is the recipe of three pastry world friends—Clement Hsu, James Wong, and Katherine Campecino—who met years ago while working together at Atelier Crenn. In 2018 they quit their full-time gigs to launch a series of pop-ups slanging Asian-influenced baked goods, regularly taking over the Outer Sunset’s Andytown Coffee Roasters where they drew in-the-know foodies for such ingenious creations as anko red bean paste sticky buns and alfajor-esque black sesame cookies. Now, with a fresh coat of cream paint, new light fixtures, art prints, and plants from a nearby nursery, Breadbelly is the neighborhood brick-and-mortar bakery for those who call the Outer Richmond home. The caliber of the team’s baking experience shows in the expert balance of salty and sweet in every item, whether it’s the salty flecks of dried egg yolks balancing out the purple sweet potatoes of the ube tart, or the extra bit of butter baked into the milk bread of the kaya toast.