- This is delicious.
Wow.
I'm so glad we're doing this together.
- Same.
- This is gonna be hard to beat.
I'm in San Francisco, and it's a beautiful day here.
I'm gonna meet up with my friend, Allyson.
She's a Bay Area native,
and she's gonna show me how to eat in San Francisco
like a local.
Let's go meet her.
Allyson. - Hey.
- Good to see you. - Yeah, dude.
Welcome to San Francisco.
Are you ready for a whole day of eating?
- Yeah, I haven't been here in years.
I'm so ready to see where you have in store.
- Well, I wanted to bring you here, Tartine.
You're gonna love it. - I am so excited.
- You ready? - Yeah, let's get it.
- My name's Christa Chase.
I'm the chef here at Tartine Manufactory.
We're in the Mission District of San Francisco.
We have beautiful breads as you can see right here.
In the literal sense,
the word tartine is a open-faced sandwich.
So, we'll start with the strawberry tartine.
We get to start with a beautiful country bread.
We do a slice of that toasted
with a little housemade ricotta.
The strawberries are from Dirty Girl Farms.
We like to support local farms, especially female farms.
We just toss 'em with a little bit of sugar,
put it on top of the ricotta,
finish it with some tarragon and a vanilla gastrique.
Then the coddled egg.
We cook the coddled eggs in the Heath ceramic bowls.
We cooked it just through
so the egg is still a little bit runny.
We top it with some trout roe, chives, salt, pepper,
olive oil, horseradish,
then we do some toasted country bread.
Finish that with za'atar,
which is a Middle Eastern seasoning that has sesame,
thyme, sumac.
We love it.
We kind of douse the bread in it.
I think it's pretty special.
- Wow.
- This is the strawberry tartine, what they're known for,
and then these are the coddled eggs.
- They're beautiful.
Let's dig in.
I feel like we should go savory first, right?
- [Allyson] Yeah.
- Coddled egg.
I'm just gonna dip it right in.
- Dip it right in there.
- This looks so silky smooth.
Do a cheers? - Cheers.
- This is delicious.
- Oh, this is so good.
- It's so good!
It's like a Middle Eastern spice blend.
It's got runny yolk, and then there's trout roe on top,
which they just kinda burst in your mouth.
- I come here for this.
This is like my favorite breakfast item.
- Tartine obviously known for their tartines,
but this is too beautiful to eat.
- Here we are.
- Wow, it smells like a strawberry shortcake.
- Kinda tastes like strawberry candy.
- You've got the ricotta, which is really smooth and creamy.
I mean, this is wonderful.
- This is a really popular spot,
and this is why people come here.
So, this is just our first stop.
We have so much more to go to.
- This is gonna be hard to beat.
- Try me.
- [Alexis] Cheers to a great day ahead.
- [Allyson] We're in Alamo Square.
The Painted Ladies are over there.
- I feel like we need to do the Full House intro right now.
- It's a big tourist spot.
People are lovin' the 90s nostalgia.
Let's go to Brenda's, one of my local favorite spots,
just around the corner.
- Yeah, let's go. - Yeah.
- That sounds great. - Yeah.
- I'm Brenda Buenviaje,
chef/owner of Brenda's French Soul Food
here in San Francisco.
Brenda's French Soul Food is my restaurant
that I dreamed about for decades.
Born and raised in New Orleans.
I wanted to bring southern food to San Francisco.
The most favorite dishes here are beignets.
We stuff them with different flavors.
We have a plain beignet, Ghirardelli chocolate beignet,
Granny Smith apple and honey beignet,
and a spicy crawfish and cheddar beignet.
Those are all really popular.
- So, here we are at Brenda's.
Great local spot.
- There's a line out the door right now.
Oh. - Bomb.
Beignet flight.
- [Alexis] We should start with crawfish,
right? - Let's do it.
Savory.
- It's a fluffy spiced beignet
with this creamy crawfish in the center.
- [Allyson] I love the heat on top.
- I've never had a savory beignet before.
Have you? - No.
Let's try the apple one.
I feel like you'll like it.
- I mean...
The dough outside, it's not overly sweet.
The apples have just the right amount of cinnamon and spice.
- I mean, you literally have a whole flight of them.
- I worked on a fried chicken recipe
for the better part of a year.
It's become a really big fan favorite.
First thing we do is we bring in
local fresh chicken every day.
We make a brine made of buttermilk, Crystal Hot Sauce,
salt and pepper, garlic, cayenne, onions,
and we actually hold the chicken in that
for at least 24 hours.
And then the next day we take it out,
roll it around in our seasoned flour, fry those.
And when the chicken comes out
and it's served with french fries, our famous cream biscuit.
I really wanted a nice spicy fried chicken
that I grew up eating,
also that had enough flavor
so that when customers sat down to eat the chicken,
they weren't reaching for this condiment, that condiment.
- I ordered us the fried chicken,
and this is the best, I promise you.
- Wow.
The chicken looks incredible.
- Huh?
- The outside is crispy and crackling.
- It's perfect.
- The inside is so juicy.
This is exactly how fried chicken should taste.
It has the faintest amount of spice.
- I don't even need hot sauce.
- I'm gonna try the biscuit too.
- [Allyson] Do you wanna try the jam?
- You're gonna feed it to me?
(laughing)
(mumbling)
- Huh?
- All of these jams are made in house, right?
- Mhm.
- [Alexis] You can tell that so much time and effort
has gone into every single element of the dish here.
- We opened a year or so after Katrina happened
and there were a lot of displaced people who just showed up.
Being able to just bring that to people,
and then also teach the Bay Area
what really good southern food should taste like,
has been amazing.
- Thank you so much for bringing me here.
I would definitely come back.
- I'm glad you liked it.
We're in Chinatown.
This is very iconic to San Francisco.
- So, we've got some egg tarts here.
- Yes.
- [Both] Mmm!
(laughing) - Oh my God.
It's like a buttery, flaky crust and it's like a custard.
It tastes kind of like a flan.
Right? - Yeah!
Dude, it's like a mix of a custard and a flan.
- Oh my God, it's so good.
- I love Chinatown.
I've been going here for years, ever since I was a kid.
I think this is an iconic place to bring someone,
it would be Chinatown.
- Amazing. - Staple.
- [Alexis] Love it.
- Flour + Water, best pasta in the city.
I've always wanted to eat here
and I've never had a chance to,
so I'm glad I'm going with you.
- Hey.
Ryan Pollnow, the executive chef of Flour + Water
here in the Mission District.
Our pasta program's pretty extensive.
We feature many different styles.
Trying to capture different towns,
but also trying to represent Norther California
almost as if it was a region of Italy.
What would those pastas look like?
To start the tasting menu,
we just wanna feature stone fruit,
a little agretti on a pistachio crema with ricotta salata.
One of our farms currently is supplying us
with all this beautiful stone fruit, French plum,
yellow peach, white donut peach, pluot,
which is a hybrid fruit.
To dress this stone fruit, a Taggiasca olive tapenade.
The base of the dish
is just a small amount of pistachio crema.
This is agretti, a house made ricotta.
It's just gonna add another layer of savoriness
to the fruit.
Hello there. - Hi.
How beautiful.
- [Alexis] It's too beautiful to eat.
- It's a savory bite.
- It's stone fruit season
and it comes together so beautifully.
- It's so good, it hurts.
- I feel like if this is how we're starting the meal,
it's perfect. - Yes.
- [Ryan] Currently, we're featuring the first pasta,
which is a doppio, essentially a side by side ravioli.
It's picked up with some pickled squash blossoms,
additional shaved truffle, and toasted seeds for texture.
So, we're gonna get into the pastas now.
- I've never had a ravioli with two different filings.
How does that work?
The pasta itself, that is the star.
- It's so good.
- Nuts and seeds on top of pasta,
it really adds this crunchy element.
- And the sauce, I can't even describe it.
It's not heavy at all.
It's just beautiful and I just love looking at it,
but I also love eating it.
(mumbling)
I love eating it.
- [Ryan] The next one will be the farfalle
with our pork polpettini
seasoned with chili flake, fennel pollen.
These are our purple dragon beans,
red gypsy peperonata, fresh parsley.
The only garnish for this pasta's
a little bit of an aged parmigiano reggiano.
- Wow. - Yeah,
this one's one of my favorite pastas on the menu.
- This looks like my dream pasta.
This family style, it's really nice to eat this way.
It's spiced.
You can taste the pepper in it.
Okay, if this was the only meatball
I had to eat for the rest of my life, I'd be thrilled.
- It actually, it doesn't feel heavy to me either.
- I think that's just the balance of flavors, right?
You can taste some acidity, you have the saltiniess,
you have the chili, some heat.
So, it's all these things working together.
- [Allyson] I feel all warm and cozy.
- The one thing we can't take off the menu
is the chocolate budino.
Rich chocolate pudding
covered in a bunch of malt and sea salt
and then a caramel espresso whipped cream,
and I think if we took this one off the dessert menu,
our regulars would revolt.
Gonna you off with a little sweet treat
to round out the tasting menu.
This is a dark chocolate budino.
- [Allyson] It's so pretty.
- This is incredible.
I think that's because it doesn't taste too sweet.
- Exactly.
Savor the moment.
- I know everyone's had chocolate pudding
and budino's like a fancy version of that.
It's more rich and more creamy and more silky.
This is the chocolate I wanna eat.
- They change the menu all the time,
but this is a house favorite.
It's always on the menu.
- The common thread throughout every dish that we've had,
the salad, the pasta, the dessert,
is that everything is so well balanced.
I had so many awesome experiences to choose from
in San Francisco,
and now I get to choose how to pay for them
with Pay It Plan It from American Express.
This is the perfect way to end this day.
- Thank you for visiting me.
(upbeat music)