Guides — Food

Eating and drinking

Where to look rather than where to go. Restaurant lists rot; streets don't.

Checked August 2026

A guide that names 20 restaurants is wrong within a year. This guide names streets, which change on a slower schedule.

Downtown: B Street and the numbered avenues

The walkable core is roughly B Street between 1st and 3rd, plus the avenues crossing it. Ramen, Italian, sushi, Mexican, a couple of long-running bars, a movie theater, and outdoor seating that survived from the pandemic and improved the street permanently.

This is the part of town where you pick the restaurant after you have already arrived — the density is high enough that walking 3 blocks and looking in windows beats deciding in advance. It is also the part of town least worth driving to: the garages are congested and stressful, and still slower than arriving on a bike from anywhere inside 2 miles.

Hillsdale and the flats: the practical tier

Shopping-center dining, chains, and a handful of long-tenured neighborhood restaurants that have outlasted three remodels of the mall next door. Not romantic. Reliable and accessible to the southern half of the city when downtown isn't.

Groceries, by temperament

• Trader Joe's and Safeway along the arterials, for ordinary weeks.
• The Asian supermarkets for produce at half the price, a fish counter worth the trip, and the best noodle aisle in the county (Suruki, Takahashi)
• Latin markets in North Central, for masa, chiles, and a butcher who cuts to order. Mi Rancho.

The farmers market

The big Saturday-morning market runs in the College of San Mateo parking lot, up the hill, year round. Stone fruit in July, citrus in January, and the coast farms bringing brassicas basically always. The hours have shifted over the years, but 9am-1pm is good. A car-dependent outing for the most part.

Coffee and drinking

Downtown has the density: independent roasters, a couple of places that take espresso very seriously, and cafés that tolerate laptops for hours. Bay Meadows has newer, brighter rooms below the apartments. The hills have nothing at all, so it is a machine at home or a trip down — which from most hillside addresses is well under ten minutes on an e-bike, and the descent is the easy half.

For drinking, downtown again, plus a few taprooms scattered along the industrial edges east of El Camino. Last call comes earlier than it does in San Francisco, and the last northbound train is a real constraint on the evening.