Harris' Restaurant - The San Francisco Steakhouse
That's the full name
I went through a phase right after lockdown where I insisted that there are only four reliable types of restaurants and bars: steakhouses, red-sauce Italian joints, dives, and tiki bars. I claimed it was because these categories resisted trends and could be counted on to stay consistent without losing any of their charm. What I thought was an original take was as run-of-the-mill as they come, if the subsequent martini obsession and Bad Romans of the world are any indication. I was more likely reacting to the on-the-horizon vibe shift, emerging from the pandemic only to confront the reality that every “cool” new restaurant was coughing out a dying look/adding chicken sandwiches/only serving natural wine + charcuterie plates because of the loss of labor and increase in food prices brought on by the pandemic.1
A few years into this shift and the restaurant industry is still in flux. The millennial aesthetic now extends to dentist offices and fast-casual restaurants, and the void of cachet it left behind is as fragmented a landscape as the rest of society. The good-for-Instagram restaurant has transitioned into the good-for-TikTok one. Dining out in New York and LA seems to be as thrilling as ever in spite of these conditions, but in the Bay things still feel, well, off.
Bon Appetit recently tried to wrestle with this reality, as did the SF Chronicle.2 I’ve worked at [REDACTED] in Rockridge for over a year, and often hear patrons and employees wax nostalgic for the pre-pandemic days when there was a line out the door every night. Now 150 covers is the busiest night of a week. That isn’t to say there aren’t places in the Bay with packed houses, hard-to-get reservations, and/or a sexy, chic ambience (Soba Ichi, hello). Also, of course, things change, tastes morph, and people move on. But overall, the vibes just seem, well, off!! Sorry I don’t have a better descriptor!!! My experience dining out in the Bay is often that the restaurant is busy but the food is awful to middling, or that the restaurant is empty but the food is fantastic. Sometimes I get the thrill of a place that is both bustling and satisfying. It doesn’t help that one of the most lauded new restaurants looks like the latest iteration of the adults-are-regressing-but-calling-it-cool aesthetic.3
Amidst this unstable reality, though, lies a beacon of quality, service, ambience, charm, the whole nine yards — Harris’ Restaurant - The San Francisco Steakhouse. Some of my original point still stands.
Right after the lockdown New Year I decided to use credit card points to do a one-night staycation in SF. I needed something to mark the transition from one year to the next in the absence of any grounding social events (or much meaningful time outside my apartment in Oakland). I only had enough points to cover a ~$150/night room, so no St. Regis for me. I landed on the Intercontinental Nob Hill—charming and old enough to feel like an event, run down enough for me to afford.
I had hardly spent any time in San Francisco at this point, just a handful of day trips pre-Covid and some Covid-era neighborhood strolls. I still thought “Polk Gulch” on Google Maps read “Pork Gulch.” When I started looking for somewhere to get a really good, festive-ish, takeout meal within walking distance to the hotel, I could feel the unfamiliarity close in.
After scrolling many useless Eater lists I finally landed on Harris’. I knew about the House of Prime Rib, which was just a couple blocks south, but for whatever reason I didn’t pick it.
The steak and vegetables and carrot cake I took back to the hotel were phenomenal, and managed to make a depressing-in-retrospect night quite enjoyable (Point Break playing on HBO didn’t hurt). At the time I didn’t realize it would come to be my favorite restaurant here; that took my first time eating there in person the following December.
At that point, right as Omicron was about to crest and all social occasions were prefaced by a “So, uh, should we be doing this?”, my sister came up from LA and we went to the Tonga Room4 and Harris’ in an attempt to wrest any cheeky festivity from the season. During our dinner at Harris’, we had a ball. The place was decorated for the holidays and completely full. Perfect martinis—sidecar included—and Baked Alaska for dessert. We’re from Kansas City, and we kept cracking up at the California restaurant bragging about serving Midwestern beef. In the Midwest, restaurants brag about serving California beef. That winter had a painful edge of will-Covid-ever-meaningfully-ebb and the evening provided a brief respite from the anxiety and an injection of life and energy.
I’ve been two more times since and it continues to astound. The food and drinks are one thing; the service is what seals the deal.5 It is a delight watching such skilled servers and servers’ assistants at work. As someone who still panics when I have to run more than four drinks to a table, seeing the servers’ assistant clear our entire table of utensils and plates in seconds was like watching LeBron James play. Hospitality without preciousness; finesse at its finest.
Due to the exorbitant cost of dining out, bad service can veer into farce. Even without the edge case of lockdown-era dining, the encroachment of technology into the dining experience and overall labor shortages have the same effect as an overly-lit dining room: the destruction of ambience. Even places that don’t suffer from staff shortages or bad vibes do suffer from less experienced servers, which will probably take years to overcome due to pandemic-induced resignations. No wonder Grub Street’s Matthew Schneier’s wrote in his review of Eulalie in NYC—a restaurant with only a phone number and an aggressive dedication to hospitality—that every “under-40 [he] took […] was in rapture.” Steakhouses have a legacy of service expectations to uphold; to lose some of that skill would be to pierce at the heart of the entire restaurant category. Of all the steakhouses I’ve been to, though, Harris’ holds top billing.
Longing for days when good service was easier to come by, when those days included horrible working conditions (that have emerged from the lockdown-era valley to still mostly suck writ large), could be a willful misread of how the hospitality industry works. Especially when it’s clear that current conditions are more likely reflections of macro labor shortages and industry instability. But my guess is one could create a matrix of labor conditions on the Y axis and guest experience on the X axis and see no overwhelming correlation. As someone with fair amount of FOH experience who is also a communist, I refuse to fully subsume service quality into labor relations. I also really hope to god that the staff at Harris’ is treated well, because they do absolutely stunning work!!!
The cost of a real night out at Harris’ keeps the restaurant fully in the “special occasion” category. To assess an entire region’s hospitality industry through the lens of a somewhat protected class of restaurant6 is to wonder why hotels are so weird nowadays unless you’re staying at the Ritz-Carlton. But the loss of reliable standards below luxury is some part class anxiety and major part genuine disruption of a primary post-industrial economic sector.
For decades the reputation of the Bay’s food scene was propped up via reference to its access to wine country and incredible produce, its Michelin stars, the slow food movement, the dizzying array of restaurants rooted in its robust immigrant communities. All of those qualities remain present, and yet the overall effect remains one of a place that took a major beating and is struggling to regain its footing. I’ll probably never fully internalize that the Bay in peak form is still largely comprised of coffee shops straight out of the 90s, but I’m willing to accept that that’s a me problem. For the rest, I’m going to hold out hope and wait and see.
Unproven theory but that’s my hunch!!
This Chronicle story got picked up by Fox News, which means it clearly does work for the right-wing fear-mongering machine, too. We need better counter-narratives that don’t deny the instability without catering to reactionary backlash!
I haven’t been to Dalida yet! But speaking of s/o Emily Parkinson and her gorgeous murals and wallpaper.
Deserves its own post — someday.
My 2023 experience of Zuni Cafe, which won the James Beard “Outstanding Service” award in 2018, involved so many service mistakes that the group I was with had to start processing the service experience instead of talking about anything else — literally the worst outcome while eating out !!
Conservatives will always love steakhouses, too.
the content i crave