Published Aug. 19, 2026at6:00am
Off Menu is available exclusively for SF Standard members. Click here for a limited-time friends-and-fam offer starting at $1 for the first month (and the cost of two hefty heirloom tomatoes every month thereafter).
August is my favorite month for dining in San Francisco, when menus are sumptuous with melons every shade of the sunset, and Early Girls sidle up to corn fresh-picked from Brentwood.
Everything is so sweet and juicy that, even in the thick of an abnormally cold “Fogust,” (opens in new tab) I can almost believe that I live in a place where the weather is in sync with the ingredients. I can feel the sun beaming through the late-season stone fruits, conjure the content sigh of a warm summer night, and dare to wear that slip of a dress I delusionally bought on a trip to L.A., forgetting that I live in San Francisco.
That is, provided the door to the restaurant is closed.
However, the chances of this are slim. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that, most days of the year, 98.6% of our city’s restaurant doors remain open, no matter how wet the fog or bone-chilling the wind. This is a completely unfounded statistic that I feel confident stating because I’ve been bitching about this phenomenon long before everyone blamed it on the remnants of COVID.