There’s certainly no shortage of excellent food to be found in San Francisco and the Bay Area — but there’s plenty worth skipping, too. Luckily for you, Eater editors dine out several times a week (or more) and we’re happy to share the standout dishes we encounter as we go.
Stuffed chicken wing at Prelude
My confession about tasting menus is that when a restaurant gets to a certain calibre to command a plate-by-plate rendition of its best dishes, it is oftentimes tough to pick a “best dish” from the bunch. (Not always, but most times.) That’s my conundrum with my recent tasting menu at Prelude. Chef Celtin Hendrickson-Jones’s restaurant was surprising in the best of ways, so much so that I was moved enough to add them to Eater SF’s 38 list this month. But now, when pressed to figure out which dish was the best, it’s tough to pick. Between the smoked catfish dumplings, johnny cakes, the grits, the ambrosia salad, and more, I struggled with this one. What I eventually landed on was this stuffed chicken wing. The crisp, fried exterior gives way to a dirty rice-filled inside, for a bite that will make you pause in appreciation. When you get into the weeds of how a stuffed chicken wing is made, you grow all the more appreciative when you first go in. Of course, one can never go wrong with fried chicken, but when you find a version that makes you look at wings in a new way, you can never go back. If you’re going in to Prelude for the a la carte menu, you already have a partial list of my favorites, but go with the stuffed wings, too, if you know what’s good for you. Prelude, 333 Battery Street, San Francisco
— Dianne de Guzman
Tofu wowotou at Mama Ji’s
There are not as many restaurants as the Chef’s Table diehard might think where owners are traveling the world for their preciously sourced ingredients. Mama Ji’s, the almost 15-year-old Castro restaurant on the lonely snip where 18th Street ends, is one such restaurant. The owners traveled to Chengdu recently and brought back not only boxes of Sichuan peppers (the chile crisp here is richly spicy and maybe my favorite I’ve had in the city, just powder keg stuff) but the cornmeal-paired dish wowotou. The item has various spellings and styles, but at Mama Ji’s one can order the punchy stir-fry with meat or tofu. In either case the idea is to fill the corn balls with the medley. It’s playful, affordable at less than $20 for all the work that goes into it, and sumptuous as hell. Mama Ji’s, 4416 18th Street, San Francisco
— Paolo Bicchieri
Rabos con huevos at La Marcha
When your profession requires that you eat like your job depends on it, it only makes sense that some meals sometimes get sidelined. In the juggle of weekly dinner reservations and squeezing in lunch dates to check out just one more new restaurant, I’d somehow ignored some of the better brunches that are in my own neighborhood. La Marcha is known for its deep paella menu, but the Berkeley restaurant has added on brunch in recent months, and so I set aside a recent Sunday morning to check it out. While sweet tooths will most likely enjoy the churros and panqueques, or pancakes served with fresh fruit, what I found myself drawn to is the rabo con huevos. Everything on the plate was really well executed; the sherry-braised oxtail was perfectly tender, the yolks on the eggs lovely and runny, and the patatas were evenly crisped with dipping sauce on the side. To me, this felt like a fresh take on brunch: yes, the staples of eggs and potatoes were there, but it didn’t have the rote feel to it that some brunch spots have settled into. I’m also a sucker for a well-cooked oxtail, a protein featured in Filipino dishes from time to time, and this one hit all my benchmarks for a noteworthy version. I’m a textbook over-orderer — all the better to sample things! — but when all the dishes landed on the table, I found myself continuing to snag bites of this oxtail, meat falling off the bone with each swoop of a fork. Maybe I’ll have to pick up more brunch dates this summer, after all. La Marcha, 2026 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley…