TENDERLOIN GEMS IN THE NEWS

For a recent show about China’s Bronze Age, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco invited a group of Bay Area content creators who specialise in textile and costume design for a private tour with the exhibition’s curator.

This Turkish spot in the Tenderloin is big enough to do a Biles II in, so you can always count on it for a last-minute group dinner.

It’s a Thursday night at Chapeau on Clement Street, and the scene is so familial and wholesome, it almost seems like you’re a guest at someone’s house. Owner and executive chef Philippe Gardelle is standing at the door welcoming regular customers with hugs. “Do you want your usual table?” he asks in a thick French accent.

“When I started working here, we had one bartender who was a former empress of the Imperial Council of San Francisco named Mae,” Joe Mattheisen, manager of Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, tells me. “She had a glass eye, and she’d roll it down the bar saying, ‘looking at you’, or drop it in somebody’s drink.”

The location of this Malaysian restaurant in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood is no accident. James Beard Award-recognized chef Azalina Eusope has been bringing her food and culture to this corner of the city for decades, first selling at the farmers market and later at a stall inside the Twitter building.

Don’t think K-pop, K-dramas or K-anything is for you? Curators of a just-opened exhibit at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum aim to prove otherwise.

For Estrella Gonzalez and her mother, Maria del Carmen Flores, the opening of their restaurant in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood is the realization of a long-held dream.

The best things in life are uncomplicated. A capsule closet. Slip-on sneakers. The chords to “I’m Yours.” And, of course, Outta Sight Pizza.

During this week’s First Thursday Art Walk in San Francisco’s Tenderloin Museum, neighbors and guests celebrated “Tenderloin Blackness,” an upbeat exhibition about the notable personalities who made the area a hub for Black people.

What started more than 90 years ago as the Gaylord Hotel is now more than a decade into its new life as a collection of bars and an event space near the theater district, and it’s become a citywide favorite.

A longstanding La Cocina food-hall vendor is back with her own brick-and-mortar restaurant nearby almost a year after the marketplace closed.

Mộng Thu Vietnamese Cafe in San Francisco is family-run oasis for bánh mi and noodles in the Tenderloin.

This Tenderloin spot is perhaps the best known Turkish restaurant in the city, and for good reason. The menu is fresh and full of authentic dishes that are often made by hand, including pide, the popular Turkish pizza equivalent. Their lentil soup, served with homemade bread, is a menu standout.

Grab a group of friends and head to one of these spots serving bottomless mimosas (or at least big batches) of all colors and flavors to keep the good times pouring at brunch.

Skateboarders do not look at the city — any city — the same way that non-skaters do.Skateboarders have brains that make instant calculations using principles of geometry and physics, and are hardwired to evaluate ways around obstacles and over gaps.

Traversing San Francisco’s Tenderloin and neighboring Polk Gulch hoods today and remembering the once-vibrant queer community that existed there only two decades before makes one want to cry out “Rosebud,” like the titular character in Orson Welle’s Citizen Kane.

The Tenderloin reminds me of New York in the 1980s, unkempt, unsanitized, the intersection of Bleecker and the Bowery. There are stretches of sidewalk in the Tenderloin where you have to hold your breath — and close your eyes.

Queer-run Brenda’s French Soul Food has been our best, authentic New Orleans restaurant. Partners in business and life, Brenda Buenviaje and Libby Truesdell, opened the equally great Brenda’s Meat & Three in 2014 on Divisadero.