Up and coming. Trendy. Hipster. All the rage. For whatever reason in San Francisco, any restaurant that has any of those words associated with it will inevitably be a place I will not enjoy. I need to stop adding these new restaurants to my Yelp bookmark list and just stop going to them. I always leave feeling ripped off and like I paid so much for so little of a truly good experience. Aina, Statebird Provision, and The Progress are just some of the places I’ve been to recently and just think… Did I really pay $60-70 for my share of the bill for that? That’s all I get? My friends and I actually paid $8 each for a spam musubi bao – what the hell were we thinking?!

San Tung, El Farolito, and new hole-in-the-walls I find like House of Pancake seem to be the only places I end up loving and really wanting to come back to. These other places are trying too hard, and I don’t want to pay for them anymore.