A Postcard From San Francisco

San Francisco never looks the same twice. The fog rolls in, the neon lights turn on, rain starts, the sun comes out. The city is a sensory experience. A visceral adventure for a couple days through the city's facade of hypermodernity. Almost as soon as you step off the plane you're bombarded by adverts for the future; AI and tech startups, everyone promising to revolutionise and automatise everything around you. We spot our first Waymo with glee, driverless and gliding through traffic. But San Francisco, despite all that superficial technological novelty, is a great place to visit precisely because it has such a reassuring sense of the past.

And the city is literally built on that history. When California became the 31st state in 1848, they expanded the shoreline of the city deep into the bay. The ships that had ferried passengers from across the world during the Gold Rush were abandoned, and left to sink into the marshes. Much of the city's financial district is built on their remains. You walk over ghosts everywhere here.

Our first stop after landing is Presidio Post, where we're greeted by Carson, his wife Tahnee, and their dog Harold, a greying little fella who lovingly barks us in as welcome. Cable cars run past outside the shop in the sunshine, trundling along noisily, overflowing with tourists.

Presidio Post, as well as being a fine stockist of Drake's, is a beautiful store, covered in deep cherry wood panelling that Carson built himself. It's full of beautiful things to discover, and the pair are loving guides through the city, excited for us to experience it. Over a coffee in the sunshine, they begin reeling off lists of restaurants, bars and stores to check out. Which we duly begin to do.

Our first stop, after navigating visiting Lombard Street and the succession of mountainous hills nearby, is Chinatown, the first and original Chinatown, the blueprint. It was the port of entry for emigrants from Guangdong in the 1850s, hoping to make it rich during the Gold Rush, or else find work on the railroads. Walking through it you feel the accumulated weight of history; temples and labour associations and community centres, rows of roast duck hanging in the windows, dim sum carts rattling across tiled floors.

On a sunny day the streets of Chinatown overflow with energy and the enjoyable kind of chaos, the restaurants platonic ideals of Cantonese cuisine, alongside innovators like Mister Jiu's, a friend of Carson's and one of his favourite spots in the city, which manages to feel completely of this place while doing something entirely new with it.

The reasons why people come here haven’t changed much in the last 150 years, they're chasing money and dreams, the Gold Rush long replaced by a tech boom. The other main reason people came was in search of enlightenment, or at least the kind offered by the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and which had its darker sides immortalised by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Only a pastiche of the hippy dream remains in Haight-Ashbury, well preserved and documented, and fascinating still, but not really alive. We do spend an enjoyable afternoon among the vintage and record stores there though, particularly Amoeba, which you could easily lose a whole day in, and which we come out from weighed down with vinyl.

Sheltering from a downpour one afternoon we pop into Cafe Trieste in North Beach, the West Coast's oldest coffee shop, which in the 50s became a hangout for the city's literary scene of Beatniks and poets — one of those places that feels comfortingly like an extension of the living room of its regulars, somewhere to hang out and meet and argue, and where Francis Ford Coppola wrote the script for The Godfather. We share a coffee and a cookie with an old poetry publisher who moved here from New York decades ago and stayed, and talk about the city’s literary scene, while he says hello to a succession of people coming and going.

After, we head to City Lights Books, and then Vesuvio, a bar across the narrow alley from the store, between these three outposts the last living remnants of the city's Beat-era heritage survive. In Vesuvio we bump into some friends from out of town, and find ourselves later that evening back in Chinatown with them, drinking Tsingtaos and wheeling a Lazy Susan full of fried rice, noodles, soups, dumplings and roast meat around a table for an impromptu feast that we struggle to finish.

San Francisco is a great food city. It’s the place they invented sourdough bread, the burrito, Cioppino. Tartine in the Mission has as good a claim as anywhere to having set the template of the modern bakery, and the city's relationship with food feels personal in a way that bigger, more self-conscious food cities sometimes don't. You eat well here without really trying. The Mission District delivers on tacos in the way only a neighbourhood with genuine Mexican roots can. We pile our plates high with them, our waiter surprised we manage to eat half a dozen each. In Oakland, across the Bay, we head to Snail Bar, a buzzy natural wine spot, serving up delicious small plates.

It’s very modern, so one evening we make our way to the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness, a San Francisco institution since 1949. As the name suggests it does one thing and does it very well: prime rib, carved tableside off a silver trolley with magical, juicy ceremony. Perfectly accompanied by a martini, or a pisco punch, which was invented here too, in a saloon where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands.

On our last day we spend a foggy morning down at the Piers, watching the sea lions and tourists, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. We have lunch and In-N-Out, and get a couple of double doubles and some animal style fries to eat in the sunshine and enjoy the streams of lowriders running down the strip. A passerby recognises us, and tells us how much he loves Drake’s. It’s a fitting farewell and we head to the airport with bags full of records, with Carson and Tahnee to wave us off and a goodbye bark from Harold.