Food - Coffee

If you're a coffee lover, you've definitely chosen the right city to visit for your vacation! A couple of barista friends of mine from Portland came and stayed with me for a week on a sort of coffee roster tour. Apparently, Oakland is one of the main shipping ports for coffee beans being shipped to the west coast of the United States, so if you're a roster here you get fist pick when beans come in. As a result, a whole bunch of amazing rosters have located themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area and have taken us from normal coffee, to some of the best in the world. And once the beans are roasted they don't sell their beans to just any coffee shop, they make the cafes that sell for them only use organic milk, ban them from using sweet syrups, and the baristas that make the coffee have to be skilled enough to pour those cool designs with the milk when they're making you your drink. It's a whole new level of coffee that has completely spoiled me!

Blue Bottle Coffee - http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net
These guys are probably the biggest and most popular coffee roster in the Bay Area. They might be my favorite when it comes to getting an espresso drink. The shops I go to the most for their coffee is Cibo in Sausalito, Haight Street Market on Haight Street, the Blue Bottle Coffee Kiosk in Hayes Valley, and Blue Bottle Coffee in the Ferry Building.

Philz Coffee - http://www.philzcoffee.com
I think these guys were the fist ones to really do the cup-at-a-time coffee pores that everyone now does. You know, where they grind the beans and drip just a single cup of coffee when you order it. Probably because they were around before all the snoby rules about only making drip, espresso, and mochas, Philz is one of the only gourmet coffee places making making flavored coffee drinks. I love their iced mojito coffee: fresh muddled mint with brown sugar, coffee, cream, and ice. Yum! All their locations are great.

Four Barrel - http://fourbarrelcoffee.com
They do some of my favorite roasts when it comes to beans. They're also the coffee they serve at Tartine. They've got a great little shop in the Mission that I always go to. Four Barrel is definitely one of the best coffee roasters in San Francisco!

Sightglass - http://sightglasscoffee.com
Two brothers quit as roasters for Blue Bottle and went and started their own shop called Sightglass. This place is where all my barista friends like to go the most. It's got all the quality of Blue Bottle, with a little more time spent on making each cup for the customers. Their SOMA location is amazing, but it's always so far away for me. Instead I go to Matching Half in the Haight. That's just 3 blocks away from me!

Ritual - http://ritualroasters.com
Their main shop is probably the snobbiest of the fancy coffee places in San Francisco. But then again, one man's snobby is another man's quality control. The two places I go to for their coffee is their main roasting location in the Mission, or Mojo Cafe and Bicycle Shop in the Haight. Bicycles and coffee?! Yeah, it's pretty awesome!

Night Life - Improv

When most people think of improv they think of the television show Whose Line Is It Anyway or maybe the stand-up comedy show An Evening At The Improv. Then there's a whole group of people who have seen an improv comedy show live: With its theater games and sketch comedy style scenes. Well my friend I'm hear to tell you, there's improv here in San Francisco that may be completely new and different for you!

First of all, most performances here are longer. The standard night out here involves an improv show 2-hours in length with an intermission in the middle. Kinda like what you would expect at a regular night at the theater. In Chicago, where they have more improvisors than any other city in the United States, venues will often have 4 shows a night in order to supply the demand for performance space. As a result, most of their shows have about 30 to 45 minutes of stage time per performance. So what the heck are we doing here with all our extra time on stage? Sometimes we just have longer improv comedy shows, but this extra amount of stage time has also fostered a special kind of longform improvisation that feels much more like normal scripted theater. In most of the rest of the world anything longer than 5-minutes in length is considered longform improv. Yet here, it's not uncommon to see one story told over the length of a full 2-hour show. San Francisco is apparently full of actors wanting to improvise 2-hour single set plays or full length completely improvised musicals. Standard longform formats like The Herold, with their many storylines performed over a 45-minute time period, feel much more like mediumform to me now that I've been exposed to longform improv in San Francisco.

And our improv is not all about the comedy anymore: With a full length show, comes full range acting!  We've got improvised Shakespeare and improvised horror, improvised Dickens and improvised Bollywood. There's a lot of great unique improv here in San Francisco. The stuff performed as straight theater (not for laughs but rather as new works of theater) is my personal favorite. That's one of the reasons I specialize in San Francisco style longform as an actor. If the timing works out while you're here, I would totally recommend coming to see one of our shows at the Un-Scripted Theater Company. The work is very stereotypical of "high quality" San Francisco improv theater, and if you've only got a few nights in town, seeing something that's really well done is a must.

The Un-Scripted Theater Company
http://un-scripted.com

If there's nothing going on at the Un-Scripted Theater Company while you're in town you could always check and see if BATS Improv or 3 for All has anything on sale at the Half Priced Ticket Booth.
Half Priced Ticket Booth
http://www.tixbayarea.com

Night Life - Bellydance

Ahhh San Francisco: know for its cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge, and its world renowned bellydance scene? Strangely, yes! San Francisco happens to be the birthplace of Tribal Fusion: a style of bellydance that combines American Tribal Style bellydance with other styles of dance like locking & popping and hip-hop. It really is quite amazing to watch, and I had no idea of it's popularity until rather late in the game. I was always so busy doing street theater at Renaissance Faire that I never really paid much attention to what Rachel Brice and Zoe Jakes were doing over at our bellydancing stage. I saw their shows from time to time but I never really got introduced to the scene 'til after the fact through their work with The Yard Dogs Road Show: A hobo/circus/jug-band/variety-show that's huge here in the Bay Area. Rachel and Zoe really helped popularize Tribal Fusion and I've met people from all over the world who have come here to San Francisco to study bellydance because of our rich and talented scene. I guess we've kinda become a mecca for bellydancers. Heck, 2012 marked our 12th annual Tribal Fest and featured a french guy who who had won a dance competition with a grand prize of a trip to come here and go to Tribal Fest.

Illan and Rachel at Tribal Fest 2012

In terms of what to see while you're in town, I don't have a lot of suggestions for any given day. Most of the stuff I go and see are one off shows that my bellydancer friends invite me to. I guess you could always check the schedule at 50 Mason and see if anything bellydance related is going on. If you're here on the 4th Friday of the month, I work the door of a great bellydance/burlesque/variety-show called Baxtalo Drom put on by the girls from Sister Kate. That show is always fun! It's at bar called Amnesia in the Mission District. Every Wednesday Amnesia has a great gipsy-jazz band called Gaucho that plays for free at 7pm. You see a lot of those musicians performing in the bellydance scene all the time (although people mostly swing dance at their Wednesday shows). If you love the clothing style that runs through San Francisco's Tribal Fusion scene, check out 5 & Diamond at 16th and Valencia. A couple of people from the Yard Dogs started it. Their clothing is fricken amazing!