San Francisco Life Archives - Michelle Richmond

What To Do in San Francisco

image of Golden Gate Bridge, by Simone Enderlin

I fell in love with San Francisco on a family vacation when I was thirteen years old. I decided then that I would live here someday. Fast forward to Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1995. I was doing a brief layover at The University of Fayetteville. Brief enough not to lose my mind, but long enough to meet a boy from San Francisco. The rest is history.

When The Telegraph asked me to talk about what no Londoner should miss on a trip to San Francisco, it wasn’t easy to whittle it down. From where to eat to what to avoid, here are my top recommendations for tourists in San Francisco.

Read San Francisco, My Kind of Town, in The Telegraph.

literary hot spots

Author and editor Jordan Rosenfeld (Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time) pays tribute to San Francisco’s “literary hot spots” in this article for Writer’s Digest. Jordan mentions the historic Caffe Trieste (this is the place that local writer Junvenal Acosta, among others, sometimes refers to as his office), the Mission-district watering hole The Makeout Room (home of the Progressive Reading Series), and Vesuvio. While Caffe Trieste and Vesuvio are in North Beach, Jordan’s pick for the most beloved bookstore is Green Apple (see my “found at Green Apple” posts) on Clement. Living as I do in the Richmond district, Green Apple is my neighborhood store. (I couldn’t help but give it special mention, gnome and all, in my new novel!)