Restaurants I've been to in SF

The Deli Pub restautrant sits at the top of the hill at Cortland Avenue as you come up from the Mission Street towards Bernal Heights. It was ran by my Lebanese friend Imad Yais and this picture was taken when I had a solo art exhibition here. The picture is of my son with the 'Chief' and His grand daughter Tracy.

At Just Deserts in San Francisco, cant remember on what street it was.

At Toni's Restaurant on Cortland Ave where I often had my breakfast when I was living on the same street.

Capturing people while they are eating or simply lost in a converstaion over a drink at restaurants has always been one of my favorite pasttime. I prefer to do portraits of people when they are not aware of me doing it and I do not know who they are.

From coffee shops in the rural areas in Terengganu to the places like the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, people seems most relaxed when they are involved in a quite sharing of thoughts and feelings over a cup 0f coffee or tea.

The Round Table Pizza Restaurant on San Bruno Avenue is another of those places you would havefound me hanging with my friend 'Buddha'Ron and his Mom Estelle. The boys working at the place before were mostly Indonesians and so i had a good rapport with them not to mention extra special services.

The Hunan on Haight, a Chinese restaurant was the Chinese restaurant for me when I was living in the area of Haight Ashbury, later on Stanyan and 2nd, Avenue. The food at the Hunan was spicy enough to my Malaysian taste and their service was next to excellent as i was a regular.

It is intriguing to watch couples having no conversation whatsoever as they sat there facing one another for an hour or so like they are lost for words or ran out of things to say to eachother over the years of sitting and facing eachother.

The Clarion Restaurant changed hands a few times that i was frequenting the place while living out of the Eastman Hotel a block from it on 16th. and Mission. It was hard to figuire out what to eat as the manu kept changing from Western to Chinese to Yuppie to Italian or was it Greek?

San Francisco is inundated by the Chinese Mom and Pop restaurants and these do well because of their budget prices and plenty to eat. For one who grew up in the East the food would have been considered expensive by Asian standards considering the ingredients used to make them. But the Honkies and the Blacks and Chicanoes , they dont know this. All they know it is 'One Ton soup' and the Emperor's fried wings... some spicy...with flied lies.

You find all kinds of interesting characters sitting in the restaurants and coffee shops in San Francisco and they each have an air of sophistication about them,like this Lady with the baret. I thought she could have passed for a writer or a Russian spy.

'THe Blue Muse' on Vallencia in the Mission District was often full of a younger group of clientele who would sit jibbie jabbering away over a cup of cafe late for an hour or so. If they eat it would a large salad of one kind or another just to be more in the 'Muse'.

Sometimes you ran into restaurants that have real out of the world paintings on the walls like this restaurant on Haight and Cole called the Double Rainbow.

When I sat and watched these three Chinese characters going at it in Cantonese at the counter I found myself lost for a while, I was back in Malaysia!

When you eat in any restaurant in the Noe valley, Castro district you feel like all the guys are not altogether guys and all the girls were not altogether girls. it was kida strange feeling for me when I first began exploring the Bay Area.

The 'Bouncer's Bar' was my watering hole when I was working on the water front at H&H on China basin. The Bar was decorated like a naval museum of antiquity catering to the dockworkers and seamen who frequented it. "Willie", the owner was a character worth to visit the bar for if you wish to learn about the history of the San francisco Water front.