The San Francisco Citizen

These days, a meal at The French Laundry restaurant up in the Napa County town of Yountville can set you back $240 or so, before adding such extras as a nice tip for the waitstaff [see UPDATE below], or a $100 “steak supplement,” or wine, or whatever. And that assumes you can even get into the fifth best restaurant in the world, as reservations can be hard to come by.

But check out this entry from a pristine 1987 copy of the Zagat San Francisco Restaraunt Survey (the Yelp of its day). Click to expand:

That’s right, Tim and Nina had an “estimated price of dinner” pegged at $29. (Compare that with Nob Hill’s Fournou’s Ovens, listed at $31 in the same 1987 guide.)

So you see, you had your chance back in the 1980’s, back before Pixar’s Ratatouille, and back before Thomas Keller ate an ortolan bunting songbird at a secret chef’s dinner in Bourdeax, France.

Oh well, c‘est la vie. Is there a relatively inexpensive place you can go to now in the bay area that will be internationally famous in the year 2029? Think about it.

Happy hunting.

[UPDATE: Commenter Chester has two valid points that explain some of the price inflation. Well played, Chester.]  

Well, park it where you want, but don’t be surprised if it looks like this by the next day.

Local artists used this Sprinter 2500 van as their canvas:

Welcome to San Francisco!

First,  let’s all agree that denial, (also called abnegation), is:

 ”is a defense mechanism‘ postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept…”

Can a radio station be in denial? Well, how about the coverage KCBS AM 740  is giving to yesterday’s crash landing of a traffic-reporting Cessna 172. KCBS reports this incident thusly: “Plane Lands near I-80 Ramp” with an account about how “freeway traffic was not affected by the landing”.

Firstly, KCBS used this in the webpage URL: “Plane-Blocks-I-80-Off-Ramp” - so this was spurious information? Or maybe the plane blocked the off-ramp, but not the freeway? Secondly, other media sources correctly called this incident a “crash-landing,” as that’s what it was. Thirdly, KCBS reported last month’s other crash landing of a Cessna 172 in the bay area as a “crash landing.”

The dash of a Cessna 172 that didn’t crash land in the bay area last month, from the incredible Telstar Logistics Flickrstream

There’s lots of ways to report a story. KCBS certainly chose a drama-free approach. As must be obvious by now, you can put a Cessna 172 (that has a landing weight pretty close to a tiny 2-seat Smart Car) down in a very small piece of real estate, but yesterday’s crash landing could easily have been fatal.

So, better check yo self before you wreck yo self (again). Just saying,