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.]  

No, not the moribund Filepile.com, we’re talking about the very active Filepile.org. If you mention the name of their URL, some of these secretive people just might come after you, as Laura K. discovered:

“Now I’m receiving nasty emails from this filepile crew. Apparently I had the audacity to mention their secret sandbox in public and it made them cry.”

What does the site look like? How about this (minus the kitteh)? Or this screenshot from when they “went spooky” last Halloween:

These thousands of Filepilers might practically control the Internets and yet some of them claim they’re “not notable”?  It seems Anil Dash got close to the truth while ago, but can we rely on what he says? Many private organizations have Wiki entries, but not Filepile.org. Why’s that?

Domo arigatou (Mr. Roboto)
Mata o-hima de
Domo arigatou (Mr. Roboto)
Himitsu wo shiritai

[Update: A certain Mr. Jacob Y. has offered to hand over a valid user name and password for filepile but only in person and at some hard-to-find street in Burlingame (of all places). Frank says he has plenty of gas and he's sure he can find the place, so we're heading down there now. Wish us luck!]

[ReUpdate: Well we never found that place in San Mateo County. The address didn't show up on Google Maps and the directions we had wound us up at McGraw's Grocery. Frank said the whole deal was a "bum steer." Man,  looks like it's going to be tough to get a password. Oh well. We made the best of it by having dinner at Joanie's "Happy Days" Diner (did ABC license this name?) and then ended up at the loungey Vinyl Room. B'Game rocks! (but "JacobY" sucks :(). Frank said the FPers would probably launch a "Dawes' Attack" to take down my "crappy little WordPress." But let's worry about that tomorrow!]

[Captain's Log, supplemental: So Filepile.org could be described as a cross between Digg and craigslist. You have an old-school interface (like craigslist) that shows interesting links, but there's also a rating system (like Digg) that allows users to easily get to the good stuff. Self-policing serves to prevent too much snooping from the RIAA or the (American) Feds. Filepile.org has perhaps 10,000 accountholders with a few thousand especially active members. The reason why evidence of such an active site doesn't show up anywhere, is that filepile.org rejects robots crawling all over it, which is fair enough. The reason why they don't have a Wikipedia entry is that FPers will sign up for a Wiki account just to say how FP shouldn't be on the Wiki. Mystery solved. Carry on, my wayward sons (you got to wait for the good part, just like on this one)]