Latest posts by Peter Lawrence Kane

Barely 24 hours after Mission Pie announced that it will wind down its operations by Labor Day, San Francisco was hit with the news of two more closures: fellow Mission restaurant Southpaw BBQ and Dogpatch Hawaiian gem ‘aina. The latter had been in limbo for quite some time, so this is not entirely out of […]

So many Romantic operas gush with highly emotive paeans to love as the ultimate virtue that you could be forgiven for thinking that’s what opera is intrinsically about. And while the San Francisco Opera staged Bizet’s Carmen in its 2018-19 season, it also chose to resurrect Orlando, George Frideric Handel‘s 1733 adaptation of the earlier […]

If there’s one 20th century genius whose reputation has only continued to grow in the 21st century, it’s James Baldwin. Not only are people reading deeper into his oeuvre than merely Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, but his epigrammatic and occasionally mournful observations provide posthumous intellectual heft to many of the […]

Today is the 73rd birthday of a certain president of the United States. In a bid to nudge the Speaker of the House toward what they see as her constitutional duty, a group of activists gathered outside the Federal Building on Seventh Street in Colonial era garb to demand that Nancy Pelosi sign on to […]

Western SoMa will soon be home to the SoMa Leather Cultural District, a city-designated move to protect its historic queer and queer-owned spaces, portions of which have already begun in earnest. Two years ago, the Ringold Alley Art Walk launched with plinths commemorating various leather and LGBTQ individuals and groups on white, black, and blue-painted […]

The nori spaghettini at Melissa Perfit’s superb Ayala won a nod in SF Weekly‘s Best Of 2019 issue, and now the seafood-and-pasta restaurant inside Union Square’s Hotel G has announced a new addition, opening daily from 7 to 11 a.m. Café by Ayala is a quick-service spinoff across the lobby with “Poptarts” and other baked […]

This post has been updated below to reflect a second press release from Microbiz. Supervisor Matt Haney will hold a press conference at Mezzanine at 10:30 this morning to announce legislation proposing changes to nightlife in a wide swath of Western SoMa, including the entertainment corridors on Sixth and 11th Streets. In essence, it would […]

Second only to the pizza dilemma, the question of whether San Francisco has good bagels or not remains the most annoying thing of no consequence to argue about in this city. Hopefully inviting and putting to rest any debate, Daily Driver opens this Saturday, June 15, selling those doughnut-shaped bread things that aren’t doughnuts ­— […]

Let’s think of the city’s dim sum ecosystem as if it were the five strata of O.G. General Motors. Extra-fancy Yank Sing would be Cadillac, while less-sexy but ever-reliable Koi Palace is Buick. Any number of no-frills places could be Chevrolet, and flashier Koi Palace spinoff Dragon Beaux might make a good Pontiac. That leaves […]

The famous opening scene in Rudolph Maté’s 1949 noir D.O.A. shows Edmund O’Brien walking down a long corridor to report his own murder, but the most electrifying moment happens when O’Brien’s character Frank Bigelow runs down a crowded Market Street at top speed. The crew had no official permission to shoot on a major thoroughfare […]