Spyplane Ultimate BAY AREA Guide
The slappiest food, shops, drinks, sights, nature trails & more
We just published our extensive Natural Fiber Workout Gear Guide.
Our guide to Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.
Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8B. How good of a person do you expect her to be? Read our Spyplane Deep Dive.
Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.
Our Home Goods Index, full of things to enliven the place you live, and stores where you can find them, is here.
We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and Etsy, and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.
— Jonah & Erin
Few saw it coming, but here in 2026, it’s incontestable:
The Bay Area has become one of the Top 2 places in America.
In fact, in many Quality of Life respects, the Bay is vastly superior to America’s No. 1 place — New York — especially if you are older than ~29 and booed up.
More and more people are grappling with this truth. Even I’m a bit surprised. I (Jonah) am a native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn. I spent my life in New York, until 2014, when Erin and I came to Oakland. But we loved it here off rip, and we don’t think we’ll ever leave.
Today we’re finally ready to drop the Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.
Perhaps more to the point, the world is finally ready to truly appreciate it. Scaremongering headlines from wack and/or ill-informed dweebs have transformed into rhapsodies of praise. Tremendous food and wine, paradisiacal nature, charismatic fauna, glorious weather, chill people, old-school bars, restaurants and art-deco movie palaces, excellent bookshops, dope record stores, cool clothing stores, one of the world’s sickest designers, and the world’s best newsletter — they all call the Bay home, and it’s no longer a secret.
You might be planning a trip here, or you might live here. Either way, this intel is for you. It’s focused on San Francisco and the East Bay, where we spend the most time, but with a few farther-flung spots mixed in within ~an hour’s drive away.
A few quick notes up top:
Everything listed here rocks.
A 🏆 icon indicates a superlative spot.
An even-rarer 🐦⬛ indicates a place in the uppermost tier of our Personal Bay Pantheon.
An ✨ indicates a great room / major vibiness.
Other icons (e.g. 🍷🍕🥃⛩️🌳🥾) are clear in context.
This is a robust but curated selection of places we adore, with a few that come highly recommended to us by trusted and admired locals. There are any number of beloved spots in the Bay we didn’t include, because our goal here is to be useful, not to be exhaustive.
In that spirit, if there’s a spot you f--k with heavy and it isn’t in this guide, shout it out in the comments.
Let’s get to it —
Food & Drinks
