I Wrote Off San Francisco for Years. This Long Weekend Changed My Mind.

The highest rooms in the city

Photo: Jenny Thomas

I pulled up to the hotel and handed the keys to my dusty 2012 Outback to the valet, where the car would sit untouched the entire weekend. After a warm welcome and easy check-in that made this California mountain girl feel like I belonged there, I headed up to the 43rd floor. The whole San Francisco Bay opened up in front of me, the bridges stitched across the water and the fog sitting low over all of it. I dropped my bags and just stood at the window for a while.

The Four Seasons at Embarcadero takes the top 11 floors of 345 California Center, a 48-story tower in the Financial District, with all 155 rooms and suites stacked between the 38th and 48th floors. There’s no bad view in the building, which helps explain why the hotel has held two Michelin Keys for two years running. Room rates start around $670 per night and climb from the Deluxe rooms up through studio-style corner suites to the Golden Gate Terrace Suite, which has an 800-square-foot terrace hanging in the sky.

My room faced the Bay, and I left the blackout shades open every night so the first thing I saw each morning was the sun rising over the water. The room also brought the city into it. There were postcards designed by local artists on the desk (the hotel mailed one to my husband for me), and local artists’ work runs throughout the property. Down in the lobby stands a Guy Dill sculpture called “Ohlone,” named for the people who lived along this coast before San Francisco was San Francisco.

Photo: Jenny Thomas

As a girl who hauls a Yeti everywhere and travels with refillable shampoos, I notice when a hotel’s sustainability pledges are performative. This one’s are real. The room was outfitted with aluminum Open Water bottles, a pour-over coffee setup with no pods or plastic cups, and an old-school phone on the nightstand, so I wasn’t draping a bath towel over five glowing blue dots on a charging brick at midnight as I do in every other hotel. Even the trash bins were unlined, and a disc on the desk explained that fresh linens come after the third night while towels left hanging get reused. Toiletries are refillable Codage — not the cleanest beauty line out there, but honest about ingredients and lighter on filler than most.

But the detail I loved most about the Four Seasons was the building itself. The two crowns of the tower sit at 45-degree angles to the rest of it, connected by glass skybridges. I crossed one every morning on my way to yoga with the city dropping out from under me on both sides.

Sky Flow Yoga runs weekly on the open-air terrace on the 40th floor in partnership with Nob Hill Yoga, free for hotel guests and open to outside bookings. If you’d rather sweat solo, the 24-hour hotel gym has a squat rack, free weights, a TRX setup, cardio machines, and Manduka mats. You can also work out in private; each room comes with a Manduka mat, free weights, and resistance bands.

Waste-not-want-not dining

The Four Seasons at Embarcadero’s only on-site restaurant is called Orafo, meaning “goldsmith” in Italian, a nod to the city’s Gold Rush past. I came for dinner and had the Ora King salmon, as well as perfectly seasoned and crispy fries.

If you’re in the mood for a slower-paced dinner, Terrene is about a half-mile away, set right on the Bay. The restaurant grows much of its own produce on a rooftop garden, including honey from on-site beehives. The cocktails are zero-waste, with ingredients not sourced from the rooftop procured within 50 miles. The wine list also features sustainable, organic, and Napa Green-certified wines. I sampled the heirloom tomato and burrata salad, expertly charred Brussels sprouts, one too many steak skewers, and more fries.

In the Mission District, about a 25-minute drive from the Embarcadero, Shuggie’s is a restaurant and bar that doubles as a 1970s fever dream, down to the chairs shaped like little hands. The whole concept is about rescuing ingredients that would otherwise go to waste — byproducts from food manufacturing, lower-on-the-food-chain seafood, offcuts from local ranchers, and invasive species — and making them centerpieces. Northern California farms like Stemple Creek, Marin Roots Farm, and Old Dog Ranch anchor the menu. I feasted on the wild boar chop with thomcord grapes, frisée, stonefruit karashi, and black plum powder. The onion-peel Funyuns were fantastic, too: giant puffed onion-peel crispies with a maitake mushroom dip and chèvre.

For lunch, Wildseed is a popular vegetarian pick, crafting seasonal plant-based dishes. As a former vegetarian who now can’t fathom skipping meat on the plate, I left both full and satisfied. I had the Mediterranean salad, loaded with organic fresh vegetables, and the plant-based chilaquiles with JUST Egg over a fresh and spicy chile de arbol sauce. In keeping with the theme of the trip, I also ordered fries, this time accompanied by three bold dipping sauces.

A frozen clock, cool vintage finds, and a cold plunge

Photo: Photo Spirit/Shutterstock

San Francisco rewards a loose itinerary. Start at the Ferry Building, a 660-foot waterfront hall at the foot of Market Street, topped with a 245-foot clock tower that’s been there since 1898 when the building was the second-busiest transit terminal in the world behind London’s Charing Cross. The clock famously stopped at 5:12 the morning of the 1906 earthquake and sat frozen for over a year while the city rebuilt tirelessly around it.

Inside, the old nave is a busy marketplace with outposts of a lot of local and beloved establishments: Blue Bottle Coffee, Hog Island Oyster Company, Dandelion Chocolate, Acme Bread Company, Fort Point Beer Company, Heath Ceramics, and Bernal Cutlery, to name several. My visit happened to coincide with the raucous Bay to Breakers race weekend, so the hall was full of people rocking pink tutus, Bananas in Pajamas onesies, and every wild costume you could imagine. What surprised me the most after years away from the city was how content I felt just being there in the building, people-watching.

While getting lost in the halls of the Ferry Building, I stumbled upon a vintage thrifters’ dream: the Pickwick Vintage Show. It’s a monthly traveling market that bounces between San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago. It packs silver rolling closets full of 40-plus vintage vendors selling everything from vintage Gucci to Dior. It was busting at the seams with eclectic shoppers wearing equally fabulous clothes, and I found myself shoulder to shoulder with locals and tourists digging through racks of chic secondhand everything.

Photo: Sergio TB/Shutterstock

To keep the thrift hunt going, head to Haight Street. The Summer of Love ended in 1967, but the corridor never got the memo; almost 60 years later, it’s credited as the most concentrated vintage corridor on the West Coast. The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin lived in the candy-colored Victorians up the hill, and the storefronts still carry that psychedelic-era charge. Start mid-street and walk it: Relic Vintage, Decades of Fashion, and Community Thrift Store are all worth a stop.

Though easily navigable on foot, San Francisco is a city of beautiful but intense hills. Renting an e-bike will help you cover more ground while keeping your footprint light. I took Dandyhorse’s three-hour Ultimate Electric SF Bike Tour, which hits stops like Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, and the Painted Ladies. The tour also included a stop on the Golden Gate Bridge, across which you’ll find Fjord.

Fjord is a floating sauna and cold plunge on the Sausalito waterfront at the end of a boat dock. The sauna looks out through a massive picture window framing Angel Island and Mount Tamalpais. I started in the redwood-clad Finnish sauna, and when the dry heat radiating from the stones became too much, I jumped into Richardson Bay. The water was in the mid-50s, the right temperature to feel cool without being chilled to the bone.

Photo: Jenny Thomas

I’ve driven over this bay hundreds of times over the years but had never once been in it. That first cold plunge changed something. I came to make up with the city that wronged me, and somewhere between the fog and the cold plunge, we called it even.

Getting to and around San Francisco

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is about a 30-minute drive from downtown, with Uber, Lyft, and a self-driving Waymo just an app away. If you’re local-ish like me, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) drops you right in the Financial District a few blocks from the Four Seasons at Embarcadero.