With two RANGE editors posted up at two very different hotels on opposite sides of the city, we spent our off-hours eating our weight in seafood, digging through the bins at Amoeba, drinking dirty martinis (and surprisingly convincing booze-free Long Islands), wandering through the ruins of a 19th-century bathhouse, and learning how a neighbourhood activist helped stop a freeway from bulldozing its way through the Panhandle.

We got a little lost, ate very well, and may still be recovering. Consider this RANGE’s guide to San Francisco beyond Outside Lands.

San Francisco Skyline.

Stay In Japantown

Hotel Kabuki (1625 Post St.) was our home base for Outside Lands, and Japantown turned out to be an ideal place to stay for the weekend. It’s closer to Golden Gate Park than downtown, but more importantly, there’s plenty worth sticking around the neighbourhood for.

Hotel Kabuki.

Kabuki draws heavily from its Japanese surroundings without laying it on too thick. The rooms are spacious and modern with great views across the city, and the breakfast buffet is an entertaining mix of miso soup, rice and Japanese staples alongside bacon, eggs, and pancakes. After a late night at Outside Lands, having all of the above at your disposal is useful.

Japantown itself deserves more time than we were able to give it. Best Boy Electric (1746 Post St.), on the ground floor of the New People building, handles the morning coffee and matcha, including hand-whisked organic matcha sourced from Miyazaki, Japan. Nearby, Maruwu Seicha Matcha House (1737 Post St.) gets a little more indulgent with Hokkaido milk, matcha soft serve, and cheese-foam drinks.

Between festival days, it was generally just a good neighbourhood to wander around without much of an agenda — bookstores, restaurants, Japanese markets, and the sprawling Japan Center all within a few blocks of the hotel.

Dirty Martinis and Oysters

Venturing downtown ahead of the city’s First Thursday market, Bar Malone (326 Minna St.) became one of the surprise hits of the trip.

Bar Malone.

Part cocktail bar, part oyster bar, it’s the kind of place where stopping in for one drink can easily turn into dinner. The Scoundrel, their spin on a dirty martini, comes with gin or vodka, housemade brine, an olive and a house-pickled garnish, and goes particularly well with a round of oysters. We stuck around for the corn ribs and shrimp cocktail too.

It was a good way to spend a few hours downtown before the city’s monthly Downtown First Thursday took over the streets.

Get Sober-Curious By The Ocean

At Ocean Beach Cafe (734 La Playa St.), owner Joshua James has been quietly helping shift San Francisco drinking culture since 2020.

Ocean Beach Cafe.

A turkey sandwich somehow turned into a crash course in non-alcoholic cocktails as James walked us through an increasingly fascinating world of booze-free spirits, tinctures, and botanical concoctions designed to offer some of the ritual, and occasionally some of the sensation, of drinking without the alcohol.

That included kava and other botanical ingredients that have found their way into the rapidly expanding world of functional beverages. More importantly, James makes one hell of a non-alcoholic Long Island iced tea. Ours actually gave us a bit of a buzz and briefly made us question what exactly we had just consumed.

The culprit, apparently, was Soul Hum, a zero-proof spirit that uses botanical terpenes alongside ingredients like ashwagandha, L-theanine and valerian root to create its namesake “hum” without the alcohol. Whether it was the botanicals or the power of suggestion, something was definitely happening.

Then we went for a walk. And this is where things got slightly off course.

Chinatown.

Lost At The End of the World

We intended to walk from Ocean Beach to the Sutro Baths (1004 Point Lobos Ave.), the haunting ruins of the enormous public bathhouse that once sat along San Francisco’s Pacific coastline beneath what is now Lands End.

Sutro Baths.

We did eventually find them. Getting there just took a little longer than anticipated.

Built by millionaire Adolph Sutro in the late 19th century, the baths once contained massive saltwater swimming pools beneath an enormous glass enclosure. Today, what’s left is a maze of concrete foundations covered in shitty graffiti and pools sitting against the cliffs, with waves crashing dramatically behind them. We slapped a RANGE sticker on a nearby bench and went on our way. 

If you keep wandering through Lands End, the payoff gets even better. The trail eventually opens onto wide views of the Golden Gate Bridge — one of those iconic San Francisco moments where something you’ve seen reproduced 40 billion times somehow still looks impressive in person.

Getting a little lost only improves the experience.

Eat Filipino Brunch Like You Mean It

Near Fisherman’s Wharf, ABACÁ (2700 Jones St.) is hidden inside the Kimpton Alton Hotel, but it’s absolutely not one of those obligatory hotel restaurants.

Chef Francis Ang’s contemporary Filipino cooking turned brunch into one of our favourite meals of the trip.

ABACÁ.

The Sarap Sampler is the obvious start: buttered pandesal and spreads surrounded by mussels, kinilaw, lumpia, and Ilocos empanada. But the dish that we’re still talking about to this day was the Chicken & Mango Longganisa Silog — breakfast sausages served with English peas, calamansi glaze, and two sunny-side-up eggs.

If you’re into sweets, make sure you save room, because the raspberry-lychee cream puff is insane, but it’s also the kind of dessert that demands an immediate walk afterward. Fortunately Fisherman’s Wharf gives you plenty of waterfront to get your steps in for the day. 

The Hippie History Lesson

After two full days at Outside Lands, we may not have been emotionally prepared to begin a walking tour by joining hands — metaphorically, thankfully — and singing “Get Together.” But that’s more or less how our exploration of Haight-Ashbury began.

Our guide kicked things off with the Youngbloods counterculture anthem, written by Dino Valenti, asking everyone to sing along about smiling on your brother and loving one another. We were perhaps a little too hungover to immediately embrace the assignment, but we played along. 

Thankfully, things got better from there. The volunteer-led tour took us beyond the standard Summer of Love mythology and into some of the unexpected political history embedded in the neighbourhood, including the Panhandle and the story of Sue Bierman, the preservationist and future San Francisco supervisor who became instrumental in the fight against a proposed freeway that threatened the neighbourhood in the 1960s. Without her, it’s likely that there never would have been a Summer Of Love in the same way that it unfolded so famously during the Counterculture Era and brought us so many amazing talents. 

Haight-Ashbury.

It’s the kind of story that changes the way you look at a park. What now feels like an inevitable strip of green running alongside the Haight exists in part because residents organized to protect it.

The tours are run by San Francisco City Guides, a nonprofit program powered by volunteers, and they’re one of the best ways to get a true glimpse into so many different sides of San Francisco.

CDs Are Coming Back In Style?

You can’t spend time in Haight-Ashbury without eventually ending up inside Amoeba Music (1855 Haight St.).

Housed in a former bowling alley near Golden Gate Park, Amoeba can turn a casual browse into an hour-long archaeological dig. We left with a few pieces of vinyl and some CDs, because nothing rages against the AI machine more succinctly than some shiny physical media. 

Amoeba Music.

For a magazine built around the idea of experiencing life through the lens of a music fan, this one was essentially mandatory. But Amoeba is a mecca for music lovers. The day prior to our visit, they hosted a Q&A with Charli xcx – who headlined Outside Lands. 

More Tacos Please

After a couple of long days at Outside Lands, Flores (2030 Union St.) delivered exactly the kind of Mexican brunch we needed. The restaurant makes its tortillas in-house, so the tacos are the obvious place to start. We went for both the carne asada and carnitas, each tucked into warm, freshly made tortillas that were reason enough to get another round.

Flores.

Also worth making room for: the prawn and squid ceviche, salsa and guacamole, and chilaquiles with just enough heat to make you order a second michelada.

I Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star

If Outside Lands represents the polished, enormous end of San Francisco’s music ecosystem, Music City Starfactory (1353 Bush St.) feels like somebody attempted to build the other end of it from scratch.

Music City Starfactory.

Founder Rudy Colombini calls his sprawling musical universe the Starfactory, and explaining exactly what that means takes a minute. Part hotel. Part hostel. Part music museum. Part rehearsal complex. Part performance venue. Part grand experiment in keeping musicians in a city where doing so has become increasingly difficult.

The rehearsal rooms come stocked and ready for bands to plug in and play, memorabilia and music history spill throughout the building, and live performances with up-and-coming musicians move through the space constantly.

Behind it all is Colombini, a performer himself as the frontman for the Unauthorized Rolling Stones tribute band. His vision has the manic optimism of someone attempting to build a Willy Wonka-esque factory for rock and roll. It’s strange, ambitious, and slightly overwhelming, which is precisely why we liked it.

Find Your Post-Festival Dive

By the end of the first night of Outside Lands, The Nag’s Head (5346 Geary Blvd.) had become our unofficial post-festival headquarters. The Outer Richmond dive is close enough to Golden Gate Park to make it an easy final stop, with cheap drinks, a pool table and exactly the kind of no-frills atmosphere we were looking for after spending all day at a festival.

We ended up back there every night. By the second night, the owner and bartender knew our names.

Outside Lands.