Customer Reviews

Time Out San Francisco 4 (Time Out San Francisco Guide)

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First off, I should say that for a visitor to San Francisco, this guide is still your best bet for all around coverage of shopping, bars, and sights. If you are going to get one guide, get this one (just make sure the restaurants still exist before you drop by!).

I really like Time Out guides in general, and have found them indispensable for such places as diverse as Budapest, Las Vegas, and New York. This guide, however, lacks the fun attitude and vast amount of information that these others have. I am clearly biased, being a Bay Area native, but the writers just got on my nerves: the bar section, for example, constantly categorizes places as catering to "pretentious hipsters" or "scenester yuppies", while other places are left for the "cool kids." Critiques such as these seem so pretentious and as grasping to prove some "alternative" credibility. Also, this book is much shorter than Time Out guides for other cities, and they could have written more: places like Mendocino County, the nearby San Mateo County coast, and even Oakland are given scant coverage, and several landmark SF institutions have been left out. There is nothing on San Jose (apart from the airport address) or Silicon Valley, the nearby metropolis that dwarfs SF. So while this guide is great for a visitor, if you are planning to move to SF or are a local trying to learn more, you may want to go with a more in depth guide (Avon Travel's Moon Handbooks, for instance).

A good and straight forward guide to San Francisco from the venerable English publisher. This company should do more guides. I used this when I went to San Francisco and it was indispensable.