A search for the best Vietnam food in San Francisco that ends in the Inner Sunset is a search that has been done properly. Yummy Yummy is a long-running noodle room on Irving Street, in a residential quarter that most visitors never reach, and it belongs to a category the city does unusually well: the neighbourhood Vietnamese restaurant that has been feeding the same streets for decades.
Cold, grey, damp weather is the strongest possible argument for a bowl of soup, and this city supplies it most of the year. Ask Karpo where the good noodle rooms near you are on a day like this.
Why soup makes sense here
The Sunset sits west of the hills that block the fog, which means it gets the marine layer earlier, keeps it longer and runs several degrees colder than the eastern half of the city on most days. Summer in particular is genuinely cold and grey out here while the Mission is in sunshine.
That produces a specific eating culture. The neighbourhood is dense with noodle rooms, hotpot restaurants, congee shops and bakeries — food that makes sense when you have walked six blocks in wind off the ocean — and comparatively light on the outdoor-seating, rosé-in-the-afternoon establishments that dominate warmer districts.
It is one of the more genuinely useful pieces of local knowledge in this city: pick the neighbourhood to match the weather, not the other way around. On a grey August afternoon the Sunset is exactly right and Dolores Park is a mistake.
Ordering beyond pho
Bun bo Hue is the bowl to order if the weather is bad and you want something with more force than pho — lemongrass, chilli, fermented shrimp paste, thick round noodles, and a broth that is assertive rather than delicate. It is the central Vietnamese answer to the same question pho answers in the north.
Bun rieu is the other one worth knowing: a tomato and freshwater crab noodle soup with a distinctive sour edge and a crab-and-egg curd floating in it. It is sharp, savoury and unlike anything else in the cuisine, and it is chronically under-ordered by people who are not Vietnamese.
For a dry dish, bun thit nuong — grilled pork over cool rice vermicelli with herbs, pickles, peanuts and dipping sauce poured over the top — is the everyday order and the one that works best when it is warm, which out here is roughly six days a year.
The Inner Sunset as a neighbourhood
The commercial spine runs along Irving Street and the cross streets around Ninth Avenue, and it is a working neighbourhood high street: grocers, bakeries, hardware, a cinema, and a very high density of small restaurants across a wide range of cuisines. Almost none of it is aimed at visitors.
What makes it worth crossing the city for is the eastern edge. Golden Gate Park runs along the northern side of the neighbourhood, and the botanical garden, the arboretum, the de Young museum and the Academy of Sciences are all a short walk from the restaurants.
That combination — a serious museum, a large park and a street full of cheap good food, all walkable from each other — is one of the better half-days available in San Francisco and considerably less contested than the equivalent downtown.
How to plan it
Park or take transit once and walk the rest. The N line runs directly along Irving and connects to downtown, which makes this one of the easier outlying neighbourhoods to reach without a car.
Eat before or after the park rather than in the middle. The museums are at the eastern end and the restaurants are south of them, and doubling back mid-afternoon costs twenty minutes for no reason.
Dress for cold regardless of the forecast for San Francisco as a whole, which is usually taken from a station in a much warmer part of the city. Locals in the Sunset carry a jacket in July and they are not being cautious.
The Sunset, in outline
The Sunset District is the largest neighbourhood in San Francisco by area and one of the least visited, and it looks like nowhere else in the city: forty blocks of near-identical two-storey houses built rapidly in the mid-twentieth century on what had been sand dunes, laid out on a grid that runs from the park to the ocean.
It is heavily Asian-American, substantially Chinese, and it functions as a family neighbourhood rather than a destination. Housing here is somewhat less absurd than elsewhere in the city, the streets are quiet, and the restaurants are priced for people who eat at them every week.
Ocean Beach forms its western edge, and walking the length of it in wind and fog is an experience that people either love or find bleak. It is worth doing once regardless — it is the actual western edge of the continent, and there is very little between the sand and Japan. The surfers out there in February are not showing off; the water is cold all year and that is simply when the swell is best.
Practical notes
Yummy Yummy is a long-running Vietnamese noodle room on Irving Street in San Francisco's Inner Sunset, a cold, foggy, residential neighbourhood with a high density of good cheap food. Order bun bo Hue for an assertive lemongrass-and-chilli broth, bun rieu for the sour tomato and crab version, or bun thit nuong as the dry everyday dish. Combine it with Golden Gate Park, the botanical garden and the museums at the eastern end, eating before or after rather than doubling back. Take the N line rather than driving, and dress several degrees colder than the citywide forecast suggests.
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Ask Karpo first
In a city with several microclimates, the right neighbourhood depends on the weather rather than the ranking. Ask Karpo where it is actually warm or cold right now, what suits it, and what is worth doing within a walk of the meal.
