There is a single building at 1000 Great Highway, where Golden Gate Park runs out of land and the Pacific starts, that contains two restaurants, a brewery and a free museum. On Thanksgiving the two restaurants serve the same three-course menu at the same price, and almost nobody booking it realises they are choosing between two entirely different evenings.
Holiday menus are mostly identical once you strip out the room, and the room is the part nobody tells you about until you are sitting in it. Ask Karpo which table you actually want before you book.
The menu, which is genuinely the same
Three courses, $85 for adults and $37.50 for children under twelve. You start with butternut squash soup or a radicchio and endive salad. The main is roasted turkey, pan-seared bass, or a farro and delicata squash risotto. Dessert is pumpkin cheesecake or apple crisp.
That is a well-constructed holiday menu rather than a cynical one. There is a real alternative to turkey for the people who never wanted turkey, the vegetarian option is a dish rather than a side plate rearranged, and the two desserts cover both of the arguments that break out at the end of Thanksgiving dinner.
Add-on starters sit outside the prix fixe: crab and shrimp cakes, oysters, burrata, buttermilk fried calamari. These are where the bill moves. A table of four that orders two add-ons and a round of drinks has quietly turned an $85 menu into something closer to $120 a head, which is fine if you meant to and irritating if you did not.
Upstairs: the ocean room
Beach Chalet is the first-floor room, and its entire case rests on a wall of windows facing due west over Ocean Beach. In late November, sunset falls in the late afternoon, which means a booking around four o'clock puts the sun going down into the Pacific in the middle of your main course.
This is the version to book if the view is the point and if there are people at the table who have not seen it. It is also the noisier and busier of the two rooms, the windows fog when it is cold, and the tables are close together — a Thanksgiving with a lot of people talking at once rather than a quiet one.
Downstairs and behind: the garden room
Park Chalet faces the other way, into the park, with a glass-roofed room opening onto a lawn backed by cypress trees. There is no ocean in it at all. What there is instead is light, space, a considerably calmer volume, and the ability to send children out onto the grass between courses without anybody having to negotiate a road.
For a family group with small children, or for anybody who finds a packed dining room on a holiday exhausting, this is the better of the two rooms by a distance, and the menu is identical. The people who end up disappointed at Park Chalet are the ones who assumed a restaurant at the beach faces the beach.
- 1000 Great Highway, at the western end of Golden Gate Park
- Three courses, $85 adults and $37.50 for under-12s, at both restaurants
- Turkey, pan-seared bass or farro and delicata squash risotto as mains
- Add-on starters and holiday cocktails are charged separately
- Beach Chalet faces the Pacific; Park Chalet faces the park and the lawn
The free museum on the ground floor
The reason to arrive early is on the way in and costs nothing. The ground-floor lobby is the Golden Gate Park visitor centre, and its four walls carry a 1,500-square-foot fresco cycle called San Francisco Life, painted by Lucien Labaudt in 1936 under the WPA.
It is a nine-foot-high painted record of Depression-era San Francisco at play — people in the park, at Land's End, on the beach outside — and it is one of the best New Deal murals in the city, sitting in a room most diners walk straight through. There is also a scale model of the park, which is a surprisingly effective way to explain to a visitor how large the thing they just drove the length of actually is.
Fifteen minutes downstairs before you go up to the table converts a meal into an afternoon, and it is the single best free thing attached to any holiday booking in San Francisco.
The brewery, and the drinks bill
Beach Chalet has brewed its own beer on site since the mid-nineties, which makes it one of the older surviving brewpubs in the city and gives the drinks list a spine that most holiday prix fixe menus do not have. On a day built around a heavy plate of turkey, a house beer is a considerably better idea than the bottle of red somebody will otherwise suggest.
There are seasonal cocktails too — glögg and hot buttered rum among them — which sound like a gimmick and are, in a cold room at the edge of the Pacific in late November, exactly right. Both are the sort of drink you order one of. Two turns the afternoon into something else entirely, and you still have to get home.
Getting there, and the weather
This is the far western edge of the city, which in practice means a different climate from wherever you are starting. It will be colder, windier and quite possibly fogged in when the Mission is clear, and the walk from the car park to the door is exposed. Coats, not jackets.
Parking is along the Great Highway and in the lot, and on a holiday afternoon it is far easier than any comparable restaurant in the city centre — one of the genuine advantages of eating at the end of the park. The N Judah runs to within a few blocks if you would rather not drive, and a walk along the beach either side of the meal is the obvious thing to do with the daylight.
Practical notes
Beach Chalet and Park Chalet share the building at 1000 Great Highway at the western end of Golden Gate Park. Both serve a three-course Thanksgiving prix fixe at $85 per adult and $37.50 for children under twelve: butternut squash soup or radicchio and endive salad; roasted turkey, pan-seared bass or farro and delicata squash risotto; pumpkin cheesecake or apple crisp. Add-on starters including crab and shrimp cakes, oysters, burrata and fried calamari are extra, as are holiday cocktails such as glögg and hot buttered rum. Beach Chalet upstairs faces the Pacific and is the louder room; Park Chalet at the back faces a lawn and the park and is the calmer one. Book early for a late-afternoon table if you want the sunset, and allow fifteen minutes for the free WPA frescoes in the ground-floor visitor centre.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #Thanksgiving #BeachChalet #ParkChalet #OceanBeach #GoldenGatePark #Restaurants #SFEats #OuterSunset #HolidayDining #PrixFixe #SFThingsToDo #OceanView #WPAMurals
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which holiday menus near you are worth the money, which room to ask for and what the add-ons really cost? Ask Karpo before you commit to a booking.
