This Expensive San Francisco Restaurant Made Me Hate Myself

Want to live like a rich bitch? Try wasting menu on salty steak. (Zayn Shah)

BY ANTONY FANGARY

There’s an upscale chain restaurant, we’ll call it “Fancy Applebee’s,” with a location in downtown San Francisco that reeks of fratboys at a nightclub. Like most places that aren’t worth the money, they have a dress code. I don’t think that we need to debate the obvious racist, classist, and sexist history of dress codes, but this is one of those archaic places that hold onto problematic status symbols. So, if you are in sweatpants they will turn you away. Weird rules like this remind me of Claim Jumpers in the 90’s; remember how they would price kid’s meals based on how much the kid weighed? Remember how bad that felt? Standing on the scale, the shame in your parents eyes, like if you ate and weighed less, they’d have a bigger house and a nicer car? Well, if you miss that sense of disappointment only a parent could make you feel, this is your place. 

I live in SF’s Tenderloin and love it. It is an international culinary sanctuary. Here, you are walking distance from some of the best restaurants in the city. You can find amazing Indian, Yemani, Mayan, Thai, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Chinese, Turkish, Korean food, and more within a 7-block radius. There really is nothing else on the west coast like it. With all this incredible food at my doorstep, I would normally never go to a place like this. It simply isn’t my style or in my tax bracket. But I recently received a writing fellowship that is allowing me to feel rich for exactly one month. And with that, I said, let’s see how the rest of these rich assholes dine. 

When you walk in, you get the strange feeling that a rich, 2006-era gym bro was the interior designer, and was going for a “Lou Ferigno fucks a Fabergé egg” aesthetic; way too many shiny metals and big blocky marble objects. It’s like if the movie 300 was a restaurant. The host walks you upstairs, and you get the same neo-rococo vibe. I will say that the music is great. They have a live band playing old and new R&B hits, and it makes eating at a fancy Applebee’s less unbearable.

The food is, of course, pricey. Some steaks are over $250, but my Egyptian parents would kill me if I ever spent that much on beef and didn’t get an entire cow. So, I settled for a $90 steak, the most I have ever spent on a single item of food. I was more than disappointed. The meat came on a comically large sizzling-hot plate as if it were fajitas or bibimbap, or something good. Sadly, this was just culinary theater. The meat was encrusted in burnt salt, and every bite tasted as if it were dipped into a bowl of salt. I hated it. I hated myself for going there because I knew Shalimar, Yemen Kitchen, and all the other amazing restaurants that didn’t care how I dressed were around the corner, and it felt like they knew I was there. I was just another Fabergé egg-fucking tool with a plate of stale bread and salty meat. I felt like I was that same chubby kid in the 90’s all over again, quivering on the Claim Jumper’s scale. I saw my parents in that plate of salty meat, and I could taste their disappointment and the salt was their tears; and there were so many tears. 

But I’m not going to lie to you, I finished my meal. I ate all of it, every last bite, I even used that stale-fucking-bread to wipe up the last of the meat-salt resin from the plate because my parents didn’t leave Egypt so I could pay $90 for a steak and not finish it, no matter how salty it is, and even if it makes me hate myself and undoes six years of therapy.