Road Trip: San Francisco! Part 3a--Restaurants (some followup)

I should have put this as the close of the restaurants post. Oh, well.

In the three days I spent in the SF area, I ranged as far north as Sausalito (on a run up to see Muir Woods) and as far south as San Mateo.

I was struck by how few out-in-the-open fast food joints there were. These were mostly in San Bruno and Millbrae (the In-N-Out Burger we went to was in Millbrae). I saw one stand-alone McDonald's with its familiar architecture. The handful of McDonald's joints farther north were blended into their neighborhoods or in strip malls. No drive-through, nothing more than a recognizable but modest double-arches sign to let you know they were there.

I saw a combined KFC and Taco Bell in an otherwise nondescript building. A combined KFC or Taco Bell and A&W in another spot.

Not a Waffle House sign (or restaurant) anywhere. Those things grow like kudzu near highway offramps in the Southeast.

I liked it. I liked the fact that there was a dress code in the area and that even these corporate giants had to conform.

Billboards. There weren't a lot of them cluttering up the view. Business signs, either.

Walmart? bwahahaha. Nope. The Great Retail Satan can be found across the bay or down near Palo Alto, though there are a couple of corporate offices of some sort near San Bruno.

Nice.

[Edit: Don't know why it didn't occur to me that the "dress code" could also be about using established buildings that are up to local earthquake-preparedness codes. The San Andreas fault cuts right up the center of the SF peninsula--interactive map at the link.]

[Nother Edit: I really should have trolled the locals, asking them where the Rice-A-Roni Factory Outlet store was. Dammit!]