Funny you mentioned not being able to get a good meal after 9:30pm. That was the most frustrating thing about being in San Francisco for me. I hated that the whole bay seemed to shut down @10pm - almost as if everybody has to wake up the next morning to work another 12 hour day to pay the insane rent.....
Perhaps part of the reason is the massive wealth gap between the tech migrants (tech workers) and the local population. It causes a lot of friction between locals and the new migrants. The lower earners are being forced out of the city and they probably make a up a large chunk of the service workers.
The public transit system shuts off by 12 AM - 1PM, and most service workers would likely have to live outside of the city, as well as most people coming into SF to work. The city is forced to shutoff at a certain time because of the transit situation, even if not for any other reasons.
> Perhaps part of the reason is the massive wealth gap between the tech migrants (tech workers) and the local population. It causes a lot of friction between locals and the new migrants. The lower earners are being forced out of the city and they probably make a up a large chunk of the service workers.
The current disparity certainly causes plenty of concerning issues, though SF's early closing has been a thing since at least 2007 when I first lived there, at which point cost of living was somewhat reasonable.
Don't get me started. You get inured to it after a while, but every time I travel outside of SF, I remember what it's like to live in a real city.
I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things.
That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.
It's because everyone in SF seems to be a morning person. In my building everyone (except me) is asleep by 10pm. In NYC things are only getting started at 10.
... and it's exhuasting to adjust to when business trips take me from SF to NYC. I usually add two hours to whatever normal evening meetup time I'd suggest in SF when I make plans with my NYC friends.
This doesn't square with my perception of SV programmers always mentioning staying late to hack on their startup. Do they actually mean that they got there at 6AM, so staying until 5PM is "late?"
Engineers might stay up until 2am, but they stay up until 2am at home because nobody else is bugging them. If they eat, it's gonna be cheap stuff or frozen trader joes food from the freezer, more time efficient.
I don't think that it's all hackers. Without mentioning the neighborhood (because this borders on stereotype, and these things usually devolve into an x vs. x neighborhood discussion), I live in a neighborhood where people mostly hold non-technical titles like "marketing manager" and "product manager".
And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.
The only way I could handle my old SF boss expecting people in the office by 7:30 was by being based in Dublin and only making the occasional trip to SF.
Even then, the jetlag only made it work for a week or two.
I find it to be one of the mysteries of bay area. I don't understand how a city this size can manage to have nothing open after 10 pm. Is there a reason to this? Surely it can't be all shop owners getting to gather and saying ok let's all close shop at 10..
I don't know if it's true for SF, but some cities have noise ordinances that pretty much shut everything down by a certain time.
As others have noted, people who have the sorts of jobs that put them behind a register can't afford to live in SF, and public transportation shuts down at midnight or so. If you were working a restaurant it would have to close by 10:00 so you had time to clean up with a little buffer to make sure you were on the last train.
I guess I always end up in the wrong parts of NYC because I kept finding that all the restaurants closed at 10pm (during the week, at least)... say, in Chelsea.
Chelsea doesn't have the best food options. You could go south to Meatpacking which is a bit better but I'd just walk east. Flatiron / Union Square has tons of food options that are open late plus solid bars. Walk even further to the East Village and you're golden, there's like two twenty-four hour restaurants within a block's radius of each other.
But you can. The Brazen Head in the Marina, Thai Noodle on Haight and a bunch of places in North Beach will happily serve till 1 AM or later and at a quality that doesn't even compare with fast food. In fact since I've moved to SF, going on ten years now, I've found pretty much most of the rest of the country (NYC and LA excepted) to be quiet a sad food desert.
