18. Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement1375 Fillmore St., San Francisco, Northern California, $$
Carolyn Fong
Macaroni and fried chicken.
Alta
Fernay McPherson’s maternal grandmother, Lillie Bell, arrived in San Francisco in 1962 from Port Arthur, Texas, part of the wave of Black families who came west during and after World War II. The Fillmore she found was the Harlem of the West: jazz clubs and soul food restaurants lining the corridor, a neighborhood where it felt like California was the one place willing to make good on this country’s promises. But Bell and her family were able to enjoy that life for only a short time before the bulldozers showed up and whole swaths of the Fillmore were razed by the city.
By the ’80s, when McPherson was a child in the Fillmore, most of the scene that her grandmother had known was long gone. The old Fillmore was crippled first by demolition, then by endless waves of gentrification, and finally by the pandemic.
But McPherson holds on to her memories of watching and helping her grandmother and her great-aunt Minnie cook; her restaurant is named for them. After years of selling fried chicken out of a food truck and then from a stall at a shopping center food court, McPherson opened Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement on Fillmore Street in 2024, five blocks from where she grew up.
The Fillmore corridor, though, has been hampered by disinvestment. McPherson does what she can: She talks up the French bakery next door, offers advice to local business owners, and somehow finds time to sit on the neighborhood improvement committee. When she caters Fillmore community meetings, she sources from three businesses on the block in addition to her own. “In order for one to sustain,” she says, “we all have to sustain.”
Carolyn Fong
Chef Fernay McPherson.
Inside the restaurant, portraits of Lillie and Minnie as young women look over the dining room, while a reproduction of an archival photo of bustling Fillmore Street occupies a wall around the corner. McPherson also mixes her family’s legacy into the restaurant’s food. The fried chicken, her calling card, is the recipe Lillie Bell brought on a train from Texas, updated with one addition: rosemary, its floral, piney aroma present in every bite. Behind the craggy, high-decibel crust lies white meat that runs with herb-infused juice. It is, in this writer’s opinion, the finest fried chicken in the Bay Area.
The mac and cheese inhabits the other end of the texture spectrum. The noodles are soft, cooked just short of collapse. The cheese sauce, built on a béchamel and finished with sharp cheddar and fontina, is gooey and stretchy; a parmesan crust forms on top in the oven. McPherson can recall being five years old and already in the kitchen, grating cheese to turn into the velvety binder for macaroni. The dish is the ideal complement to the well-spiced and vinegared collard greens. Her homemade hot sauce, garlicky and piquant, turbocharges everything on your plate.
Customers tell McPherson that the food makes them want a nap. She considers that a success: “That homestyle comforting food is what I wanted to put out.”
Yet the hard days are still there. Advocating for the neighborhood can feel like a 24-7 job on top of the actual work of running a restaurant. But she keeps going. “It can be hard today; it can be hard tomorrow,” she says. “For some reason, I’m supposed to be doing this.” —S.H.
This roundup appears in Issue 37 of Alta Journal.
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19. Outta Sight Pizza422 Larkin St., San Francisco
643 Clay St., San Francisco
Northern California, $$
Carolyn Fong
Server Ev Tilson holds the Orchard pie.
Outta Sight Pizza began as a pop-up at a San Francisco house in 2020. The venture quickly built a following, and co-owners Peter Dorrance and Eric Ehler secured brick-and-mortar outposts in the Tenderloin and Chinatown neighborhoods.
The pair had met while working at Mister Jiu’s, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Chinatown known as an incubator for enterprising cooks who have gone on to open many creative restaurants and bakeries on their own. With Outta Sight, Dorrance and Ehler took a bet on San Francisco, especially the Tenderloin, during a time when conservative politicians, including the president, were amplifying stories about the city’s, and the neighborhood’s, challenges. With plans to open a bar nearby, and frequent collaborations with local culinary luminaries like Cambodian American chef Nite Yun, the owners have made it clear that they aren’t backing out anytime soon.
The pizzeria’s template is consistent across both locations: a choice of thin-crust New York–style slices or thick, rectangular “lunch lady” slices; hip-hop on the speakers; and material and spiritual nods to the city’s graffiti and skateboarding cultures. Every inch of the fridge at the Larkin Street location is covered in stickers for streetwear brands, and vibrant skateboards hang on the walls. The tender, slow-fermented crusts are platforms for funky and seasonal topping combinations, including a vegan tofu al pastor with jalapeño tofu crema; chicken shawarma drizzled with yogurt sauce; and tea-smoked duck smothered in hoisin sauce and a splash of chile crisp oil.
The Orchard pie is the restaurant’s tribute to Olive Garden—the “fine dining” institution of Ehler’s Midwestern youth. With notes of garlic butter and honey, the fresh take on a classic mushroom pie is a Proustian madeleine for those who worship the infinite breadstick. —S.H.
20. Alice B.1122 E. Tahquitz Canyon Way, Palm Springs, Southern California, $$$
Andrea D’Agosto
Grilled artichokes.
When Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger (from left, at top) started City Café in 1981, they had only a hot plate, a basic grill, and a single prep table. The pair cooked classical, seasonally driven French cuisine before widening their focus to include ingredients, techniques, and flavors from around the globe and transforming their modest 39-seat establishment along Los Angeles’s Melrose Avenue into the acclaimed City Restaurant. Four years later, the trailblazing duo opened the James Beard Award–winning Border Grill, which presented traditional Mexican foodways and the pleasures of slow-braised carnitas and goat milk caramel flan. Now, the two have returned to their culinary roots with Alice B., a globally inspired New American concept housed in a rather unlikely place: the lobby of Living Out, a 55-and-over LGBTQ active living community in Palm Springs.
“When Susan and I first started cooking together, we would hardly ever have a day off,” Milliken says. “But if we ever had one, we would love to go to the desert and just recharge.” When a longtime friend in real estate approached them with the opportunity to open a restaurant in Palm Springs, the pair jumped at the chance to start an entirely new project serving a vibrant community of older adults. And although Feniger and Milliken are both past retirement age themselves, they show no signs of slowing down. “Well, we like to work in retirement,” Milliken says, laughing.
Andrea D’Agosto
Cornmeal-cheddar biscuits.
Alice B.’s dinner menu changes monthly or more often; this past spring, it featured artichokes, steamed and grilled, with a silky Meyer lemon aioli and an asparagus salad dressed with goat cheese, romesco, and almonds. The cornmeal-cheddar drop biscuits were an early, instant hit, served with whipped butter and a cardamom-infused honey thickened with black and white sesame seeds. Developed with one of Alice B.’s first chefs shortly before the opening, the biscuits have become so popular among both Living Out and area residents that the restaurant now sells them frozen. The kitchen also leans into Continental cuisine—a style of cooking long associated with the Coachella Valley’s resort cities—with midcentury throwbacks like deviled eggs with champagne vinaigrette and a classic steak Diane topped with crispy onions.
Feniger and Milliken have livened the lobby’s fairly plain interior with vibrant pieces made by local artists as well as life-size cutouts of the restaurant’s iconic namesake and her partner, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. The chefs say it’s been a delightful surprise to meet Alice B. diners they’ve been serving, at one restaurant or another, for more than four decades. Many former patrons of Border Grill and City, now happily retired and living in Palm Springs, stop in for a relaxed meal of slow-roasted pork shoulder with heirloom beans and grilled cabbage or the Border Grill pop-up menu that the restaurant runs on select Tuesday evenings. “It really feels like a little bit of a reunion,” Milliken says. —P.K.Y.
21. Komal3655 S. Grand Ave., C2, Los Angeles, Southern California, $$
Andrea D’Agosto
Quesadilla de flor.
The vast majority of tortillas consumed in the United States and even Mexico are mass-produced glop. But back in the day in Mexico, it took a literal village to make something as seemingly simple as a tortilla. People tilled the soil, planted corn, harvested it, and dried it. They took bushels back to a family that ran a molino—a mill—where the corn would be boiled, soaked, and washed before being ground and transformed into masa, the base for tortillas, tamales, and so much more.
Komal chef Fátima Juárez sources heirloom corn from Mexico and grinds it at her small South L.A. restaurant. She’s arguably the most prominent California chef advocating for traditional methods of tortilla making—and diners are all the better for it.
The emphasis on masa is evident in every corner of Komal. The kitchen tile design, visible to customers from the register, is meant to evoke the kernels on a multihued yellow cob. Premade tostadas and tlacoyos—elongated, bean-stuffed masa patties—sit in display cases for to-go orders. And those are just hints of the rainbow of tortillas the cooks prepare, depending on the available corn, each variety with its own colorway and flavor profile. Blue tortillas are deep and dusky; pink ones have a touch of sweetness. Yellow corn tastes like the earth. The tortillas come as sides or as the base for humongous tacos.
Komal’s masas shine in other dishes as well. Chuchitos—Guatemalan-style tamales that are fluffier and juicier than their Mexican cousins—burst with succulent braised pork and cabbage. Massive quesadillas consist of thicker-than-usual corn tortillas stuffed with burst squash blossoms or chorizo fused onto Oaxacan cheese. It’s a rather limited menu, but that’s the point: Juárez wants the world to know that when you have amazing masa, you really don’t need much else. If Mexicans ate like this for thousands of years, why can’t we now?
Not only does Juárez evoke the old ways, but she’s a wonderful reflection of Los Angeles’s close-knit culinary community. Komal is located in Mercado La Paloma, a food hall that since 1999 has offered immigrants and locals the chance to run their own businesses through affordable rents, startup funds, and business training. One of those entrepreneurs is Gilberto Cetina, owner of the Michelin-starred seafood stall Holbox, who is Juárez’s former boss and was one of the first customers for her masa.
Food halls are now mostly passé, ruined by too many smashburger concepts and hipster lattes. But Mercado La Paloma and Komal prove how vital they can be. —G.A.