Travel The Heart of San Francisco

THE LOBBY BAR IS THROBBING WITH EURO-cool music. The sofas are plush, purplish, and filled with Lycra-dressed women. Under a large painting of two women playing Twister, people are enjoying a game of backgammon (backgammon!) and sipping martinis. Board games are stacked artistically on bookshelves. At guest registration, black-clad, shaved-head kids wired with headsets carry luggage and park cars. The restaurant right off the lobby is packed. It’s a six or ten o’clock seating situation, if you call for reservations.

Welcome to hotel W, one of the newest boutique hotels from Starwood Properties. Its bar and the adjoining restaurant, XYZ, are the hottest spots in dot.com-wealthy San Francisco right now. The food at XYZ is “excellent,” according to Michael Bauer, restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. The decor is ultra hip and the heady, just-charge-it atmosphere is reminiscent of the high-flying ’80s.

Starwood, the owner of such megachains as Westin and Sheraton, has opened W hotels in New York, Seattle. Atlanta, and San Francisco. These are boutique hotels, a far cry from the mega-Hyatts of a few decades ago. Like the other typically urban W hotels, the San Francisco Wis located just off downtown, in the part of the city called SoMa, meaning “south of Market,” a transitional warehouse district that is to San Francisco what Deep Ellum and SoHo once were to Dallas and New York. SoMa is the place to he right now. and W is blocks from the Sony Metreon. the new PacBell stadium, the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and any number of happening restaurants-right in the middle of this city’s envisioned “arts district.”

When Starwood Properties was opening a San Francisco addition to their collection of downtown boutique hotels, Gail Defferari- a Dallas girl-was the obvious choice to put together its restaurant. XYZ.

Defferari grew up in Highland Park and got her start in the kitchen of La Cave, Dallas’ legendary wine bar. Her next gig, at The Grape, gave her real cooking experience. She moved to California 13 years ago, put in time at Splendido’s, and eventually opened a tiny little restaurant. Universal Cafe, on 19th Street in the thoroughly (at the time) un-hip Mission district. Friendly service, a great wine list, and inventive food meant that San Francisco heat a path to Defferari’s restaurant door. Before long, Universal Cafe was featured in Gourmet Magazine as San Francisco’s hidden treasure. And. naturally, XYZ has become a destination on its own.

The neighborhood is groovy, the lobby is jumping, but your room at W is about what’s not happening. Each mini-suite is designed as a refuge in the soon-to-be unmistakable late 20th-century fashion-a seamless combination of organic and electronic comfort. Sink back into your feather bed while you check your e-mail on the large TV screen, using a cordless keyboard. The room is like a luxury padded cell-plush carpel and deluxe linens in subdued colors, thick towels and robes, a selection of easy-listening CDs. Oh, you’re also provided with gin. wine, and velvety banquettes lavished with chenille throws. Gild this comfy lily with details like deluxe Aveda bath products and that most rare of amenities, a staff that wants to make you happy. So what if the room is small?

Luckily for me, the room featured necessities as well as luxuries, so I ironed my shirt before we went out.

Like kids to candy, we were drawn to Metreon, an indoor electronic amusement park just a few blocks away from the hotel. It looms like a neon sign from the sidewalk, irresistible in a hypnotic kind of way. Supposedly, the Metreon drew Stanley Marcus and Jack Gosnell to San Francisco to check out this digital Disneyland, thinking it might be perfect for Dallas. And listen, it is.

The Metreon is 15 movie theaters under one roof, plus a Sony IMAX theater with 2D and 3D capabilities on an 80-by-100-foot screen-a perfect indoor playground. David MacAulay’s book. The Way Things Work, is presented as an event in 3D, you can walk through Maurice Sendak’s world of Where the Wild Things Are, and you play electronic games inspired by Jean “Moebius” Girard, the French graphic novelist. Metreon reminds me of a world’s fair pavilion, a giant high-brow educational arcade suitable for children and adults. Like everything else, it’s packaged in shopping-The Way Things Work Shop, the Sony Style store, the Discovery Channel Store–everything loaded with bells, bright lights, whistles, and price tags. Themed restaurants mean you never have to leave the building, a Dallasite’s dream.

Around the comer is the planned cultural center of SoMa, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a sleek, modem construction designed by Mario Botta set in the middle of the downtown block just like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We waited in line to tour a major exhibit of paintings by Rene Magritte and to browse the permanent collection of photography, Pop, Post Expressionism-in other words, to take a look at weird to weirder. We then rewarded ourselves by checking out the museum store, which has some of the best shopping in town. Like so many other museums these days, SFMOMA’s merchandising is as exciting as its curating.

Across the street is the Verba Buena Center for the Arts. This multicultural, multimedia complex of art installations and performance space is San Francisco PC summed up-the theaters and galleries display work from all cultures. A recent show was themed around surfing as a cultural influence-you entered the gallery through a double line of life-sized hula mannequins with blacked-out teeth and bandages, a comment on how Western influence ravaged traditional Polynesian culture. Outside, a series of artist-conceived gardens provide more performance space-there’s a garden designed to attract butterflies, a poetry performance space that is also a tribute to the Ohlone tribe with a redwood grove, mossy rocks, and a quiet crescent-moon-shaped pool. The Sister Cities Garden features flowers native to San Francisco’s 13 sister cities around the world; the East Garden has a 50-foot waterfall leading to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.

And in the middle of all this idealistic brother (and sister) hood, at the edge of the Yerba Buena Center, stands a life-sized bronze of a briefcase-carrying, suited businessman, his arm extended for a friendly handshake. The piece is called “Shaking Man.” and it’s by Texan Terry Allen.

For dinner, we walked to Dine, one of the many up-and-coming restaurants in SoMa. Dine’s interior is everything you’d expect in a neighborhood like this-discreet signage (we passed it twice), high ceilings, industrial acoustics, and the usual family-style table in the middle of the dining room. Dine’s chef is another Defferari alum, a graduate of Universal, who presents a similarly eclectic menu-a global variety of dishes that are only linked by how good they are. We had silken scallops, green Thai curry, and falling-to-pieces pot roast with mashed potatoes and braised carrots. Dine’s kitchen is similar to Universal’s-based on simple ingredients, highly flavored and imaginatively culturally cross-dressed.

Visitors staying in San Francisco for longer than a weekend won’t want to spend all their time downtown. This has been called one of the country’s most beautiful cities, after all, and no one wants to miss the wonderful old “painted ladies,” the psy-chedelically colored and perfectly kept Victorian houses that line the steep streets. Nor can they skip the traditional pleasures of Golden Gate Park and its Japanese garden. Fisherman’s Wharf is still high on the tourist agenda and brunch at Cliff House (its popovers rival the Zodiac Room’s) and a walk through the bathhouse ruins to Lands End provide a historical foil to the cooler-than-now context of SoMa and the W.

A large part of San Francisco’s charm is its provincial heart. Dallas is a provincial city that wants to be New York, but San Francisco is a city that wants to be a small town. Even SoMa, though it’s the heart of hipness, still seems approachable, even laid-back. You can’t help relaxing in San Francisco.