Your Weekend Starts at the Portal: Forest Hill's Quiet Reinvention

If you have lived in Forest Hill for more than a couple of years, you already know the drill. You walk down Pacheco or Castenada, catch the K, L, or M at the station, and the neighborhood ends at the tunnel mouth. What you may not have clocked is that the block right outside that tunnel has changed more in the last eighteen months than in the previous eighteen years. The reason to notice is selfish. Your Saturday morning got shorter, your dinner reservations got harder to score, and the trail you keep meaning to walk starts across the street from the turnstiles.

The block outside the station is a different block

The surge offers clues about why some SF neighborhoods take off while others languish. On West Portal Avenue, the churn is easy to name. In just the last few months, West Portal has welcomed buzzy Elena's Mexican Restaurant, the first brick-and-mortar from popular Thai pop-up Khao Tiew, and Binu Bonu, a little Italian wine bar and shop from the original owners of Noe Valley Sardinian restaurant La Ciccia. Most recently, George's Donuts & Merriment is drawing crowd to its stylish cafe for celebratory sweet-and-savory treats.

That was the January picture. Since then the block kept going. At the beginning of May, two notable restaurants opened within about a week of one another: Tur, a brunch spot from the duo behind Khao Tiew, and Hardware Coffee Co., a bilevel florist-cum-café brewing beans from Grand Coffee.

Tur is the one worth planning around if you have not been. On May 13, Dusitnitsakul and chef Wipada Rattanapun opened their second restaurant, Tur, in the two-story, blue-and-white corner location, which housed Squat & Gobble for 32 years. Unlike the dinner-only Khao Tiew, Tur is all about breakfast and lunch; the menu is inspired by the dishes Dusitnitsakul and Rattanapun craved in the morning when they were kids in Thailand. If you have been sending guests to the Mission for weekend brunch, the trip is now three Muni stops.

A Saturday that only works if you live here

The point of listing all this is not the roll call. It is that the geography stitches together in a way no other SF neighborhood offers right now. Try this on a Saturday and see:

1. Walk down to Tur at 1 West Portal Ave. for the passion-fruit sticky rice French toast. Get there before the line, which now behaves like a Mission line.
2. Cross to Hardware Coffee Co. for a second cup on the mezzanine.
3. Cut back toward the station and take the Laguna Honda Trailhead, which is directly across from Forest Hill Muni.
4. Loop the Victory Trail up to Steep Ravine, watch Sutro Tower appear over the ridge, drop down through the Troop 88 Trail toward Panorama.
5. Come back down through the Pacheco stairway and be home in under three hours.

Nobody in Noe Valley or the Marina can do that on foot. That is the argument.

The trails across from the turnstile

Most Forest Hill residents pass the Laguna Honda Trailhead kiosk a thousand times before they walk it. Consider hiking through Laguna Honda Hospital Community Trails, a network of approximately 2 miles of trails located on the campus of Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. This long-term acute care facility, established in 1866, houses 780 beds on a 62-acre campus. It's also right across the street from the Forest Hill Muni Station. On Google Maps, the entrance is listed as Laguna Honda Trailhead kiosk. Start at the arched entrance and take the stairs up, then veer left onto Victory Trail.

What you get for the fifteen-minute climb: The trail continues up a hill and intersects with the Steep Ravine Trail, which also leads out to Clarendon Avenue, serving as an alternative entrance. The Steep Ravine Trail is where it gets very forested. The foliage is dense and thick with ivy engulfing most of the trees. One might feel as if walking in a different city, not in the middle of a sprawling metropolis like San Francisco. This section is very quiet and serene, with only the sounds of birds breaking the silence. The path meanders through thick vegetation for about half a mile with views of Sutro Tower in the near distance.

If you have the appetite to keep going, the Laguna Honda system connects to Mount Sutro. Mount Sutro rises to 908 feet in more or less the center of the city, right next to the more famous Twin Peaks, and directly behind the campus of the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). All of the trails on Mount Sutro could probably be covered in two hours, and for the most part, the trails are well-maintained (thanks to volunteers with Sutro Stewards) and not strenuous. A note if you have a dog: the Mount Sutro Loop is Dogs on leash · Kid-friendly · Forests · Views · Hiking · Mountain biking friendly, and the eucalyptus canopy keeps it cool on the summer afternoons when Ocean Beach is fogged in and Bernal Hill is baking.

Trail conditions do shift. Part of this route along the North Ridge Trail is temporarily inaccessible, but you can still enjoy other sections of this trail. For more information, please visit https://www.ucsf.edu/about/locations/mount-sutro-open-space-reserve Worth checking before you head up, particularly after wet weather.

The stairway route home

The stairways in Forest Hill are the neighborhood's defining architecture and its most underused amenity. The Grand Pacheco Stairway, technically the Forest Hill Grand Stairway, is the piece of civic infrastructure Airbnb tourists come to photograph while you are on your way to Falletti's.

Here is what it actually is. By far the grandest of all stairways in San Francisco, serving as a grand entrance into Forest Hill from Dewey Boulevard. The stairs sit behind a well-manicured lawn with a large planter urn at the center in the space between Magellan Avenue and where Pacheco Street and Dorantes Avenue join together. This layout is mirrored on the other side of Dewey Boulevard with a much flatter stairway. It was built in 1912 or 1913, when Forest Hill was first being developed. This is among the widest stairways in the city, with 15 foot wide steps. At the bottom, the steps are in a semi-circle with built-in benches on either side.

The stairs matter to the design story of the whole neighborhood. Architect David Coleman designed the first completed home in Forest Hill at 266 Pacheco Street. The stairway itself is Mark Daniels' work, the same landscape architect who planned Bel Air.

For a stair workout that starts and ends at your door, the loop from Forest Hill Station to West Portal is compact and legible: Forest Hill to West Portal stairs 114 Muni Metro station 135 Pacheco 307 Castenada to Mendosa 556 total stairs 1.4 miles 400 stairs per mile 400 feet elevation gain, 286 feet per mile. If you want more, the extension out to Golden Gate Heights adds Oriole, Quintara, and Mandalay for a total of 840 stairs over 2.1 miles.

The old guard is still the old guard

None of this displaces what you already go to. Although the newcomers have taken over a few West Portal classics (RIP Portals Tavern), the hood's old-school haunts—-including dive bar Philosopher's Club and the nearly century-old Shaw's candy and ice cream shop—are still going strong enough to balance out the new blood. The Philosopher's Club (824 Ulloa St.) has been a neighborhood fixture since the end of Prohibition. An eclectic dive with a protected back patio, it's an ideal spot to catch a game, grab a beer, or hoover up cocktails late night.

If you are hosting out-of-town family and need something between dive and destination, The tasty Eastern Mediterranean and Turkish food served inside the deep blue jewel box of Bursa (60 West Portal Ave.) is a local favorite with warm, friendly service. The Sherwood (179 West Portal Ave.) is a casually elegant spot for seasonal cocktails in front of a cozy fireplace.

What this actually means for the block

Look at what happens on West Portal now on a Friday night. Reservations are stacked, sidewalk tables spill toward the Muni tracks, and the Khao Tiew team was so specific about staying on West Portal that the space at 1 West Portal Ave. was not available. At least, not to just anyone. The real estate agent was told it was on the market only for the owners of Khao Tiew, the Thai restaurant just around the corner, should they call. "This is luck," says Khao Tiew co-owner Arkaranit Dusitnitsakul, who did, in fact, call.

That is a landlord signaling, in a concrete way, which operators they want on this stretch. Forest Hill residents have quietly been the beneficiaries. The neighborhood was already built for people who valued a country-in-the-city feel, wide setbacks, and mature trees. It now has a Main Street to match.

If you have been in your house for more than five years, this is a good weekend to walk the block you think you know. Start at Tur. End at the Pacheco benches with a Shaw's cone. See what the neighborhood has become while you were commuting through it.

When it is time to think about what your Forest Hill home is worth in this newer, busier version of the neighborhood, Minna Real Estate is here to walk the block with you. Get My Free Home Valuation and let's talk about what the last eighteen months have done to values on your street.