Good Taste tells you where to stick your fork in the Bay — and, this week only, maybe where to avoid?
I just realized it’s been 10 years since I’ve eaten at McDonald’s, and what it was exactly that sent me scurrying away forever.
Beyond knowing about the many health and ethical reasons not to eat there, and being a viewer of the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, what actually did it for me was a limited regional special: Gilroy garlic fries. I have a memory of my friend Cherie and I basically rushing down to the McDonald’s on Serramonte in Daly City to try them, and how quickly we were not only disappointed, but grossed out at how soggy and acrid they were.
The local impact of McDonald’s was a brief news beat for me around that time. I wrote some freelance stories about embattled Bay Area McDonald’s locations for NBC Bay Area in 2015 and 2016, including when City Attorney Dennis Herrera declared the Stanyan Street location a public nuisance.
Herrera wrote in his letter to the McDonald’s CEO that the SFPD received over 1,100 complaints about the location between January 2012 and May 2015, and that there were 32 documented fights, assaults, or batteries; eight car break-ins, and two dog attacks.
After reading how many—or, in retrospect, how few?—drugs were “recovered” from the parking lot. I made up a jingle and posted it on my own social media:
“Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, 100 doses of LSD, two pounds of cannabis, heaven knows how much ‘hashish,’ and 88.5 grams of psilocybin on a sesame seed bun.”
In January 2015, McDonald’s closed its Van Ness location after 36 years. The Mission and 16th Street location followed in June, shuttering after problems at the nearby Mission and 24th Street store, which is still around, if this is giving you a perverse craving.
McDonald’s closed 154 locations in the US that year, but that San Francisco store remained open until 2018. The City bought the property for $15.5 million and built affordable housing on the site, alongside community groups. The intersection of Haight and Stanyan looks totally different now.
The pandemic basically killed the Fisherman’s Wharf McD’s in 2022 and the Financial District store in 2023. The Stonestown Mall location went down in 2024. And employees of the Jackson Street store in downtown Oakland that went viral for a rat infestation went on strike when they received only 10 days notice that the store would permanently close on November 30, 2025.
I’m still brainwashed about the Golden Arches in some childhood flavor ways, for sure. I can taste the Eighties-fried McDonald’s apple pie in my mind whenever I want to, and I’m always chasing the Filet-O-Fish vibe in the flesh at all the twee seafood places I love in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles (that I’ve allowed to charge me astronomical prices for fried fish and American cheese on a bun, sesame seeds or not).
I probably wouldn’t mind if someone slipped me an unmarked McD shake or sundae and didn’t tell me where it came from—now that I know I can go so long without them.
