Best Restaurants for Outdoor Dining in Civic Center / Hayes Valley / Van Ness

Our favorite restaurant in San Francisco. Whenever we’re in town we come multiple times. We ALWAYS leave happier than when we came. The food (try the pork chop, if it’s on the menu, with a glass of Pinot noir), service and vibe are consistently rave worthy. NOPA is the very definition of what a restaurant should be and is - gracious hospitality and delicious food in a wonderful setting. We’ll be back! Thank you.

We loved the experience! We went with 4 people, everyone was very happy with their food as it was all interesting, creative and delicious! Service was spot on, great ambience though pretty noisy. It's not cheap, we spent 100 dollars per person including the tip for a shared appetizer, an entree and one drink (no dessert ). It was well worth it and we'll surely come back.

A wonderful meal! The only thing that isn’t great at Waterbar is their choice of music which does NOT fit the dining experience at all!!

The Habourview beef with lemon and the shrimp toasts are excellent. Very unusual.

The food quality at Octavia is very high. The chefs really know what they’re doing. We had a pre-fixe menu for Christmas Eve dinner and they accommodated dietary restrictions with advanced notice. They actually called a few days in advance of the reservation to confirm the dietary restrictions which was really nice. We had 9 courses I think and they were all delicious. My favorites were the soup and the pasta dishes. The service was also very good, the servers were very attending and accommodating. There was one dish I didn’t eat much of because it had radicchio in it which I don’t like, and our server offered to have the kitchen make me a replacement dish with a different lettuce instead. The only negative of Octavia is that it feels very cramped. The space is small and they squeeze in a lot of tables so you’re sitting basically on top of other diners and it’s a little awkward. Everything else was great though. I would definitely recommend Octavia as a good place for special occasions or bringing out of town visitors.