North Beach, San Francisco · restaurant
The wedge-shaped Sentinel Building at Columbus and Kearny has harbored speakeasies, recording studios, and the Grateful Dead — and since 1999, Francis Ford Coppola's Italian café has occupied the ground floor, pouring his family's wines alongside a menu he largely developed himself. The caesar salad, made daily with fresh egg yolk, is a deliberate nod to Caesar's Grill, the restaurant that stood here in the 1920s and allegedly invented it.