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.