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I ate at San Francisco's most popular breakfast spot. It was overrated, save for the lemon ricotta pancakes.

A recent report by data analytics firm Stacker ranked San Francisco's Plow restaurant as California's most popular breakfast spot.

plow san francisco best breakfast restaurant 8
  • Plow has been in the city's Potrero Hill neighborhood for nine years and is famous for its long wait lines, as are many brunch spots.
  • I ate at Plow on a Saturday morning and found it to be overhyped.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

Perhaps one of the most enduring trends of modern-day America is the weekend institution that is brunch.

The definition of brunch, according to Merriam-Webster , is: A meal usually taken late in the morning that combines a late breakfast and an early lunch. What we, as a society, have translated that into is an excuse to shell out at least $20 for mediocre eggs and bottomless mimosas at 11:30 in the morning.

While the brunch concept is pervasive in the US, the first meal of the day can look very different across the country. Data-analytics platform Stacker sourced data from Foursquare to find the most popular breakfast spot in each US state. Foursquare ranks the most popular restaurants based on customer check-ins, ratings, category matches, tips, and photo trends. So, based on that criterion, California's most popular breakfast restaurant is in San Francisco.

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Plow has been around for nine years, a waitress told me when I visited recently. It's located in the city's Potrero Hill neighborhood, a part of town known for its sunny, family-oriented atmosphere and suburban-like feel.

The city has no shortage of brunch destinations that have brunch-goers waiting an hour or two to enter, and Plow is one of them. It's been visited by U2's Bono and NBA superstar Andre Iguodala, according to the restaurant's Instagram account. The eatery has 2,589 reviews on review site Yelp, some positive, some negative, and some mixed.

One review reads "This is your classic hype (a bit over hyped) American brunch restaurant, prepare to wait in line!" Another review from January 19 declares her Plow experience was "an ordinary breakfast for an extraordinary wait."

That's basically Plow in a nutshell.

I awoke at 8 am on a Saturday morning to trek across the city by Uber to beat the bulk of the Saturday brunch crowd and give Plow a try for myself. Here's what happened.

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And the management did not waste any space the tables are wedged so closely together. I got up twice to go to the bathroom and couldn't help but bump into our neighbor's table in the process.

But that's a common feat in San Francisco across the board, from restaurants to offices to housing. We're all living on top of each other.

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High living costs are felt by everyone, including restaurant owners. Rising food costs have forced restauranteurs to price food higher than usual in the past couple of decades, as The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2016. Those costs are going to be even higher if a restaurant sources locally which, according to the Plow menu, the restaurant does. And although an increase in labor wages is a good feat, they, too, also result in increased restaurant menu prices.

Other factors include increases in city and state permit costs, garbage costs, and linen prices, according to the Chronicle.

So our meal may have seemed annoyingly expensive, and maybe it was, but that's not the restaurant's fault necessarily more than it is anyone else's.

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So far we had gotten lucky. Yelp reviews recount horror stories of two-plus hour wait times before waiting another 45 minutes while seated before food is served. We, fortunately, didn't have to deal with that.

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See Also:

SEE ALSO: I moved from the Texas suburbs to the biggest tech hub in America. Here are the 11 things that surprised me most.

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