Range

Our verdict

For roughly a decade, 842 Valencia Street served as evidence that the Mission District could sustain genuinely ambitious cooking. Range, the California/New American restaurant run by Phil and Cameron West, earned a Michelin star in 2007 and held it through 2010, a run that placed it among a small cohort of San Francisco restaurants making the case for the neighbourhood as a fine-dining address at a time when that argument was still being made. The menu stayed compact and California-focused, with dishes built around seasonal American ingredients rather than the kind of maximalist tasting-menu theatre common at comparable price points elsewhere in the city. Review accounts from the period single out the pork and halibut preparations as representative of the kitchen's approach: direct, technically considered, without unnecessary elaboration. Entrees ran in the high teens to low twenties, which positioned Range as accessible relative to its Michelin-starred peers, and the San Francisco Chronicle included it in its Top 100 as recently as 2016. The West family attributed the eventual closure to shifting demographics along Valencia Street and intensifying competition in a corridor that Range had helped establish as a dining destination. That arc, a restaurant pioneering a neighbourhood only to be priced and crowded out of it, became a familiar Mission District story in the mid-2010s. The space was subsequently taken over by a bar called The Beehive. Range is now closed. Readers researching the Mission District's current dining scene should treat this entry as historical record rather than an active recommendation.