Frommer's San Francisco 2012 - Matthew Poole [132]
There is often live entertainment on summer weekends and during spring’s cherry blossom festival, including Japanese music and dance performances, tea ceremonies, flower-arranging demonstrations, martial-arts presentations, and other cultural events. The Japan Center ( 415/922-7765) is open daily from 10am to midnight, although most shops close much earlier. To get there, take bus no. 2, 3, or 4 (exit at Buchanan and Sutter sts.) or no. 22 or 38 (exit at the northeast corner of Geary Blvd. and Fillmore St.).
The Sokoji–Soto Zen Buddhist Temple.
Haight-Ashbury
Few of San Francisco’s neighborhoods are as varied—or as famous—as Haight-Ashbury. Walk along Haight Street, and you’ll encounter everything from drug-dazed drifters begging for change to an armada of the city’s funky-trendy shops, clubs, and cafes. Turn anywhere off Haight, and instantly you’re among the clean-cut, young urban professionals who can afford the steep rents in this hip ’hood. The result is an interesting mix of well-to-do and well-screw-you aging flower children, former Dead-heads, homeless people, and throngs of tourists who try not to stare as they wander through this most human of zoos. Some find it depressing, others find it fascinating, but everyone agrees that it ain’t what it was in the free-lovin’ psychedelic Summer of Love. Is it still worth a visit? Not if you are here for a day or two, but it’s certainly worth an excursion on longer trips, if only to enjoy a cone of Cherry Garcia at the now-famous Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Store on the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, and then to wander and gawk at the area’s intentional freaks.
Urban Renewal
• Kabuki Springs & Spa, 1750 Geary Blvd. ( 415/922-6000; www.kabukisprings.com), the Japan Center’s most famous tenant, was once an authentic, traditional Japanese bathhouse. The Joie de Vivre hotel group bought and renovated it, however, and it’s now more of a Pan-Asian spa with a focus on wellness. The deep ceramic communal tubs—at a very affordable $22 to $25 per person—private baths, and shiatsu massages remain. The spa is open from 10am to 9:45pm daily; joining the baths is an array of massages and ayurvedic treatments, body scrubs, wraps, and facials, which cost from $60 to $150.
• Spa Radiance, 3011 Fillmore St. ( 415/346-6281; www.sparadiance.com), is an utterly San Francisco spa experience due to its unassuming Victorian surroundings and its wonderfully luxurious treatments such as facials, body treatments, massages, manicures, pedicures, Brazilian waxing, spray-tanning, and makeup application by in-house artists.
• A more posh and modern experience is yours at International Orange, 2044 Fillmore St., second floor ( 888/894-8811; www.internationalorange.com). The self-described spa yoga lounge offers just what it says in a chic white-on-white space on the boutique-shopping stretch of Fillmore Street. They’ve also got a great selection of clothing and face and body products, including one of my personal favorites, locally made In Fiore body balms.
• In the St. Regis Hotel, Remède Spa, 125 Third St. ( 415/284-4060; www.remede.com), has two whole floors dedicated to melting away all your cares, worries, kinks, and knots—not to mention primping. Expect wonderful massage, facials, manis and pedis, waxes, and more. A few doors down in the W Hotel is the city’s outpost of New York’s Bliss Spa, 181 Third St., fourth floor ( 415/281-0990; www.blissworld.com). The hip version to St. Regis’s chic, it offers a similar spa menu, including wedding specialties.
Kabuki Springs.
• Opened in 2003, Tru, 750 Kearny St. ( 415/399-9700; www.truspa.com), is a sleek, modern-day spa with options that go way beyond your average hot stone massage. Signature