Sara Deseran: The Food Critic Who Ran Seven Restaurants, And What She Learned About Media's Blind Spot

That trajectory, from senior editor at San Francisco Magazine to restaurateur and back to food writing at The San Francisco Standard, gives Sara a perspective almost no one in food media has. She's lived both sides. She knows exactly what critics miss.

The 2009 Lesson

Sara's restaurant education started during the recession, watching her now-ex-husband Joe Hargrave try to save his restaurant Laiola. Every restaurant was struggling. Burgers started appearing on fine dining menus, always a signal of desperation.

"The great thing about really troubled times is that creativity is spawned from it," Sara said. "When people stop worrying about success because success doesn't even seem like an option, you just do whatever you want to do."

That upside-down thinking led to a three-taco stand at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market. It became Tacolicious, the first restaurant to serve tacos family-style on platters as a sit-down dining experience. Before that, tacos meant taquerias and street food, not full-service restaurants.

For seven years, Sara ran the business side while learning every lesson food critics never see: how labor costs can kill you, how one delayed permit costs you months of rent with no revenue, how thirty different people and systems have to align perfectly just to serve dinner.

"You have thirty people running a restaurant," she said. "Inevitably someone's having a shitty day. Inevitably some ingredient forgot to be delivered. Inevitably the heater didn't work. There's always, always a fire being put out."

The Chronicle's Ranking Problem

When The Chronicle released its first Top 100 restaurants since Michael Bauer's era, Sara saw her old blind spot reflected back.

The list itself was promising, an eclectic mix that included taco trucks alongside fine dining, moving beyond the old guard's narrow definition of what restaurants "counted." But then they ranked it numerically. State Bird Provisions landed below Sandy's, a counter-service muffuletta spot.

"My brain just short-circuited," Sara wrote in her newsletter. "A counter service place makes one thing. They're not operating a restaurant with front of house staff trained, a wine list, ambiance, music, there's so much that goes into a full service restaurant. Why would you rank them?"

Brandon Jew from Mister Jius texted her before she published: "They don't understand the idea of a full restaurant."

The problem isn't that counter-service spots don't deserve recognition. It's that ranking systems create false equivalencies. They suggest a muffuletta stand and a Michelin-level operation are comparable, just different rankings on the same scale. They're not. They're entirely different business models with different complexity, different risk, different operational reality.

And once published, those rankings live forever. "Someone every day is gonna see that list," Sara said. "It will live on the internet for eternity."

The George's Donuts Decision

Sara's most controversial piece came after George's Donuts opened in San Francisco. Beautiful space, high-end concept, Serbian immigrant grandfather as the namesake. Then it surfaced: the owner's company had invested a million dollars in Trump's campaign.

The response was immediate. Cancel it. Boycott. Yelp filled with one-star reviews from people who'd never visited.

Sara's first instinct matched the crowd: "Yeah, fuck those donuts."

Then she sat with it.

"I use Instagram all the time. Meta is totally invested in Trump. I don't have a Tesla, but I could easily have one and probably wouldn't have thought twice about it. Pretty much every device I use, my computer, Amazon, they've all invested in Trump."

She went back. The line was still ninety minutes long. She interviewed people waiting, including an employee who said, "I really love working here."

In her newsletter, Sara doubled down: "If I'm posting about this place on my Instagram and simultaneously boycotting the donuts, it's low-hanging fruit. It's easy. If you really want to do something, you have to do much bigger things."

Readers canceled their Standard subscriptions. Her son told her she'd been "canceled online." But her editor John surprised her: "That's great. That just means people read it and paid attention."

What Media Gets Wrong About Restaurants

Sara's career spans the entire transformation of food media. When she started, Michael Bauer's Sunday print review in The Chronicle could make or break a restaurant. His stranglehold on San Francisco dining lasted thirty-two years.

Now? "Anyone and their mother can write anything at all times. The amount of information is astounding and simultaneously overwhelming."

At The Standard, Sara and colleague Lauren Saria write four to six stories per week between them, half the output Eater once demanded from Lauren alone. The tradeoff is depth. They call sources. They visit in person. They spend time on the ground.

But even Sara feels the pressure. "I tried to reread Love in the Time of Cholera and I couldn't. I think my brain has shrunk along with everyone else's."

The real shift isn't just volume. It's that traditional media lost its monopoly on narrative. Restaurants can now tell their own stories through social media, bypassing critics entirely. But that also means the signal-to-noise ratio is impossible.

"You really have to pick a person who you trust," Sara said.

The Two Parties Feeding Each Other

Sara's most vivid restaurant memory isn't about a review or a ranking.

At Tacolicious, she'd walk through the dining room, margaritas, dim lighting, laughter, celebration. Then through the kitchen door into fluorescent brightness. Banda music cranking. Everyone speaking Spanish. Big cauldrons of guisado braising. Chilies roasting, smoke everywhere, eyes watering.

"Two completely different parties, feeding each other," she said. "That's what makes a restaurant so dynamic and exciting."

That image captures what critics miss when they write about restaurants from the outside. They see the front-of-house performance. They taste the final product. But they don't see the thirty people coordinating in two languages across two completely different environments to make that one perfect meal happen.

They don't see the dishwasher who didn't show up, the supplier who sent the wrong order, the grease trap that needs servicing mid-shift, the guest who left a scathing review because their server was new and nervous.

"Most of the time, people are doing their best," Sara said. "You can go into a restaurant and have a shitty experience, but God knows there's so many elements going on. It's really the only industry where critics go in, make a decision, and write something about a place that will inevitably be very different next time. Versus a book, versus a movie, these things are stagnant. A restaurant changes every single hour."

What Opening a Restaurant Really Means

Ask Sara what she wishes diners understood, and her answer is immediate: "If someone opens a restaurant, particularly in a red-tape-crazy city like San Francisco, and it closes the next day, they still should be given an award. It is so hard to even get that far."

She means it. The permit process alone in San Francisco can take months or years. The capital required is staggering. The health inspections, the liquor licensing, the ADA compliance, the fire code, the neighbor complaints, all before you've served a single dish.

Then the actual operation: food costs, labor costs, rent, insurance, marketing, utilities, equipment maintenance, constant inspections, ever-changing regulations.

"No one wants to equate money with hospitality because money is considered vulgar and hospitality is supposed to be all gloss and loveliness," Sara said. "But they have to work in synergy. At the end of the day, it's a business."

Most people see a closed restaurant and think "failure." Sara sees someone who fought through impossible complexity and served their community, even briefly. That deserves recognition, not judgment.

The Gray Zone

What makes Sara valuable in food media right now is her willingness to live in the gray zone.

She can critique The Chronicle's ranking system while respecting the writers. She can challenge San Francisco's cancel culture while holding progressive values. She can write honestly about restaurants while understanding how hard operators work.

"I live in the gray zone," she said. "I'm very interested in nuance. I don't like this black and white idea of anything."

That perspective is increasingly rare. Social media rewards extremes, hot takes, definitive judgments, binary thinking. Nuance doesn't generate clicks.

But hospitality itself exists in the gray zone. It's about connection, which requires curiosity about other people's experiences. It's about consistency while adapting to constant change. It's about passion that has to coexist with brutal financial reality.

Sara's career, from critic to operator and back, proves that understanding both sides doesn't mean softening your perspective. It means sharpening it. Writing with empathy for how hard it is, while still holding restaurants accountable for what they put out into the world.

That's the voice hospitality needs more of right now.

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Listen to the full conversation with Sara Deseran on Hot Gossip: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1iYtsrCvHTBRmvbVlRCQsr?si=a5bf3dfb5ce84ec7

Follow Sara's work: @saradeseran_food on Instagram and sfstandard.com

Hot Gossip is hosted by Hannah Collins Tate and Jacob Cross: https://www.thisisroy.com/podcast

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