SAN FRANCISCO —

Tom Medin is the ultimate foodie. Trained as a chef and a marine naturalist, he leads tours of this California city by focusing not on the well-known attractions — the bridges, the cable cars, the tourist centers — but on neighborhood life. He knows that just as the heart of every home is its kitchen, so is the hub of every neighborhood its food purveyors and coffee shops.

Through his company, Local Tastes of the City Tours, Medin takes small groups of visitors to North Beach, also known as Little Italy, and to Chinatown. He walks them through old-time coffee shops with roasting machines at their core; family-owned bakeries where flour, water and yeast are still kneaded by hand; Italian import delicatessens whose meats are smoked in-house and whose olive oils are offered for tasting much like wine.

“When you shop in the neighborhoods,” said Medin, “you can be sure the food is simple, fresh and sustainably produced. They’ve done it this way for more than 100 years, without chemicals or additives, and I wouldn’t buy my food anywhere else.”

With an estimated 3,300 restaurants in this city of 744,000 — the highest rate per capita of any city in the world, according to the city’s convention and visitor bureau — San Francisco is considered by many to be the culinary capital of North America. A large number of its restaurateurs — perhaps a majority, although there’s no way to know for certain — buy from the mom-and-pop store down the street, or directly from specialty producers, rather than corporate entities. That’s one of the things that makes dining in this city so extraordinary.

Fisherman’s Wharf

On a three-day weekend visit to the City by the Bay, I began my culinary exploration at Fisherman’s Wharf. More than 100 years ago, early-morning fishermen would grab steaming bowls of clam and fish chowder from sidewalk stands before rushing off to sell the day’s catch. In 1916, entrepreneur Tomaso Castagnola began offering crab cocktails to tourists who came down to see the Italian community’s lively fishing fleet.

His success led other families to set up their own steaming pots along the wharf, where they sold freshly cooked Dungeness crab. Large-scale restaurants, including Castagnola’s own, began popping up in the 1930s. But the sidewalk stands persisted, and today the row of vendors at Taylor and Jefferson streets is as popular as ever, ladling creamy chowder into hollowed-out loaves of sourdough bread, baked nearby at the Boudin Bakery, and serving a fresh variety of other seafood.

Steps away from the vendors, the fishing fleet remains active and colorful. Once numbering more than 450 boats, its numbers are down to a few dozen, but the industry is still dominated by the descendants of Italian immigrants, primarily Sicilians, who settled here in the late 19th century. Visitors can still see fishermen kneeling to mend their nets after unloading their early-morning catches; even today, more than 20 million pounds of seafood come in to this port each year.

Ferry Building

Some of the seafood finds its way down the Embarcadero — the waterfront promenade that follows the bay shore three miles east and south from Fisherman’s Wharf to China Basin — to the landmark Ferry Building at the east end of Market Street.

Built in 1898 and a strong survivor of the devastating 1906 earthquake, the Ferry Building was once the primary transportation hub for all travelers to the city. Up to 50 million people passed through it each year: commuters from the East Bay and Marin County, as well as transcontinental travelers disembarking from the railroad terminus in Oakland. But after the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges were completed in the late 1930s, ferry traffic fell to almost nothing, and the building was converted to government and private offices.

In 2003, the Ferry Building was reinvented. Two city blocks long, it now is the finest food market in the San Francisco Bay Area. A score of specialty shops line up on opposite sides of a central walkway beneath a Victorian skylight, offering everything from cheese, bread and wine to mushrooms, oysters and farm-raised California caviar.

Surrounding it is a farmers’ market held every Tuesday and Saturday, year-round, rain or shine. Several restaurants, including the Point Reyes-based Hog Island Oyster Co. (a regular visitor to Bend’s annual Sagebrush Classic) and The Slanted Door, a marvelous Vietnamese-Asian fusion restaurant which relocated from the Mission District, are also located in the Ferry Building. And commuters still come and go to Marin County from the small ferry dock.

Lisa Rogovin, who describes herself as an “epicurean concierge,” conducts four-hour tours of the Ferry Building (with lunch) on the mornings of the farmers’ markets. Her company, In the Kitchen with Lisa, takes tourists through an olive-oil tasting, a tea seminar, visits to chocolate and cheese producers, then to a gourmet meal at a nearby restaurant with paired wines.

My schedule didn’t allow me to take Lisa’s tour, but I joined the former Gourmet magazine correspondent to meet a handful of shopkeepers. Her knowledge and enthusiasm convinced me that she is a great hostess; I will explore with her on a future occasion.

Chinatown

I had to rush off because Shirley Fong-Torres was expecting me. Shirley (her brother, Ben Fong-Torres, was a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine) has been conducting tours of Chinatown for more than 20 years. Wok Wiz Chinatown Tours are now more often led by others, but the effervescent Fong-Torres herself offered to take me and a small group of others through the warren of narrow lanes and back alleys that only a local would know.

We started at Portsmouth Square, where the American flag was first raised above the city (then known as Yerba Buena) in 1846, and proceeded to the Red Blossom Tea Company. Peter Luong, whose parents founded the company decades ago, earned a political science degree but returned to the family business four years ago. Dealing more than 100 bulk teas at any one time, he knows tea.

“We tell customers what to look for in a quality tea,” Luong said. “Each is as unique as wine, depending upon their region, style, soil type, harvest time, even the different traditions of tea making.” As he described the difference between green, black and oolong teas, he prepared a pot of oolong for tasting. “It’s essential to keep the brewing temperature between 190 and 195 degrees,” he said. “The problem with English teas, the reason people add milk and sugar, is that they have been overcooked.”

Our tour took us past the pagoda-like Bank of Canton, the four-story painted balconies of Waverly Place, into an herbalist’s shop and a colorful Chinese temple. We looked into shops where plucked chickens hung by their necks and strange fruits and vegetables were piled in bins. Eventually, we wound up at the Imperial Palace Restaurant in time for a dim sum lunch.

Dim sum, for the uninitiated, are tasty steamed dumplings most often stuffed with shrimp, pork and vegetables. They are bite-sized and best eaten with chopsticks, of which no self-respecting San Francisco foodie, regardless of ethnicity, would feign ignorance. A fork? What’s that? Fortunately, Fong-Torres helps her tourists out by describing how to hold chopsticks and urging them to practice.

Upon leaving the restaurant, we wandered back down little Ross Alley and bumped into a movie star. Jun Yu, a barber by trade, was sitting on a folding chair outside his tiny shop, playing the erhu, an ancient two-stringed musical instrument. What does a Chinese barber play? Try “Jingle Bells.” Jun Yu had a small part playing erhu in the 2006 Will Smith movie, “The Pursuit of Happyness,” and he is happy to show his press clippings to anyone interested.

North Beach

As Soho is to Chinatown in Lower Manhattan, so is North Beach to San Francisco’s China- town. They bump right up against one another, somewhere in the vicinity of Columbus Avenue and Broadway; you’re not really sure where one neighborhood starts and another ends, but suddenly you realize the signs on buildings are no longer written in Chinese script. Instead, they look more like those of Rome. And instead of small temples on narrow alleys, there’s a huge cathedral facing a plaza.

The erstwhile heart of San Francisco’s Italian community, North Beach is known to many as the bohemian heart of the city, where the beat generation of the ’50s and early ’60s was at home in places like the City Lights Bookstore, Caffe Trieste and the Vesuvio Café, at the corner of Jack Kerouac Alley. But the flavors and aromas of the neighborhood’s Italian roots still waft from trattorias and delicatessens for many blocks of Columbus Avenue and its cross streets.

Tom Medin’s community tour began at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Café, where the price of a cup of coffee will buy you a table to pass the day with a book or a laptop. At Caffe Roma, our host described the coffee-roasting process, emphasizing the importance of water in the process. At XOX Truffles, owner-chocolatier Jean-Marc Gorce described his painstaking technique of producing some of the finest confections in the city.

At the Italian French Baking Co., we explored the brick ovens and talked with bakers who still do everything by hand, preparing their sourdough breads with wild yeast, and finishing them in brick ovens built in the 19th century and not changed since. At the Palmero Delicatessen, we tasted house-smoked salamis and sampled unfiltered and cold-pressed olive oils.

Medin is a vocal supporter of the “slow food” movement. “Slow Food is an nonprofit, eco-gastronomic organization founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and the fast life,” he said. “We feel it’s important to know where the food we eat comes from, how it tastes, and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” His tour bears out his passion.

Belden Place

One of my favorite culinary corners in San Francisco is Belden Place. It’s a narrow, one-block alley in the Financial District, just east of Kearny Street between Pine and Bush streets, that you won’t find on many tourist maps. But it’s worth a visit, especially around mealtime.

Belden Place is lined with authentic European restaurants: Spanish, French, Italian, even a Russian-style vodka bar. Lunch and dinner, year-round, the cafes take up residence in the street itself, putting up tables and chairs, umbrellas and (when necessary) heat lamps, as young hostesses with strong accents encourage pedestrians to dine at their particular establishment. Like so many nooks in this unique city, it feels like another world.

I had a dinner at Brindisi Cucina di Mare, an Italian seafood restaurant. I started with a prawn salad, followed with a spicy-octopus pasta dish, and washed it down with a crisp glass of pinot grigio. Each time I visit, I explore a new taste, as at neighboring B44, which specializes in the Catalan cuisine of Barcelona, or Café Bastille, a French bistro.

I split my stay between two hotels, both conveniently located between Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach. On the night of my arrival, I lodged at the Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf. This modern and sprawling hotel has all the amenities of a big convention hotel but without the frenzy of a business-district property.

It was a great spot, but I stretched my dollar by moving to the modest, European-style San Remo Hotel, just a few blocks southeast. Built during the city’s revitalization following the 1906 quake, the family-owned inn has 62 cozy rooms without phones or televisions. And as with any good continental pension, the bathrooms are down the hall.

Best of all, perhaps, the Fior d’Italia restaurant is on its ground floor. Opened in North Beach in 1886, it claims to be the oldest Italian restaurant in America. With that pedigree, it’s hard to go wrong.

Visiting gourmet San Francisco

• Air fare, Redmond-San Francisco round trip $294.20

• Super Shuttle to/from downtown $30

• Dinner, Fog Harbor Fish House $42.95

• Lodging (1 night), Hyatt-Fisherman’s Wharf $210.90*

• Breakfast, Peet’s Coffee at Boudin Bakery $4.50

• Taxis $43

• Lunch, John’s Grill $32.17

• Local Tastes of the City tour of North Beach $59

• Dinner, Brindisi Cucina di Mare $50.01

• Lodging (2 nights), San Remo Hotel $159.60*

• Breakfast, Blue Bottle Coffee at Ferry Building $3.90

• Wok Wiz Chinatown tour (with lunch) $40

• Dinner, The Slanted Door $67.50

• Breakfast, Caffe Roma $3.50

• Lunch, Caffe DeLucchi $17.69

• Redmond airport parking $24

TOTAL $1,082.92

*includes 14% lodging tax

(all addresses are in San Francisco)

• San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau: 201 Third St., Suite 900; 415-227-2603; www .onlyinsanfrancisco.com

• Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf: 555 North Point St.; 415-563-1234, www.hyatt .com. Rates from $185.

• San Remo Hotel: 2237 Mason St.; 415-776-8688, www.sanremohotel.com. Rates from $70.

• Bistro Boudin: 160 Jefferson St.; 415-928-1849, www.bistroboudin.com

• Brindisi Cucina di Mare: 88 Belden Place; 415-598-8000, www.brindisicucina .com

• Caffe DeLucchi: 500 Columbia Ave.; 415-393-4515

• Caffe Roma: 526 Columbus Ave.; 415-296-7942

• Caffe Trieste: 601 Vallejo St.; 415-392-6739, www .caffetrieste.com

• Calzone’s: 430 Columbus Ave.; 415-397-3600, www .calzonesf.com

• Fog Harbor Fish House: Pier 39, Beach Street and The Embarcadero; 415-421-2442, www.fogharbor.com

• Imperial Palace Restaurant: 818 Washington St.; 415-956-9888

• John’s Grill: 63 Ellis St.; 415-986-0069, www .johnsgrill.com

• Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Café: 566 Columbia Ave.; 415-362-0536

• The Slanted Door: Ferry Building, 1 Embarcadero; 415-861-8032, www .slanteddoor.com

• In the Kitchen with Lisa: 415-806-5970, www .inthekitchenwithlisa.com

• Local Tastes of the City Tours: 415-665-0480, www .sffoodtour.com

• Wok Wiz Chinatown Tours: 415-981-8989, www.wokwiz .com

• Ferry Building: 1 Embarcadero; 415-693-0996, www.ferrybuilding marketplace.com.

• Italian French Baking Co.: 1501 Grant Ave.; 415-421-3796

• Palermo Delicatessen: 1556 Stockton St.; 415-362-9892

• Red Blossom Tea Company: 831 Grant Ave.; 415-395-0868, www .redblossomtea.com

• Victoria Pastry Co.: 1362 Stockton St.; 415-461-3099, www.victoriapastry.com

• XOX Truffles: 754 Columbus Ave.; 415-421-4814, www.xoxtruffles.com

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