Katie Canales/Business Insider
"The Plow" breakfast platter at San Francisco's Plow restaurant.
- A recent report by data analytics firm Stacker ranked San Francisco's Plow restaurant as California's most popular breakfast spot.
- 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.
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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.
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 are positive - a February 3 review calls Plow a "delicious brunch in San Francisco!"
Others are mixed or negative, with almost every one noting the long wait time. 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.