Where should I eat in San Francisco, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Cioppino is the one to sit down for. Italian immigrant fishermen working out of North Beach built it in the late 19th century from the day's catch — Dungeness crab, clams, shrimp, squid, mussels and white fish in a tomato-and-wine broth — and its name comes from ciuppin, the Ligurian word for a fish stew. It is a dish designed around whatever the boats brought in, which is why no two kitchens make it identically.

Sourdough is the city's bread with a documented bloodline. Isidore Boudin began baking with wild yeast in 1849, and Boudin Bakery still works from a portion of that original starter — the "mother dough" — at its Fisherman's Wharf flagship, where the chowder-filled bread bowl is the house signature. The tang is local chemistry: the wild bacteria of the Bay Area starter give the loaf a sourness that starters raised elsewhere do not hold. Two other 19th-century names anchor a food walk: Tadich Grill, serving since 1849 and California's oldest restaurant, and Ghirardelli, founded by Domingo Ghirardelli in 1852.

The drink is an import the city adopted outright. In 1952 the Buena Vista Café's owner Jack Koeppler and travel writer Stanton Delaplane set out to recreate the Irish coffee served at Shannon Airport in Ireland; the result — hot coffee, Irish whiskey, sugar and a collar of cream — became the American version of the drink, and the café now serves them by the thousand at its counter near the Wharf.

Along Jefferson Street the Wharf's crab stands keep their pots at a rolling boil, steam drifting across the pavement, whole Dungeness crabs stacked in the windows waiting to be cracked to order.

The fortune cookie is a Californian, not a Chinese, invention — and in Ross Alley in Chinatown, the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory has folded them by hand since 1962, one at a time on hot griddles, while you watch from the doorway of a working alley factory.

• Lunch — Dim sum on Stockton Street in Chinatown, where the delis and dining rooms serve the neighborhood rather than the tour route.
• Afternoon — Walk the Wharf end: a bread bowl at Boudin and the fortune cookie factory two neighborhoods over.
• Dinner — Cioppino in North Beach, then the short walk downhill to the Buena Vista for an Irish coffee standing at the counter.

Dungeness crab is a winter fishery, and in recent years the commercial season's opening has been repeatedly delayed — a summer visitor gets crab that was frozen or flown in, not the local catch, whatever the menu implies. The Wharf's sit-down rooms also price for the view; the same cioppino costs less a few blocks inland in North Beach.

Pair the North Beach dinner with the cable car ride in the things-to-do question in this group — the Powell-Mason line drops you at its edge.