Saying farewell to a San Francisco burger staple
The reason you didn't see any cool people in SF last weekend …
The musical multitudes of Golden Gate Park
A hit Sundance debut with a San Francisco star
The most famous wave in California gets a yearbook
On our radar:

Saying farewell to a San Francisco burger staple, The reason you didn't see any cool people in SF last weekend …, The musical multitudes of Golden Gate Park, A hit Sundance debut with a San Francisco star, The most famous wave in California gets a yearbook, On our radar:

FILE: Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on July 2, 2024. (Smith Collection/Gado/Gado via Getty Images)

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The Roxie just bought its building for $5 million. Juul is back. The Luigi Mangione musical, which is an actual thing, has managed to stretch its original run of performances into July. And locals are taking an unusual personality quiz to figure out which San Francisco transit line they resemble best.

Just as the city's summers bring fluctuations of fog and sun, San Francisco's cultural life is an endless cycle of ups and downs: new spots and closures, celebrations and flops.

To map the Bay Area's cultural microclimates, we started Fogcutter, SFGATE's weekly column of odds and ends. Every week, our reporters cover the spectrum of local life: scavenger hunts, bakeries and nightclubs. In this edition, we pay our respects to WesBurger, stumble into a Golden Gate Park bagpipe circle and figure out where all of the cool people went.

Read on for more highlights.

Saying farewell to a San Francisco burger staple

WesBurger ‘n' More is no more. The Mission Street burger spot, regularly listed among the city's best, served its last tray of tater tots on Tuesday, marking the end of a nine-year run. (The owner, Wes Rowe, opted not to renew the lease.)

WesBurger was my neighborhood burger spot. It was the place I'd go once every month to have a really solid burger and flirt with my family history of heart disease. But on Monday, WesBurger's second-to-last night, the restaurant was fuller than I'd ever seen it. Everyone, apparently, wanted to say goodbye. Whole friend groups took last photos together outside. Others clustered in booths, talking animatedly between bites of their fried chicken sandwiches and burgers.

WesBurger ‘n' More on Mission Street served its last burger on July 15, 2025. (Timothy Karoff/SFGATE)

Some items - the PB&J burger, which was designed by Jeremy Fish, and the shakes - were already sold out, so I settled for the restaurant's signature double smash burger, the Wes, with two thin, perfectly crisped patties sandwiched between an airy bun.

WesBurger might not have made the city's best burger, period (my vote goes to the Laundromat), but it was my burger spot, and its departure will certainly leave an oil-stained, smash burger-shaped hole in my heart. When I walked by the storefront Friday morning to snap a photo, a grate covered the front door, but overhead, WesBurger's burger mural remained. - Timothy Karoff, SFGATE culture reporter

The reason you didn't see any cool people in SF last weekend …

… is they were all at the 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair. Normally, they'd be browsing the used sections of Dog Eared Books, or laying out picnic blankets at Dolores Park. But last Saturday and Sunday, they convened in a cluster of Dogpatch buildings, where they leafed through the zines, risograph prints and screenprinted T-shirts.

Organized by the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, the San Francisco Art Book Fair is the city's annual gathering of printmakers and small publishers, with an eye toward the eclectic. Small presses, like Sming Sming Books, sell their limited-edition books of photos, drawings and printed artworks. The folks at the Colpa Press sell books of 1990s San Francisco rave flyers, and the local record label Cherub Dream Records sells zines and CDs from Bay Area artists. (I picked up "100% Cherub," a 16-track compilation of the label's music.)

Even Chaz Bear, aka Toro y Moi, showed up to the event's listening room to play some of his favorite records. - Timothy Karoff, SFGATE culture reporter

The musical multitudes of Golden Gate Park

The sonic multitudes of Golden Gate Park were on fine display last Sunday as musical surprises hid around every corner. Along JFK, Lindy Hoppers twirled to old-timey beats while roller skaters circled the asphalt to boogie classics. Subatomic Sound System, the late-career backing band for Jamaican legend Lee "Scratch" Perry, christened the bandshell with heavy dub vibes as dreadlocked dancers puffed on doobies for the weekly Crucial Reggae Sundays event.

The Prince Charles Pipe Band gathers in Golden Gate Park on July 13, 2025. (Dan Gentile/SFGATE)

But the most charming surprise of the day had to be the Prince Charles Pipe Band. From a distance, the underlying drones and marching band percussion resembled a drum and bass breakbeat, but as we approached, we found a group of young musicians piping their hearts out. It turns out the kilted musicians are part of a club that formed in 1967 to train the next generation of bagpipers, winning several World Pipe Band Championships while they were at it. My group of friends stopped for a few minutes to take in the rich, reedy textures, enjoying a few minutes of drone before marching toward the bandshell in time to hear a rousing rendition of Max Romeo's "Chase the Devil." - Dan Gentile, SFGATE senior culture editor

The pied bagpipers of Golden Gate Park
- dangentile007.bsky.social (@dangentile007.bsky.social) July 18, 2025 at 2:11 PM

A hit Sundance debut with a San Francisco star

In the late 2010s, "Sorry, Baby" writer-director Eva Victor amassed a quarter of a million Twitter followers for videos that spoke to a certain breed of chronically online anxiety (her pinned post is still a 2019 video about attending "Straight Pride"). The big business of short internet videos isn't typically the foundation for high-brow art, which is part of what made her debut, "Sorry, Baby," such a refreshingly modern film.

Victor, who grew up in San Francisco, also stars in the film. It follows a creative writing grad student who has a traumatic encounter with her professor, and shocker, the school administration acts as empathetically as one might expect from a school administration. It's a serious premise that Victor treats with her signature style of bitingly comic millennial ennui, pivoting from self-deprecating gut laughs to painful self-reflection.

The unique contrast earned it a screenwriting award at Sundance and led to a bidding war among studios, eventually resulting in an $8 million acquisition by indie studio A24. Catch it at the AMC Kabuki this week. - Dan Gentile, SFGATE senior culture editor

Frank Quirarte signs copies of his new book, "28 Years at Sea," which chronicles the incredible stories of the Mavericks big-wave surf spot. (Lester Black/SFGATE)

The most famous wave in California gets a yearbook

A line stretched across the back patio of Old Princeton Landing for over two hours on Friday, July 11, to get Frank Quirarte to sign copies of his new book, "28 Years at Sea," which documents the history of the Mavericks surf spot through stunning photography. Mavericks, near Half Moon Bay, is a legendary wave that's world famous for its incredible size and power, and Quirarte has been a steadying force at the big-wave spot for decades, both capturing some of the most iconic photos of surfers riding massive waves and organizing Mavericks Rescue, which keeps the surfers safe when the inevitable pounding occurs.

Most people only see Mavericks through jaw-dropping clips of surfers riding unimaginable beasts of waves, but the only way the surf spot exists is through the intense community that surrounds it. Quirarte's book acts like a yearbook for the entire movement, documenting the exploits of pro surfers like Peter Mel, Greg Long and Jojo Roper and the tight-night group of people who make riding impossibly big waves happen. Friday's standing-room-only event at the iconic surf bar was a proper celebration of it all. - Lester Black, SFGATE cannabis editor

Surfers crowded into a standing-room-only party on Friday, June 11, at Old Princeton Landing to celebrate the release of "28 Years at Sea." (Lester Black/SFGATE)