Healthy Eating in San Francisco: Burritos, Bread Bowls and Crab, With the Numbers

What does San Francisco actually eat?

San Francisco's food is built by the communities that landed here, and most of its famous dishes are working-class meals rather than fine dining. The Mission burrito came out of the Mission District's taquerias. Cioppino came from the Italian fishermen of North Beach. Sourdough and chowder belong to the waterfront, and dim sum to Chinatown, which Wikipedia describes as the oldest Chinatown in North America. Add a deep bench of Vietnamese, Burmese, Filipino and Japanese cooking, a farmers market at the Ferry Building and a delivery app on every phone, and you get a city where eating well is easy and eating a lot is easier.

• The Mission burrito: a steamed flour tortilla wrapped around meat, rice, beans and cheese. La Cumbre Taqueria, near Valencia and 16th, is credited with first selling the style in 1972, and El Faro's owner claims a first burrito on September 26, 1961.
• Cioppino: a tomato and wine seafood stew from North Beach in the late 1800s, usually with Dungeness crab, clams, shrimp, mussels and fish, eaten with sourdough for dipping.
• Clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl: the Fisherman's Wharf lunch. Boudin publishes full nutrition for its bowls, which makes it one of the few local dishes with official numbers.
• Dim sum: Chinatown centers on Grant Avenue and Stockton Street, and the Hang Ah Tea Room, open since 1920, is said to be the oldest dim sum restaurant in the US.
• Market produce: Foodwise's Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, running since 1993, has more than 100 vendors on Saturdays and smaller markets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The rest of this guide puts calories and protein on the dishes that matter, using USDA FoodData Central and Boudin's own menu, then shows how to fit them into a fat-loss or muscle-gain day without giving any of them up.

How many calories are in a Mission burrito?

A Mission-style burrito has roughly 460 to 743 calories in USDA's figures, depending on the filling and whether it's a regular (220 g) or large (330 g, about 11.6 oz) burrito. USDA FoodData Central lists burritos by filling in its survey database, which is built for foods as Americans eat them. No San Francisco taqueria we know of publishes nutrition, so these are the closest checkable numbers.

Two things follow. Chicken and beef land close together: per 100 g, USDA lists 209 calories for the chicken version and 225 for the beef, a gap of 16. Size is the real lever. Going from a regular to a large chicken burrito adds 230 calories, more than four times the 53-calorie gap between a large chicken and a large beef burrito. And many Mission District burritos look bigger than USDA's 330 g large, so if you track closely, weigh one at home once and you'll know your usual order for good.

Protein holds up well. A large chicken burrito's 36.6 g is 73% of the FDA's 50 g Daily Value for protein. The catch is carbohydrate: USDA's figures give about 86 g in a large chicken or beef burrito, mostly from the tortilla and rice. That's fine on a day you train hard. On a rest day, it's most of your carbohydrate in one meal.

How to order a burrito in the Mission when you're cutting

• Order the regular, not the super or the large. On USDA's numbers that's 230 fewer calories for 12 g less protein.
• Choose grilled chicken or carne asada over carnitas if the taqueria fries its carnitas. Most of the difference is in the fat.
• Ask for extra salsa and lettuce instead of sour cream. Salsa adds volume and flavor for very little energy.
• Make it a bowl, or eat half now and half tomorrow. Half a large chicken burrito is 345 calories and 18.3 g of protein, a fair lunch with a side of fruit.
• Skip the chips that come with it on a cutting day. They add energy and almost no protein.

Is a clam chowder bread bowl a bad choice?

A Boudin clam chowder bread bowl is a reasonable meal for calories and a heavy one for salt. Boudin, the sourdough bakery on Fisherman's Wharf, lists every soup in a sourdough bread bowl, counting the soup plus 3.8 oz of the bowl's top. The clam chowder comes to 580 calories and 24 g of protein. Its 1,790 mg of sodium is 78% of the FDA's 2,300 mg Daily Value, in one lunch.

For protein per calorie, the beef chili does the most: 32 g for 660 calories. The tomato and squash soups look lighter but give the least protein, 13 to 14 g, because most of the bowl's energy is bread. Boudin lists the clam chowder at 87 g of carbohydrate and 14 g of fat, so the bread does most of the work. If you leave half the bowl's walls, you keep most of the protein and cut a good share of the carbohydrate.

Boudin's salads and protein bowls give more room to choose. The Asian Citrus Chicken Salad lists 520 calories and 32 g of protein, the same calories as the tomato bread bowl with more than twice the protein. The Green Goddess Chicken with Avocado bowl is 795 calories and 45 g. At the top end, the Chicken, Apple, Walnut Salad lists 1,050 calories and the Crispy Chicken & Avo Caesar 1,025, more than either bread bowl. A salad isn't automatically the lighter order in San Francisco.

Crab, cioppino and San Francisco seafood

Crab is among the leanest proteins on any San Francisco menu. Dungeness is the local crab, but the USDA records we opened don't include a Dungeness entry, so we use cooked blue crab as the nearest match: 83 calories and 17.9 g of protein per 100 g, with under 1 g of fat. A 3 oz (85 g) portion of crab meat is about 71 calories and 15.2 g of protein.

What changes the numbers is everything that comes with the crab. A whole roasted crab drenched in garlic butter, a crab sandwich on buttered sourdough, a bowl of cioppino with half a loaf for dipping: the crab itself is rarely the issue. Cioppino's broth is tomato and wine, which is light. The bread you dip into it and any butter on the table are where the energy is. Eat the seafood, take one piece of bread and you have a high-protein dinner.

How to eat dim sum and the rest of the city on a plan

Dim sum in Chinatown or the Richmond doesn't come with nutrition labels, and we found no published figures for San Francisco dim sum houses, so here we give ordering rules rather than numbers. Steamed dishes like shrimp dumplings and steamed fish are usually lighter than fried ones like spring rolls, sesame balls and taro puffs, because frying adds oil. Order a plate of greens with garlic for every two or three dumpling baskets, and share: dim sum is built for a table, and splitting six dishes four ways is easier on a plan than one person eating three alone.

The same thinking works across the city. In the Tenderloin's Vietnamese restaurants, pho and fresh rolls are mostly broth, herbs and lean meat. In Japantown, sashimi and grilled fish beat tempura on protein per calorie. At the Ferry Building on a Saturday, more than 100 vendors make it easy to stock up on vegetables, eggs and fish for the week. Delivery apps are the real risk in a city of long workdays: decide your dinner at lunchtime and order it then, so you're not choosing hungry at 9 PM.

A San Francisco eating day for fat loss or muscle gain

The easiest way to eat well in San Francisco is to plan two meals out and keep the rest simple. The tables below use only figures from Boudin's menu and USDA FoodData Central, and show what's left for breakfast and snacks under two example targets. Your own targets depend on your size and activity: your coach sets them with you in the first week.

Look at what the swap does in the fat-loss day. Trade the regular chicken burrito for a large beef one and dinner goes from 460 to 743 calories, using 283 of the 749 you had left. Nothing is banned; it just has to fit. On the muscle-gain day, the large burrito after an evening session is useful: 86 g of carbohydrate and nearly 37 g of protein is a solid recovery meal.

Where training fits in a San Francisco food week

Training changes what a San Francisco dinner does. On a day with a hard strength session, the carbohydrate in a large burrito or a bread bowl goes toward recovery. On a desk day with no training, the same meal mostly adds to your total. That's why MakeMyFitness coaches plan the two together: three live sessions a week, placed so the bigger meals land on training days.

Our coaches are based in India, so San Francisco sessions run in the early evening: the slots that work all year are 5:30 to 10 PM and 5 to 6:30 AM Pacific time. A 6 PM session in Noe Valley or Hayes Valley finishes in time for a 7:30 dinner reservation. Lead coach Kumar Abhishek is a qualified Human Performance Nutritionist (K11 School of Fitness Sciences) as well as a personal trainer, so the meal side of your plan is built in, not an extra.

To see a coached evening in the city, start at our San Francisco page. For what in-person trainers and gyms charge, read what a personal trainer costs in San Francisco, and for the running loops that burn off a burrito, see how to stay fit in San Francisco. Other cities are on our US page.