Boudin is San Francisco's most famous sourdough bakery, baking since 1849 and claiming to use a "mother dough" descended from the original Gold Rush-era starter — the wild local yeast and bacteria that give the city's signature loaf its distinctive tang. The bakery's flagship at Fisherman's Wharf is part shop, part spectacle: through long windows you can watch bakers shaping dough into loaves, including novelty crab and turtle shapes.
The thing to order is a hollowed-out sourdough bread bowl filled with clam chowder, eaten looking out over the waterfront — a wharf cliché, but a genuinely good one. Upstairs there is a small museum and a sit-down restaurant for those who want more than the bakery café. It is one of the more authentic food stops in an area not short of tourist traps.