Some friends and I were sitting amid an improbably lush rooftop garden in London Terrace when the host said he had contemplated moving from Texas to San Francisco before settling in Manhattan. It was the most benevolent of late summer evenings in New York and yet the conversation turned to a wistful retelling of trips to that golden city by the Pacific.

It is not just that it is unoriginal to love San Francisco, but that there is so much with which to be besotted. Adopt a sequential approach to discovering San Francisco, however, and the place seems more manageable. On one trip you wonder at how easy it is to get away – just a couple of hours after a long flight, and the red Beetle you are in is doing lazy figure of eights above the Pacific on the road towards Big Sur.

On another trip, you concentrate on taking in stupendous views; those movie-set bridges and peculiar semi-vertical streets are not a transportation network at all but vantage points from which to marvel at the city. On a third, you look agog at the staircase in the opera house, so grand that in a less egalitarian city only people with the star quality of Bette Davis or Audrey Hepburn would be allowed to sweep up and down it. Less obvious are the city’s metaphysical charms; the Bay area still has something as close to the quasi-utopian spirit as we can manage in the 21st century. Or as Joan Didion, the state’s prose laureate, put it less sentimentally: “The mind is troubled by (the) suspicion that things had better work here, because here beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

I have come under the spell of the city’s museums only in the past couple of years, but my timing couldn’t be better. Even in an age where museums are often modern-day monuments, the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park is a gleaming show-stopper. The California Academy of Sciences reopens this autumn in a new home nearby. The Contemporary Jewish Museum opened this summer, a power station conversion that in architect Daniel Libeskind’s hands becomes a work of art. Before you even enter, you are wondering if the enormous black cube, which looks like it is colliding with the original building and houses the gift shop, is symbolic of the clash of good and evil.

There is a Rubik’s Cube-styled puzzle to be solved in the lobby at the nearby San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Four giant rainbows in diagonals, horizontals and verticals hang from its walls. Is it a palette of colours or a left/right side of the brain depiction of the creative process? The stairs lead you to a drawbridge of sorts that makes you feel like you are walking in the clouds. And after a couple of hours at this jewel box of a museum, in a sense you are.

The smaller scale of SFMOMA made for a more satisfying experience of a Frida Kahlo exhibition there than the show of her work at London’s Tate Modern, where the gigantic rooms swallowed up Kahlo’s diminutive paintings. Because this exhibition is more personal, the viewer can’t help feeling that her life and art were engulfed by her marriage to Diego Rivera, who seems enormous in her perception of him. There is a little too much self in her self-portraits and both the motifs of folk art and her dysfunctional relationship are repeated too often for my taste, but this is a moving exhibition.

The painting of her on a hospital bed splattered with blood with the foetus of a baby boy floating above it done after a miscarriage is a cry of injustice on behalf of every woman who wants to have a child but is unable to. The self-portrait of her standing in a pink dress on a border between Mexico’s ancient culture and the smoke stacks of America’s Ford Motor Company drew a sympathetic response from a viewer, whom I can only assume was a resident of the city: “It must have been difficult for her to come here.”

In fact, Kahlo and Rivera had a symbiotic relationship with San Francisco. (Rivera’s well-known painting of a peasant woman having a basket loaded upon her shoulders was commissioned by the museum decades ago and hangs in another room.) In 1953, spinal problems meant that Kahlo needed to be carried into her first solo exhibition in Mexico City. She died soon after, looking upon death as a release: “I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope never to come back – Frida.”

San Francisco, which looks across the Pacific to China and Japan more assiduously than possibly any city in the US, is also home to fine collections of Asian art. On this trip, I never made it to the Asian art museum, but SFMOMA currently features one of the best exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art ever, on loan from the collection of a San Francisco couple.

As with Kahlo’s life, there are dark themes aplenty in Chinese history, but I always end up seeing more of a gleeful embrace of the culture of Mammon rather than the madness of Mao in so many canvases. Yan Lei’s painting of Sotheby’s in New York alongside a Chinese man and woman crawling out of the doorway of a department store, is a comic commemoration of an auction there a couple of years ago that marked the arrival of Chinese artists on the international scene. In other works, Mao sleeps amid rival battalions of dinosaurs in one room while the next features the most beautiful rendition of the tale of the frog who became a prince in delicate silver Chinese silk.

Lost in a daydream, I was late for everything that followed. I met a cousin for drinks at Coi where the sommelier enthusiastically pronounced the Mosel Riesling I’d asked about “possibly the most perfect Riesling ever.” The melon soup with citron leaf and white chocolate I sampled was like a great painting; long after I finished it I wondered where all those flavours came from and what they meant. Staying too long, I missed the train I was to take to the suburbs, where I was having dinner. The BART mass transit train I took instead was halted because of a mild earthquake. I got to dinner at 10pm, still exhilarated. I suppose others feel this way about Paris, but for me a day in San Francisco is as close to paradise as you can get in an urban setting.

Rahul Jacob is the FT’s travel, food and drink editor

..............................................................

Details

The Contemporary Jewish Museum
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The de Young Museum