Patti Smith performs at the Masonic in San Francisco on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025.

On Wednesday, an atmospheric river dumped buckets on San Francisco, leaving locals huddling under umbrellas and tracking wet boot prints into their homes. It’s as clear a signal as can be: It’s indoor season in the Bay Area. 

While others might be hunkering down, SFGATE isn’t. For our weekly Fogcutter column, our journalists track down the city’s best events — small concerts, food festivals, park gatherings — and report on what they see. Our hope is to keep a living archive of San Francisco cultural life, one dispatch at a time.

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In this edition, we catch one of 2025’s coolest bands, check out the new KAWS exhibit at SFMOMA, and compare a coffee and a tea festival.

Read on for more highlights, and sign up for SFGATE’s Fogcutter newsletter to receive all of our best culture stories in your inbox.

The San Francisco International Tea Festival packed the Ferry Building.

I’ve been to festivals celebrating just about every gastronomic thing: food, wine, chocolate. But, a few Sundays ago, I joined friends for my first tea festival. With the current matcha craze and tea culture on the rise, I was curious to see what was brewing inside the Ferry Building.

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Turns out, a lot. The two-day San Francisco International Tea Festival has sold out every year since 2022, and this year’s event was no different. About 3,000 attendees took over the grand nave to sample teas from 33 vendors based around the world, from California and Oregon to Nepal, Japan and South Korea.

Attendees sample teas at the San Francisco International Tea Festival.

Under the 660-foot skylight, I drained cup after cup of warm and iced green, black and white teas. I went back for seconds of a hojicha latte from Berkeley’s COBA Coffee & Tea. I fell in love with a pan-toasted TeAlley smoky oolong grown in the high mountains of Taiwan, and learned that Stockton has a working tea farm, Redwood Tea Estate,........

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