Courtesy of Urban Putt

We missed this one on Wednesday, but here it is on Friday. The San Francisco Chronicle has an update on the Urban Putt, which increasingly seems like a deluxe club.  

It will be interesting to see if Steve Fox and his backers can make it work.

Proprietor Steve Fox rattles off the whimsical, complex components of the course, which is still under construction: a labyrinth, a submarine, an octopus, Day of the Dead, a duck shooting gallery, drums, cymbals and motion-sensor LED lights that look like shimmering phytoplankton as golf balls roll across.

There are even San Francisco touches: Painted Ladies shake on an earthquake-themed hole, and the requisite windmill is positioned on the face of the TransAmerica Building.

But this is a column about restaurant news, and the food and drink at Urban Putt are an essential part of the equation.

“This isn’t just a mini golf course, a restaurant and a bar,” says Fox, a former editor undertaking his first hospitality venture. “This needs to be an experience, an immersive and coherent experience.” More

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder/executive editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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