This morning at 11am, Rugged Elegance and the Noe Valley Merchants Association will unveil The Official Noe Valley Neighborhood Guide at Fattoush Restaurant.

The guide is sponsored by the Noe Valley Merchants and Professional Association and produced by Rugged Elegance, LLC -- publishers of the citywide RE: Companion...Places of Taste guides, the aerial map of San Francisco, the SF.RuggedElegance.com destination site and RuggedElegantLiving.com online publication.

In their July/August 2004 Edition the Noe Valley Voice wrote:

The Noe Valley Merchants and Professionals Association is so pleased to have produced an official guide to Noe Valley that the organization, along with publisher Rugged Elegance, is holding a launch party for the guide on Thursday, July 15, from 11 am to 2 pm. It will take place at Fattoush Restaurant, 1361 Church Street, between Clipper and 26th streets.

"Our members and neighbors have been asking for something like this for years--a map to show where things are. It's just gorgeous, very upscale and classy," says Carol Yenne, the association's president. "Rugged Elegance already had a guide for Noe Valley with about 20 people on it. We expanded that to include everybody from Café XO, at 30th and Church, to the Noe Valley Ministry to Firefly, and all of our members in between," she adds.

Abed Amas, owner of Fattoush, will offer attendees a taste of his unique Middle-Eastern dishes on the restaurant's patio, and publisher Rugged Elegance will present each merchant member with a copy of the Noe Valley guide.

Others can purchase a guide at the event for $4.95.

Subsequently, the guide is expected to be available at businesses throughout the neighborhood.

Sponsors of the Noe Valley Official Neighborhood Guide include: The entire real estate brokerage team at BJ Droubi & Company, Kathy Zucchi of Edward Jones Investments, Abed Amas of Fattoush Restaurant, J Thrupp Painting Incorporated, La Coterie Style Studio (which opens today on 24th at Noe), Jennifer King & Tim Fredel of Rugged Elegance, Carol Yenne of Small Frys Children's Clothes, Toys & Gifts, and Dr. Lee Bender of Zephyr Real Estate & Investments.

Rugged Elegance has also invited Select Establishment owners and managers to celebrate the launch of their Rugged Elegance Companion Summer edition of guides. Included in the collection are twelve neighborhood guides, as well as a guide to the Hidden Treasures of the city.

The Rugged Elegance Companion...Your Guide to Places of Taste

The twelve neighborhoods Rugged Elegance has initially selected to promote include:

Cow Hollow

Hayes Valley & The Civic Center

Jackson Square

Noe Valley

North Beach

Pacific Heights

Presidio Heights

Russian Hill

The Financial District

The Marina

The Theatre District / Nob Hill

Union Square

Whereas the Official Noe Valley guide will be distributed via the merchants within the Noe Valley neighborhood, the Rugged Elegance collection / hotel concierge edition is currently being distributed online through SF.RuggedElegance.com, as well as through Select "Rugged Elegant" Establishments and San Francisco's luxury property real estate brokers such as Gil Fleitas and Steven Mavromihalis of Pacific Union who are currently using the guides and San Francisco aerial map to market The Hills Residence on Broadway.

The primary distribution channel Rugged Elegance has established, however, is through many of the best hotel concierges in the city.

The Official Noe Valley guide and the Rugged Elegance Companions were published for residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as for tourists.

Since the collection edition was designed to fit into the glove compartment of a car or truck, Rugged Elegance will also begin targeting high-end automotive dealerships and luxury rental car agencies this fall.

The current collection / hotel concierge edition retails for $34.95.

Illustrator/Designer, Samuel Leshnick

Thanks go to our sponsors, our host, Abed Amas from Fattoush, and Rugged Elegance designer/illustrator, Samuel Leshnick for redesigning the Noe Valley map to include St. Philips Church & School, Noe Valley Ministry, James Lick School, Noe Park, the Post Office, 24th Street Parking and the J Line on Church.

Special thanks go to Carol Yenne, owner of Small Frys and President of the Noe Valley Merchants Association, for her vision and leadership in this production.

Inspire & Be Inspired.

~ Jennifer King

In two weeks, Rugged Elegance will launch our premier collection of tangible guides for San Francisco called The Rugged Elegance Companion...Your Guide To Places of Taste.

Already, four hundred of the five hundred establishments we have selected have been profiled at RuggedElegance.com. In addtion, a number have been written up in one of our online publications, The Rugged Elegance Inspiration Network and/or RE: San Francisco.

Each profile ties in with either one of our twelve neighborhood guides, or our "Hidden Treasures" guide of the city for those establishments in the 2004 edition that are outside one of the twelve neighborhoods. For our premier edition we have created a separate Rugged Elegance guide and Homepage for: Cow Hollow, Hayes Valley & The Civic Center, Jackson Square, Noe Valley, North Beach, Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights, Russian Hill, The Financial District, The Marina, The Theatre District & Nob Hill, and Union Square neighborhoods.

Our concept is to encourage our monthly audience of 100,000 people, and/or anyone new who comes upon one of our sites, to research where to go in San Francisco via our online profiles in Rugged Elegance.com and/or via one of our stories about those places here in RuggedElegantLiving.com.

Rather than carrying around a three-hundred page guide, of which we so often use only a small fraction, our hope is that you will print out the online profiles of the establishments you are interested in exploring. Whether you live in San Francisco or are visiting our great city, RuggedElegance.com is intended to help you find the most inspiring and trusted source of Rugged Elegant hotels, restaurants, shops and services which represent the soul of San Francisco.

Our set of thirteen Rugged Elegance San Francisco Companion maps will then help guide you there.

Since we launched RuggedElegance.com last fall, we have been thrilled and fascinated at the response from around the world.

We thought you would be interested to know of the Selected Rugged Elegance Establishments in San Francisco that were most sought after, last year.

Through Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Earthlink, Inktomi, and other search engines, we have been able to track how people found the establishment profiles we have created in RuggedElegance.com, and thus which establishments got the most "traffic" to their profile and/or RuggedElegantLiving.com story.

To give you a taste, we have created a separate post of the restaurants that were the most sought after in December 2003.