One former visitor recently went public with a memory that's been haunting their family for three decades: a hotel somewhere in the Bay Area, circa early 1990s, with an indoor atrium and koi fish ponds in the lobby. The kind of place where a five-year-old could spend hours mesmerized by orange and white fish gliding through crystal-clear water while Dad sat through meetings about quarterly projections.

The problem? Nobody can figure out what hotel it was.

The family is adamant: indoor koi ponds, an atrium, a lobby that felt like stepping into a living garden. It wasn't the Hyatt Regency — no fish. It probably wasn't Hotel Kabuki, unless the place underwent a radical aesthetic overhaul at some point. And before you ask, no, they're not confusing the Japanese Tea Garden with a Marriott.

The internet, as it does, may have cracked the case. One local pointed to the Embassy Suites by Hilton near SFO in Burlingame — which apparently still has koi in its atrium and would make perfect sense for a business traveler flying into the airport. "Not exactly in the city but seems to fit the bill," as one SF resident put it.

And honestly? That's the most Bay Area answer possible. You came to "San Francisco" as a kid, but you actually stayed in Burlingame. Welcome to the club. Half the people who say they visited SF in the '90s were really in Daly City eating at Sizzler.

But here's what makes this little mystery worth noting: it's a reminder that the Bay Area used to be a place people wanted to visit. Hotels competed on charm and ambiance — indoor koi ponds! — rather than charging $400 a night for the privilege of stepping over a needle to reach your Uber.

The city's hospitality industry has been battered by years of convention flight, pandemic fallout, and a downtown that still hasn't fully recovered. Maybe the lesson from one family's hazy 1993 memory is simple: people remember how a place made them feel. San Francisco used to make visitors feel wonder. Koi fish optional.

If anyone out there has photographic evidence of a now-vanished indoor koi pond in an SF hotel lobby, we want to see it. Some mysteries deserve to be solved.