Funky Elephant SF — Restaurant in San Francisco

“Funky” is definitely the right word to describe this place — not for the faint of heart, it’s got a creative and sometimes strange menu full of Thai flavor.

The Pad Thai Old Skool is 100% the star of the show. It’s got a great mouthfeel, smooth flavor, and a nice crunch with the granulated peanuts.

The Super Jungle Curry was… not what we were expecting. It was less of a curry and more of a broth, with a few bites of meat and some string beans. To be honest, the portioning was smaller than we expected, and the flavor was not at the same level of the pad Thai. The heat was good, but it was the only thing exciting about this dish — we wouldn’t recommend it for first time visitors.

The service was decent, albeit a bit hard to grab the attention of — we had to try a few times to get our bill (the servers seemed pretty swamped, so we understand that staffing issues are generally out of the service worker’s control).

We were perhaps most surprised that rice was not included with any of the dishes, so we had to pay for a small side. The silver lining? The Butterfly Pea Jasmine rice had a lightly herbaceous flavor, and the natural colors dyed it bluish-purple! Definitely a fun aspect that really put the “funky” in “funky elephant”.

Overall, the decor and atmosphere are fun and creative, but the food sometimes felt like it was trying too hard. Not for the faint of heart, but an adventurous eater could easily fall in...

Four of us ordered food to go from here. I especially like that they had wild fish and Mary's chicken as options so I knew the quality of the meat would be good. We ordered the Crispy Rice Salad, Roti with Yellow Curry, Party Wings, Pad Thai Old Skool, and the Motherland Curry with wild rock cod. We ordered the Pad Thai and curry Firey so we did expect to to be Thai Spicy, but it was not spicy enough. While it did have a nice heat and good flavor it wasn't Thai spicy or Firey. All the dishes tasted really good. The Pad Thai had head on shrimp that was very well cooked and delicious. The Curry's rock fish was moist and the chicken wings were sticky and had a good slice to them. Overall the food was very good. I would order from here again but I would choose to do dine in and I would not do take out again. This is because the portions were very small, especially the Crispy Rice. Definitely not a shareable dish. But sometimes when ordering to go, portions are smaller but for the price you would expect and want more. Hoping on our next visit we can try a few other items we were...

Quite disappointing experience at the funky elephant on Valencia. We ordered grilled king oyster mushrooms, Roti with green curry and the crispy tofu. The Mushroom and Crispy tofu were good but the roti was just soaking with oil to the point you could collect a spoonful of oil from the plate. The curry was over salted and my guess is too much fish sauce, needless to say we didn’t eat most of it. For the main course we ordered yellow curry with chicken, Motherland Curry and pad thai with KGM soup. The soup and pad thai were over salted. The pad thai was inedible after a point, you could tell it wasn’t mixed properly because some parts were very salty and some parts were bland. The motherland curry was alright though you could tell the fish wasn’t fresh or refrigerated properly so the curry was tasting very fishy. The chicken curry was good. Overall out of the 7 dishes we tried 2 stood out as good and one as okay. The service was quite slow we had to wait 25 mins for our appetizers to arrive. Will...