Izakaya Sozai — Restaurant in San Francisco

Tl;dr Party of two paid $100 for only 6 dishes (4 of which were literally bite-sized), with an hour total wait time between ordering and receiving the last dish. Would absolutely not recommend to anyone who values good food and a good time (esp. at a reasonable price).

My girlfriend and I came here for a date night thinking it would be a great evening spent with great food. Big, big mistake.

We ordered 6 dishes: the uni udon (which took an hour to even hit our table), 2x beef tongue skewer, clam chowder cream croquettes, A5 wagyu nigiri, and spicy tuna crispy rice.

The beef tongue skewers were overly chewy, lacking in flavor, and the second order was cold when it arrived.

The croquettes were admittedly fantastic (if you do decide against your best interests to come here, at the very least this will be an appetizing addition to your table), but the A5 wagyu nigiri was incredibly disappointing. There are countless places in SF that do it better (re: Rintaro, Robin, as infinitum) so go there instead to avoid an expensive disappointment.

Finally, it took an hour between ordering and then finally receiving the uni udon and spicy tuna crispy rice. When we asked the waitress why it took so long, we were actually genuinely curious.

Unfortunately, the waitress seemed to take it personally and curtly replied, "if you wanted it sooner, you should have told the chef to prepare it ASAP because we always serve our noodle dishes last."

First: How were we supposed to know to make that (very, very specific) request to the chef just to make sure we'd get the noodles in a reasonable time? Shouldn't it be the bare minimum that we receive our dishes in a timely manner, sans obscure chef requests? This felt more like a cheap excuse than accepting responsibility.

Second: We were done with our latest dish (the skewer) 20 whole minutes before the udon arrived. There is no conceivable nor logical reason why it took so long for us to get the noodles.

Needless to say, we were beyond confused and upset. Having to wait long times for (honestly sub-par) food is already a red flag. The customer service was just the final blow; it was rude, dismissive, and felt as if the waitress was making excuses for herself and the staff at the cost of invalidating our experiences and genuine frustrations.

To add insult to injury, the cherry on top was when I paid with AmEx, and the waitress THREW the card back down on the table and curtly said they didn't accept American Express before going back to the cashier.

In sum, if you really want to check out this restaurant, and if you're going to order the uni udon-- make sure to specify you want it ASAP because otherwise they apparently won't be serving it to you until you're one hour away from writing a very (in this author's honest opinion, justifiably) angry review.

Oh, and don't be an...

I was recommended this place by someone. After scrolling past it on Maps countless times, I finally gave the place a shot. I was expecting a bit more of a traditional experience, but it ended up being way more fusion (or maybe I just mean modern?) than I had expected. I had already snacked a bit throughout the day, so I mainly stuck with the smaller plates. The first thing we had was the takoyaki; this is the one dish that exceeded expectations. Often, the takoyaki's custard-like inside is burning hot, amazingly these were the perfect shape to be eaten immediately (though, maybe that had more to do with the smaller size rather than any intentional decision by the chef). The next I had was a duck yakitori. It had a nice grilled flavor on it, however, there wasn't much in terms of seasoning. I'm used to yakitori having much more sauce, but this felt like I was just eating duck on a stick, which feels like I'm not really paying for much. I wish I had gotten the bacon and enoki skewers instead. The last thing I had was an order of shishito peppers. These also had a a nice chat to them, but also lacked in seasoning. Most of the sauce they had put on the peppers wouldn't stick to the peppers, so it fell to the bottom of the bowl. It would have been better from more reduction to help it thicken up. My last qualm was with the hot sake we were served. Generally hot sake is not actually not; it's usually body temperature. I imagine it's nice to serve it a bit above body temperature so that the sake you pour out cools to body temperature, but what stays in the decanter stays warm. This sake was a bit too hot though. All in all, the food wasn't bad; in fact, I'm pretty sure they have some pretty good stuff there, and I just didn't get lucky ordering. Regardless, this place gave me the impression a lot of these fusion places do: they wanted to appear as if they were elevating a cuisine, but end up not delivering on what they set out to do while serving you less and charging you more. I'm not against "fancy" restaurants or something, but when you can't get yakitori to taste great, which most restaurants can, it doesn't inspire me to come back and see if I can guess what on your menu is good. Maybe I'll come back and try to order something that seems more...

To the owner of this place, your hostesses/ servers are not professional. We had reservations at 7 for 3 and when we arrived, there were 3 empty tables that can seat 3-4. We asked for a table away from the entrance because it was cold and they have outside seating which means the entrance door consistently open and close for the entire time that you eating. The young girl with the gray sweatshirt and short hair played hostess and she told us that the other 2 tables were reserved. We replied and said we have reservations so what is the difference between reserved versus reserved. She couldn’t give us an explanation and asked us if the table we don’t want was okay. Since the trip to the restaurant was far and it was getting late so we responded and said it has to be ok cause she was not giving us any other options. What made it worse was 2 parties arrived after us and were seated at the tables we asked for. Makes no sense other than we found out that one of the party were friends with the Japanese hostess/ owner/ who knows. Not cool. Overall, the food was decent except for the ramen. We ordered 3 appetizers, and various skewers; beef tongue, scallops, enoki wrapped with bacon, chicken. The Tonkatsu ramen was meh.., we waited for about 35 minutes and it was disappointing . The noodles were still very hard, soup was just warm and pork was dry. It could have been a better experience but that initial interaction with that hostess just pretty much left a sour taste with us, sorta like the wedge of lemon they served with the chicken. I normally tip at least 25% but tonight it felt like a 10% service. Added 5% for the other hostess who appeared nice. There are many good Japanese restaurants to choose from so no thanks...