Shokudou — Restaurant in San Francisco

I'll preface by stating my wife and I live and breathe Japanese food and where we're from (Malaysia and Singapore) the bar is set really high. We loved Izakaya Roku and were devastated when it recently closed. We've been looking for a yakitori place that would deliver and this was a miss for us. Service was great. We ordered: Garlic butter edamame: 5/10 I was truly surprised that the edamame was flavourless, it hadn't been salted/seasoned prior or overnight from what I could tell. -Negima: 10/10 Fantastic. We reordered! -Chicken wings: 6/10 Just meh, the potato starch breading was a little strange, wasn't crispy, nothing to shout about. -Chicken skin: 5/10 Making chicken skin yakitori is an art. The balance between crunchy and chewy needs to be there. This was crunchy to a fault--hard and unpleasant at the end to eat. Uni: 7/10 Hamachi sashimi: 9/10 -Hotate: 9/10 -Seaweed salad: 10/10, Well seasoned, not too sweet. King oyster mushroom: 2/10 an ultimate disappointment, grilled but extremely rubbery and hard to chew. Just no. Broccoli: 8/10, on the...

While I am happy to support small local restaurants, this was not a good dining experience. We ordered a wide variety of things off the menu but a lot of it fell short in flavor. In addition, everything was bone dry — the mune skewers were so tough, it wasn’t pleasant to eat at all. Same with the tonkatsu, incredibly dry.

There were two things that really did it in for me though, and make me not want to return unless there’s a drastic overhaul:

1. the leaves in our salad were decaying and looked like they were on the verge of going bad. at the very least I feel I should be served fresh greens.
2. I nearly broke my tooth on the beef enoki skewer.. there was a bone piece in the beef.

4.6 star rating is not an accurate representation of the food/experience here. Nice friendly server but other than that, not much...

With smartly decorated interior, this Bernal Heights Japanese izakaya / sushi bar / yakitori-ya is a welcome option on Cortland. The menu however lacks focus, reflected in the generally mediocre delivery on dishes.

While agedashi tofu came well-crisped (a feat), the sauce too salty. The chicken karaage, far from bite-sized as it should be and smothered in an odd tapioca-like batter — sticky on the inside. The spider (soft shell crab) roll, had an odd funk — not sweet, but more attune to gym socks.

Unfortunately, a place I very much wanted to love, but left a bit...