Zuni Café - San Andreas

Lovely time celebrating our anniversary. Food, service, ambiance were just perfect.

Welcoming atmosphere with variable quality of dishes. Zuni has a warm, welcoming interior that is brightly decorated for the holidays. The food experience was mixed the beet salad polenta with mascarpone were both stellar. The steak was over salted and below average. (To the restaurant’s credit, they did make it right. We tried the cocktails, which were fresh and innovative. We are rooting for more consistency in food quality from the kitchen and will be back to this SF classic.

Historic venue serving premier dishes with time honored attention to detail and exquisite taste! Enjoyed Oysters on the half shell, Whole Brick Oven Chicken, deelish House Cesar, Mountain of Shoe String Potatoes, Homemade Pear tart with house made Crème de Leche (ala mode). Espresso Cafe’ was superb served with a raw sugar cube. Cocktails Devine and Boozy with potent flavour! Well worth the reservation and slowww dining experience while the notes of piano music wafts through the dynamic restaurant. Delightful people watching moments.

When you dine at Zuni Cafe there are two things you expect: great food and great service. Our food was for the most part good: nicely cooked and flavored swordfish, unique and tasty soup, nicely cooked porkchop, good flavor on the short ribs but they were way too fatty. The two people in our party who ordered it were left with a slab of fat on their plates. The service was the big letdown. Of 6 or us, only 5 got our initial cocktails. The 6th drink wasn't ordered by the waiter with the rest of ours and then when we asked where it was, he said the bar was super backed up. After at least minutes, we gave up on that cocktail as dinner was on it's way out to us. The wine we ordered to eat with dinner was served when we were halfway done with the food, and another drink for the non-wine drinker was never delivered at all. We really couldn't decide if the waiter was new and overwhelmed, ready to quit or really just didn't care about good service. Definitely a let down but it won't stop us from coming back and giving it another try, hopefully with a better waiter.

EDIT: I did have the opportunity to try Zuni Café again in October 2023, and I raised my overall review from 4 to 5 stars because my dinner service was exceptional. Everything I had was delicious, from cocktail to starter to main dish. I did end up trying the famous roast chicken, and I will say that the chicken itself was good (albeit a bit dry, but that's just the consequences of roasting a bird whole) but the warm bread salad it was served on was even more spectacular. I might just have to try and reverse engineer the recipe myself lol. I will also add on that I did not manage to snag a reservation this time around, but they do take walk-ins and we were able to secure a table pretty much right away. . . . To preface my review, I will say that I dined here solo back in November 2022, so the dishes I had are a reflection of the menu at the time. I went for dinner because I had heard really great things and Zuni Café is apparently well known amongst foodies so I had high expectations. The atmosphere was really nice, the music was soft and the lighting was warm and inviting. I never had to ask for more water as my glass was being replenished often, and my server was attentive and made sure that I was having a good experience. I had ordered rabbit leg, and while the mashed potatoes it was served with were absolutely delicious, the rabbit itself was undercooked. I had to send it back in fear of getting sick from eating undercooked meat. One of the gentlemen at the table adjacent to me had also ordered the rabbit, and had received it undercooked as well, so I was disappointed that it wasn’t just a one-off mishap. Luckily the waiter apologized and took it back to be fired up again, and brought out some bread on the house which was tasty and kept me satisfied while I waited for my dish to come back. I felt well taken care of even though I was dining solo on a busy night, and I would like to come back again to try a different seasonal menu and give Zuni Café a well deserved chance for redemption.