Good Taste: SF Restaurant Week's best deals

Good Taste helps you eat well in the Bay Area. This week, we present our picks for the most appealing brunch, lunch, and dinner deals during SF Restaurant Week (Fri/8-November 17).

Golden Gate Restaurant Association's SF Restaurant Week is an ambitious effort, with 203 eateries offering exclusive prix fixe meals for special prices. It has grown significantly over the years, and has 33 new participants for 2024. Brunch and lunch with two or more courses are available for $10, $15, $25, $35, and $45. Three or more course dinners cost $30, $45, $60, $75, and $90. Tax and tip aren't included. Most participating restaurants are in San Francisco, but there are a few repping other parts of the Bay as well.

I scoured the SF Restaurant Week website in order to make recommendations for each price point, but some participants haven't published their menus online as of this writing.

Brunch/lunch

There may be more $10 deals out there, but so far, there's just one that's been published: a choice of three 10-inch pizzas with a drink for lunch at Valencia Pizza & Pasta (801 Valencia Street). Unlike the other selections presented here, I haven't personally tried this spot, but they are a perennial favorite of 48 Hills editors.

Chef Dontaye Ball's Gumbo Social (5176 Third Street) is offering the best value lunch for $15: eight ounces of gumbo (vegan, smoked turkey, or chicken and sausage), half of a huge po' boy sandwich (jackfruit, shrimp, shredded pork, or sausage), and a half order of Cajun fries. The best free hot sauce bar in town is a bonus for visiting the restaurant, which opened in June 2023. No one is touching this deal!

Early To Rise (1801 McAllister Street) is a brunch restaurant that opened in February where everything possible is made from scratch. Their $25 brunch deal includes a warm sugar donut and coffee, plus the choice of eggs Benedict with house-smoked Canadian bacon (or spinach) and the best grits in town, or strawberry pancakes with macerated strawberries, crème fraïche, strawberry-maple syrup, pistachio-hazelnut brittle, and chocolate mint.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to have brunch at Chef Carlos Altamirano's newest Peruvian-Californian restaurant, the not-quite two-month-old Altamirano (1775 Fulton Street), and was particularly impressed by the robust flavors of the Charlie Cheeseburger, with grass-fed beef, pepper jack cheese, caramelized onions, and roasted chile rocoto aioli. It's normally $26 on its own, but appears as an entree choice on the $35 brunch menu for the next two weekends. The meal also comes with a mimosa and a choice of two desserts (chicha brulée or algorrobo crumb cheesecake). There are several good looking $35 brunch and lunch deals happening during SF Restaurant Week; it's perhaps the best category to browse on the SF Restaurant Week site, but this is the one that really jumps out at me from recent experience.

Also available just during the two Saturdays and Sundays of SF Restaurant Week, Abacá (2700 Jones Street) has the standout $45 brunch offering, with a sarap sampler of buttered pandesal rolls, spreads, oysters, yellowtail amberjack sarciado, and lumpia and a choice of lechon pork belly arroz caldo, chicken tocino silog, or autumn crepe, with supplementary entrees and desserts available (pro tip: never skip dessert here). I wish I could eat it as I am typing; the Filipino restaurant inside the Kimpton Alton Hotel in Fisherman's Wharf is a personal favorite.

Fiery Hot Pot and Grill (2333 Irving Street), one of the relative youngsters among the restaurant hordes on Irving in the Outer Sunset, is offering a lobster and meat hot pot set or lobster tail and tabletop KBBQ set with banchan or veggies and rice and dessert for a smooth $30. Hot pot can easily be $50-plus without even blinking, so this could be a good one for fans of these communal formats.

The legendary Zen vegetarian restaurant Greens (Building A, 2 Marina Boulevard) has always been relatively expensive, making the $45 dinner prix fixe for SF Restaurant Week an opportune time to try it. There are three courses (arugula salad, pumpkin lasagna or Tassajara wild mushroom terrine, and Meyer lemon cake) as well as an amuse bouche, a potato croquette with crème fraïche and seaweed caviar. And it feels so good to sit in that room and gaze at the water by Fort Mason.

The SF Restaurant Week website mistakenly lists the dinner special at the Richmond District Vietnamese hotspot Lily (225 Clement Street) as $75, but if you click on the menu, it says that the three-course prix fixe (with optional add-ons) is $60. Choose from an amuse of Vietnamese beef carpaccio, a smoked salmon and strawberry roll, or jackfruit "pizza" (the latter is a must-have, IMHO). Everyone gets beef pho as an appetizer and a choice of seven entrees including curry clams and mussels, broken rice pork chop plate, shaking filet of beef salad, and a personal obsession: turmeric catfish. I'd eat here every week if money was no object.

As we move into the two upper price points, I really want to be blown away with a dinner that costs $75, and I know also from recent experience that the $75 family style tasting menu at Chef Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz's Dalida (101 Montgomery Street, Suite 100) can do it since it's generally part of their regular offerings for the same price. The special version for SF Restaurant Week includes five courses, some with multiple components: a snack platter with mussel dolma, Nixtamalized butternut squash with goat cheese, and Fort Bragg cod chin with taramosalata; breads and spreads, a real highlight of the Mediterranean restaurant since its June 2023 opening; octopus and cod kakavia, a dumpling dish in broth; Berkshire pork collar souvlaki with Shasta County porcini mushrooms, crispy saffron rice, and barberries; and phyllo cake with bay leaf-orange syrup and kaymak ice cream. Definitely dreamy!

I think Chef Tracy Goh's delightful Malaysian restaurant Damansara (1781 Church Street) is the $90 dinner winner here, with two different Dungeness crab combos to consider that feed two people. One is a whole crab with a choice of black pepper sauce, chili sauce with tamarind and fermented soybean sauce, or salted egg and cream cereal sauce (my favorite), served with crab butter baked rice with crab meat and fried mantou buns and an option to get 20% off select drinks. The other is a crab-heavy cioppino with jumbo prawns, clams, calamari, and fish cake (with the baked rice and mantou), a special that's not usually available, but sounds incredible.