Izakaya Roku

Loved them for small plates during pre-COVID days, but I love them for takout in a COVID world too! Great prices for very high quality food. Ramen makes for great takeout, as they give you the soup in a separate container that you can pour over your dish when you get home, to keep it as fresh as possible. How they perfectly cook their medium-boiled eggs, I have no idea!

A guy walks into a Japanese restaurant thinking it is a ramen bar. Turns out it's Japanese tapas, and there is a total of ONE ramen bowl featured on the menu. Uh oh, was the ramen an afterthought? Maybe this isn't a good idea; surely this won't end well....but ramen oh ramen, you never fail me! I slipped in on a weekday evening and was able to be seated immediately. Izakaya's menu features Japanese tapas, small dishes takoyaki, chicken karaage, and a slew of skewers like beef tongue and chicken thigh. After watching dish after dish come out of the kitchen, it's clear that people clearly love the tapas. Nevertheless, I resist the temptation and go for the ramen as originally intended. To my delight, the Tonkotsu ramen is absolute perfection. An earthy broth and al dente noodles are always the two essential elements that makes for a good bowl, but Izakaya has an option that takes this way over the top....crispy pork belly. Pork belly is always amazing, but deep frying it adds a contrast in texture that I've yet to experience...crispy exterior that then literally melts in your mouth once after one bite! There is also an apparent 'sweet' component in this pork...yet another beautiful contrast to the salt elements in the bowl. Does it sound heavenly? Well that's because it is! If you're going to feature only one Ramen option on the menu, you better do it right. As far as ramen goes, this is pretty hard to top. Izakaya has won this guy over. As far as the tapas goes, maybe one day we'll get to that...or maybe not :-)

I came here with some friends because we wanted something light to eat for dinner and we thought tapas style would be the perfect choice. To start off, we had the CHICKEN KARAAGE, which was so tender and one of the best I've ever had. The service was also amazing because they misheard and thought we ordered 2, but they were really nice and gifted it to us anyways. We also had a GRILLED BIG SQUID, which had great flavor and was really tender as well. I think the portion was pretty generous too. Since it sounded really interesting, we ordered the BACON MOCHI, which was surprisingly one of my favorite items there. They said that it was actually they're most popular item and I can see why. From the specials, we ordered the DUCK YAKITORI, which came with separate skewers for liver, breast, and gizzard. Everything was seasoned great and even though I'm usually not a fan of liver, I really enjoyed it. Also a special, we got the EGGPLANT, which was prepared really well and they managed to make one of my favorite vegetables taste even better. Lastly, we topped it off with a GREEN TEA CREME BRÛLÉE. The top was definitely crunchy, but I didn't think the green tea flavor was that strong and the inside was more fluffy and cake-like than custard-like. It's pretty unique if you want to try, but I think the dinner tapas were definitely my favorite part.

Overall, this is a decent izakaya place and I'd come here again. I had Saturday dinner here and the food was mixed - one of the items was fabulous, a couple were very good, one was good, one was lackluster and one was just horrible. (1). The Uni rice was just fabulous - it's basically Uni bibimbap. It took a bit of time but was well worth the wait. (2). The fried baby octopus and chicken skin yakitori were very good. Kudos on having the baby octopus on the menu and the chicken skin came out just perfectly crispy. (3). The chawanmushi was good, almost great. My only complaint is that the texture came out a bit too soft for me but the seafood inside it was perfect. An added plus for not being salty. (4). The gindara was lackluster - probably wasn't marinated long enough. There's so much better gindara in SF. (5). After the Uni rice, I needed something sweet and ordered the green tea panna cotta. That was just too soupy and they put too much syrup in it. This was close to inedible. Service was OK. With tax and tip, this was around $70 - a good value for money in SF these days. The menu here is quite expansive - they have sashimi, yakitori, fried items, ramen, udon and curries and A5 Wagyu. Looking forward to my next visit.

Really good Izakaya place to dine at! All the food I ordered was pretty good and I wanted to order other things on the menu, but wouldn't be able to finish it all. I guess I have to come back next time to order the other things on their menu because they all sounded so good! I really enjoyed the grilled beef tongue! It has a lot of flavor and great texture! I also thought all of the skewers I've ordered were great. I got the mochi bacon, beef short rib, scallop bacon, and chicken skin skewer. I also ordered a few more dishes, which were the uni rice, hamachi carpaccio, and tako wasabi. I feel like you can't go wrong anywhere with the tako wasabi. For the uni rice, I really love uni so I had to order it and I thought how it's great how it comes with an egg too! The hamachi carpaccio was very flavorful and tasted fresh! Overall, I was happy with all of the food I ordered. I also got a yuzu soda cocktail and I like how they have a bit of a selection to choose from. The cocktail tasted great! I originally called for a reservation and they told us that it would be at the bar because they had no more tables. I came in a bit earlier and saw that there were a lot of empty tables. I asked them if I could be seated at a table instead, but she said we had to follow the reservation? Hm...it was okay, though. The staff was pretty nice and checked up on us regularly!