Sunset Cantina - San Francisco

This place has no business being as good as it is. It’s obviously fusion food, but it’s GOOD fusion food. They make my favorite michelada in the city (when the bartender takes the times to make it correctly), my girlfriend loves the daiquiri slushy, and our go to’s for food are the Al pastor tacos, carne asada messy fries, and costillas.

I live in Seattle but have friends that live down the street from the Sunset. Such a nice, welcoming place with delicious food and a great atmosphere! If I lived in the neighborhood, I would be a regular. See you on my next SF visit.

Good food and a great environment. We sat in the patio and that was great for kids. Parking is rough, but otherwise it’s a great spot.

Short menu, bland food. I kept flipping to see if there were more food items on it somewhere else, but nope. The food we got was under-seasoned and not really recognizable as the dishes we supposedly were being served. We ordered the machete with carnitas, the elote, and the picadillo de carne tacos. The machete was decent, if short on flavor. The carnitas were tender but not recognizable as carnitas: I just got a slow cooked meat, not really any of the tangy caramel notes that are characteristic of carnitas. The elote…well, I’m not sure how they can call that elote: it was corn on the cob rolled in cheese. No mayonnaise, no chili, no lime except the little lime wedges we squeezed onto it. The picadillo was especially disappointing for me: it tasted like the ground beef tacos you had at taco night at home somewhere in Wisconsin in the 90s. Got the sense the meat MIGHT have been seasoned, but mostly all you tasted was ground beef and lettuce. Pickled veggies lacked any tang to stand up on their own against the beef grease. I couldn’t finish more than one of my tacos; my partner finished the second and agreed. We are definitely not going back.Atmosphere: loud. Standard trendy restaurant with a lot of tables elbow to elbow and no soft surfaces to absorb noise.Service: functional! We got food, we got drink, we paid, we left, without any complications or negative or positive service experiences.

This place is fun, but they add sneaky hidden charges to your bill and hope you won't notice. They charged me a 6% fee to cover employee benefits on top of the tip I paid. Last I checked, it's on the owner to take care of employee benefits, not me. They already charge their customers enough for food and basic service as it is.Make sure you get an itemized receipt and check all the charges before deciding how much to tip. Don't get ripped off.