Continuing our Japanese West Coast dining tour, we tried a popular vegan “sushi” restaurant, Shizen.
Located in a newer building on the corner of 14th and Valencia in San Francisco’s rapidly gentrifying Mission District, Shizen sells itself as a new way of thinking about sustainable sushi. As a meat-eater, I’d been a big fan of their Tataki Canyon sushi shoppe in Glen Park, a wonderful, but now defunct sushi joint that pioneered the idea of a restaurant serving solely sustainable fish, so we were eager to try this new concept, which takes that idea to it’s dramatic, ultimate reality if we don’t change our ways.
We managed to get one of their early reservations, and apparently this place is the deal, because there was a decent group of people waiting for them to open at five. There seemed to be a lot of rules about getting and keeping a table, and that’s always an early sign to me that things may be less than spectacular.
We started off with the gyoza, because gyoza. I get them everywhere I go and these were quite good. Especially once we paused to remind ourselves that these were vegan. Nice.
The food kept coming: Wakame Sunomono – a delicious seaweed salad, the shizen poke, which I liked a whole lot more than I’d thought I would. I started off by saying that if they slapped their name on it, it would probably be good and it really was. Firm, seared and marinated tofu chunks were a fine substitute for the fatty fish and the other sesame flavor was there. It was good. I’d have eaten much more of it. The corn yakimono tasted like it had previously been frozen. I had better corn at home last week. I wouldn’t have served this stuff to people.
The chilled oden was a nice palate cleanser. Delicately braised vegetables in a chilled broth slowed down the meal a bit. The Shizen Shiitake were nice and for a moment, again, I thought I was eating a crab-stuffed mushroom. Good. Finally, we all shared two of their rolls, the Colonel’s Pipe,
which has the most insane smoked beets draped across the top. I really enjoyed this roll. We also tried the Prime Suspect, which was quite good. Not my favorite, but my dining companions rather enjoyed it. What a great concept and how nice was it to be able to eat everything on this menu. I don’t think I would eat here once a month, but definitely once a quarter if I could swing it. Fun experience. Great food.
VegScore: 100% – entirely vegan food.