Oishii Cafe

Not memorable.

What a waste of $ 7… running from the gym back to work for a meeting and I popped in thinking ‘its been here forever, can’t be bad.’ Ugh famous last words… This is pretty bad for Japanese, makes the place on 1^st street seem like a top of the line place. So disappointing, the chicken is tasteless, the salad dressing is awful, first time that has ever happened at a Japanese place. Ugh, live and learn. Never again!

Value: better than other Japanese cafes
Place: really small and only take out
Hours: they open pretty early in the morning
Service: decent, quick pick up and go place
Flavor: eh, It’s alright

I might be biased because this place is located right next to my work building, but I come here for my fast, quick sushi fix. Their sushi selection (usually includes spicy tuna, salmon, and rainbow rolls along with some nigiri) goes by pretty quickly, so come here before 11:30AM and you should be fine. It comes with a small cup of piping hot miso soup also :) They take card too

I just so happened to walk by during my lunch break. Cold sushi on a hot SF day sounded perfect to me. I already knew the selection would be limited due to the size of this storefront. But to my suprise I only had a choice of 2 different small sushi trays. (Literally there were only 2 trays left on the shelf) a california roll or a spicy tuna roll. I went with the cali roll since i was just a little iffy about the color of the tuna. Turns out it was only a few bucks and came with a free miso soup. Bummer for the soup burn I later obtained after sitting down to consume my lunch. The top of the hot cup the soup was in didn’t fit and fell off onto my lap along with the soup. Meh, it was worth a shot at Oishii

Unless by teriyaki burger and fries you mean flavorless dry beef and pieces of stale cardboard then your menu is horribly misleading. I don’t understand how anyone could ever make a sober decision to eat here more than once. If you want a cheap burger and fries then walk around the block and there is this place called McDonalds that is infinitely better than Oishii Café.

I might try again, but when I went the cashier was chatting with two other customers (it’s not a big place so it’s not like I could be overlooked). When she finally decided to address me, she looked through the curtain to the kitchen — came back and said «I’m sorry, the kitchen is closed.»
On second thought, the first impression was bad enough — I won’t be back.

Good value and decent quality for the price (and NOT cash-​only, as another poster had said). Just about everything is under $ 7. I work in the same building as Kamakura across the street, which also does carry-​out sushi and udon, and I still brave crossing Market to get to this place. Flavor-​wise, Oishii beats Kamakura hands down. At least their sushi is refrigerated, and therefore not warm. I think their skinless chicken udon is actually pretty good. I like the way that the chicken is sitting on top of everything when you first open up the takeaway container, and so you really get a chance to taste the grilled flavor. Plus the chicken isn’t too dry or too soggy or too fatty. I also like their unadon (unagi bowl). Overall, not bad. I eat here at least once a week.
Food/​valuewise, it’s really a 3, but I think the guy who works there is super-​friendly, and my food comes out pretty quickly for it being freshly-​made, so I’m bumping up to a 4.
Also, they DO take Visa/​Mastercard, as I was able to pay for lunch with my MC today.

Until I ate here I didn’t realize it was possible to actually create a bland flavorless dish of teriyaki chicken over rice, nor completely draw out all the flavor of vegetables.
No seating so got to go. When I got back to my office and opened up the box I found it was around 90% rice (no sauce), with a tiny piece of chicken rubber cut in 5 strips on one end, with a little bit of sauce that barely covered a few grains of the rice underneath… while on the other was a few steamed bits of broccoli and carrot bits.
So for $ 6 you are basically getting a box of steamed white rice.
But if you are on an extreme diet I suppose it could be worth it.

OMG people !!! You know how you go to certain food spots and they have some good things on the menu and not so awesome things on the menu. Well Oishii happens to be one of those places. You go there for the Teriyaki Burgers not the rice or udon dishes. They have the best burgers in my opinion cause they add lots of condiments and the sauce mixture is amazing. Don’t order the udon or the rice dishes. Go for the Burgers.
And me being trying to be a health nut, though I still order a burger, any ways I always ask them to give me a salad or miso soup instead of the fries. They don’t mind. I rather go to have burgers at Oishii then Bistro burger which seems to always be pricey.

chicken teriyaki bowl was like rubber chicken on top of soggy rice. No thanks!

I’ve only had the burger so I can’t speak to the quality of the other food.
It’s about the size of a closet and it’s cash only, so i’m not sure what I would expect (although, I guess super tasty hole in the wall waiting to be discovered comes to mind. Oishii is not that place).
I like their burgers, especially with the teriyaki sauce. They put mayo on all their burger though, so if you aren’t a mayo fan, you need to specifically ask for no mayo. Why can’t you just say plain? Well, they don’t really speak english there, so specificity is needed.

Wow, such bad reviews. I can’t speak to the Japanese food. However the buger and fries deal is pretty good. I ordered at the walk up street window. It was a quality cheese burger and good portion of well cooked fries, no complaints.

Deserves 0 stars.
Super crappy, low quality food.
Oh sure $ 5.95 for a teriyaki bowl looks good on paper but when they serve it up. BLEH!
What kind of chicken breast do they have there? It tastes like rubbery mystery meat.
And the teriyaki sauce actually wasn’t that bad tasting but apparently there is a teriyaki sauce drought because I had to look under a grain of rice to find it.
And how can you screw up steamed broccoli? By steaming old bitter broccoli that is past it’s expiration date!
I was starving and hate wasting $ so I just ate the steamed rice.
I wish I would have consulted Unilocal but I thought it was hard to screw up something so simple.

This place is located a few steps from the BART station, so I would occasionally stop by for one of their muffins. There has been a change in proprietors and now a young woman sells their food. I noticed a couple of times that the muffin was dry, so I asked her if she sold day-​old muffins and surprisingly, she said yes. She actually thought it was OK to sell a stale muffin at full price. So, now you’re warned. If stale food is your thing, that’s the place to go.

I tried their chicken udon, and it must’ve been spiked with a sedative because all I wanted to do for the next 2 hours was go home and take a nap. Not good for a workday lunch!
Kudos for very friendly service. But the udon was not particularly good. The chicken cubes tasted processed, even though they didn’t look like they were. Veggie selection was a bit said (just brocooli and carrots). I should’ve walked a few more blocks and gone to Miyabi instead for udon that is both better and cheaper.

I come here in the mornings to get my usual: sugar-​free red bull & a container of fruit. $ 5 = just what the doctor ordered.
Well… my doctor probably wouldn’t tell me to stay out late on worknights, stay up late chatting on the phone, OR subsist on sugar-​free red bull, black coffee, and gardenburger patties.
But, then again, he never had to stare at a closet filled with suits and decide which ones are too snug across the ass.

Two Stars. I like Japanese food, and I’ve now been to Japan where the Japanese food is beyond anything I have ever tasted in the States, which is to be expected. That’s OK — because it’s Japan, and I have different expectations for different kinds of Japanese restaurants. This is one of the cheapy, take-​out ones where, sadly, you generally don’t set the bar very high.
I just think it’s over priced for what you get — a bed of rice, maybe a piece of a chicken breast with sauce, and 12 pieces of veggies. For $ 6.50? Way over priced. Especially since the food is just bearly average. You can get better Japanese food at this price in the FiDi, and really, you can also get cheaper. The lady who ran the front counter was nice, however, and didn’t make me feel like I was wasting her time– though I did get the feeling that she wanted me to wait outside.
Don’t think I’ll be back…

I work in the building. my lazy ass couldn’t be bothered to walk 1.5 blocks to the next acceptable japanese place, so i just sucked it up and called downstairs to order my food. despite knowing that the food would suck from my experiences at the embarcadero center, i decided against my better judgment. our conversation went as follows:
me: «so what kind udon do you have?»
oishii: «beef, chicken, and vegetable.»
me: «so, are there any veggies in the beef udon?»
oishii: «yes.»
me: «ok, i’ll have the beef and vegetable udon.»
oishii: «so you’ll have one beef and one vegetable udon?»
me: (with a silent DOH! and a slap to my forehead) «NO. i’ll just have the beef udon.»
so after a teeth-​pulling ordeal to order a beef WITH vegetable udon, i went downstairs to get my food, only to be told that it’s CASH ONLY. the closest ATM is 2 blocks away. this completely defeated the purpose of me choosing this crappy hole-​in-​the wall over the semi-​decent place 2 blocks down that actually takes credit card! AH!

A small, and I mean small, satellite café of the larger restaurant at 4 Embarcadero Center. I made the mistake of trying their chicken teriyaki bowl ($ 5.95+tax) for lunch. Mazui — the antonym for Oishii — would be the appropriate Japanese word. The chicken quality was poor and the worst of it was their sweet industrial tasting teriyaki sauce that tasted more like French dressing.
To be fair, I still need to try their Sumo Burger, which some Unilocalers wrote positive reviews about, to accurately rate this place.