Blog/2025-02-13/Sarap Shop

Monday was Julie's first day of maternity leave so we thought we'd walk down the street and have lunch somewhere together. We originally intended to go to Oren's Hummus but on the way there we saw this placard for The Sarap Shop on 4th street and decided to go check it out. If I'm honest, I've seen this sign many times but I've never seen the shop that it refers to. They must close before the time I walk down that street.

Anyway, we got lucky this day and it was open! It's one of those post-COVID restaurants that is a small storefront, two tables, a small merch section, and instructions for Doordash drivers. This is fairly typical these days in SF since we have lots of those delivery drivers dressed like ninjas on e-bikes transporting food all around the city.

The menu itself is quite sparse which I like. They have a few big hitters and then not much else. We ordered:

• Mini Adobo Rice Bowl and Halo Halo milk
• Lechon Sisig Rice Bowl

I'm not a big fan of Italian food so we gave that part of their menu a miss.

What we got was honestly delicious: the sauce in the container was a lightly spicy aioli-ish thing that was terrific with the rice and meat. The Halo Halo had a lot of the chopped-up jelly in it of the right consistency. I think a little more rice wouldn't have gone amiss, and I'm not generally a huge fan of pickled vegetables but those were good too. Overall, a pretty good outcome for a quick walk around the block.

I never know what to tip for a place where you bus your own tables and they just make the food behind the shop. It seems right to tip nothing, but the standard is 20% so I'm just going to count that as part of the price which came out to $37.75 altogether.

The area around 4th and Stillman isn't exactly Pleasantness Supreme.

There are sometimes far more tents than these here, but ever since the days of the ASEAN conference, the city has been pretty quick about rooting them out. They put up the warning poster telling them they'll be offered shelter and then told to buzz off and then the next day the tent is gone.

At one point that entire area was an entire tent city with bicycles in various states of disassembly and lots of smoking of all varieties. Nowadays it's a straight smooth sidewalk to walk on.