Golden Horse Restaurant in San Francisco, CA: A Review

The Golden Horse Restaurant is situated in a very good location in San Francisco, at the intersection of two cable car lines and next to popular bar the Hyde-Out. This turns out to be an important factor in evaluating the restaurant, as it explains how they can charge so much for such bad food and still manage to stay in business.

So my policy on restaurant reviews these days is this: even if I hate the place, I'll go back at least one more time, just to be thorough. On the first trip, I order a personal favorite or just whatever I'm in the mood for at the moment. On the second trip, I'll look up whatever people who are praising the restaurant are recommending, and try that.

My first trip to the Golden Horse actually came when I intended to go to Sam's Chinese, but didn't realize they were closed on Sundays, so I was left casting about for affordable Chinese take-out in the Polk Gulch area. I played it safe on my first visit with an order of sweet and sour chicken and steamed rice on the side. The entree was $7 and the rice was a little over $1, but they cooked the order from the back and didn't take it out of steam trays, so I figured it to be at least decent. Boy, was I wrong. The chicken, first of all, was a whole lot of Fried with not a lot of Chicken. What little there was was tough, stringy rib meat, complementing perfectly the overly fried, razor-like texture of the breading. And it was so tough, the flimsy plastic fork that they gave me broke while trying to spear a piece of it! As if that wasn't hard enough to get down, both the pineapple and bell pepper tasted "off." They didn't look rotten, but they tasted like maybe they had been sitting out too long. And the "sweet and sour" sauce just appeared to be orange jelly, probably the same stuff they use for Orange Chicken. The steamed rice was alright, but it's pretty tough to screw up steamed rice.

For my second trip I went with a friend for the sit-down dine-in experience. The decor is simple but clean and pleasant, and the lady serving was very nice and attentive. But the food? Pretty much the same experience. This time I gave the Moo Shu Pork a run. The pork was bland, flavorless and chewy, and the veggies had that same "off" taste about them. Dining companion had a veggie dish that was reported as also "not so fresh tasting" and "overly salty."

I'm left with the conclusion that this place basically feeds off of tourist traffic by day and drunkard bar-goers by night, and really could care less about food quality. There's plenty of restaurants like that in San Francisco. I guess if you want good Chinese on a Sunday around here, it's either call for delivery or truck on out of the neighborhood. This place is serving up the sort of crappy steam tray food you get for $4 in less expensive neighborhoods, but charging almost 2x as much for it. The funny thing is, I see a lot of Asian people eating here and raving about it on Yelp, which is usually the sign of a good Chinese restaurant. So I wonder if they don't have a separate crap bin they serve the gwailos from. Whatever the case is, this honky can't recommend it.