Green Garden Restaurant in San Francisco, California: A Review

The two block area that Green Garden Restaurant occupies in San Francisco's North Beach consists of a party hostel, two or three strip clubs, a tattoo parlor, a head shop, a couple of dive bars, a couple of sex toy shops and a couple of SROs. So you'd probably think this isn't the area of town to search for haute cuisine, and you'd be absolutely correct. With all the other eateries basically being greasy crapholes with high prices to take advantage of all the drunk people who regularly stumble through here at night, however, by being decent the Green Garden Restaurant wins the area and looks fantastic by comparison to everything near it.

Lunch specials are the best deal here, and they actually serve them from 10:30 a.m. all the way to 11:20 at night. Lunches range in price from 5.95 to 6.50 and include sesame chicken, spicy basil chicken, cashew broccoli chicken, lemon chicken, garlic chicken, string bean chicken, Mongolian beef, broccoli beef, beef with snow peas, beef with black bean sauce, royal pork, sweet and sour pork and chicken, hunan lamb, scallops with garlic sauce, prawn with snow pea and pine nut, spicy eggplant with shrimp and chicken, kung pao vegetables, asparagus with salmon, Peking style pork spare ribs, and Satay beef among others.

The full menu (also available all day) is a little more extensive and includes appetizers, salads, soups and larger dinner servings at about $9 to $10 per entree. They also offer two "family style" dinners in different sizes, in three sizes ranging from about twenty to forty bucks each.

Delivery hours are from 10:30 to 10:30 every day except for Sunday, when they only deliver from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at night. Their delivery territory is North Beach, Chinatown, the Financial District and a bit beyond, you can place an order through their website and also check if you are covered for delivery. The minimum is a bit high at twenty bucks, however, but they do consistently seem to bring it within 30 to 40 minutes without fail. You can also call ahead for pick-up and those orders are usually ready in about ten minutes.

All in all, nothing I've tried on the menu has been stellar, but everything has been at least decent and sometimes surprisingly good. They don't do the heat lamp thing, it's all prepared as you order, so you're assured of at least that much. If you're in the delivery area and have someone to split with, or just stuck working or living nearby, it's worth checking out at least once to see how it grabs you.

Green Garden Restaurant
434 Broadway St.
San Francisco, CA 94133
# 415-392-8338
http://greengardensf.com/