Inga Donuts in San Francisco, CA: A Restaurant Review

Inga Donuts is in a tough area to be serving up grill breakfast, Chinese food and donuts. They've got both cheap and good options for all of these all withing walking distance right around them, competing for their dollars. So it seems that their strategy to survive is simply to be the cheapest possible option. Unfortunately, they get to being the cheapest option by cutting quality as much as possible.

First of all, the place really shouldn't have "donut" in the title considering donuts are basically an afterthought. There's a tiny little case of them - nothing to compete with the selection at Bob's Donuts, Donuts And Things, or even the Krispy Kreme case across the street at Cala. The place is mostly about steam tray Chinese food for lunch, with a small menu of grilled breakfast items.

In both cases, the ingredients are pretty much the cheapest thing they could get from CostCo, and the preparation is apparently done in the most cost-effective way. For example, in the case of the "hash brown" that comes with breakfast, it's one of those potato patties that come in a pack of ten for like $2, and it looks like they half-cooked it in a toaster. The eggs are alright, but the sausages are tiny, burnt links that look like the $1 microwave kind. Granted it's only about $3 for all this, which is as cheap as it gets, but you're really scraping the bottom for quality just to save a buck or three.

Lunch isn't much better - rice or chow mein, the chow mein appearing to just be Ramen noodles, with a few items like teriyaki chicken, orange chicken, meatballs and steamed veggies. This is likewise ultra cheap at about $4 for rice or chow mein and an entree, but again you are seriously getting what you pay for.

The people who run it seem nice enough, the interior is decently clean, the times I've visited or passed by I always see families in there having a good old time. I don't think the place is trying to be an awful restaurant on purpose, but the "just do everything as cheaply as possible and try to charge less than everyone else" strategy they seem to be employing just doesn't work for me. I'd rather pay a few more bucks and actually get something edible and satisfying.