Rosamunde Sausage Grill in San Francisco, California: A Restaurant Review

Rosamunde Sausage Grill is a fixture of the Haight neighborhood in San Francisco, located at 545 Haight Street (in what was once the "real Haight" but is now kinda just a touristy mess.) The name tells you up front what you can expect from the menu; sausage sandwiches, and nothing but. Total sausage fest.

Actually, there's one exception. For some reason, only on Tuesday afternoons, they make a 1/2 pound cheeseburger served on ciabatta bread for $5.50. It's one of the biggest, best burgers you can grab in the area. Shame that they only do it up once a week.

For the rest of the week, it's sausage sandwiches. $5.50 gets you one of these sandwiches, and there's a ton of varieties. Unless you're some kind of world-travelling sausage aficionado, there will be some flavor here that you've never tried before. If you've never had anything but Jimmy Dean, get ready for a whole new experience. The one to try just for novelty is the wild boar, which is apparently actually made from a wild boar. I dunno if it was hunted down, but one would assume so given the "wild" designation. In spite of the trouble someone apparently had to go to, this costs no more than any other meal here. You can also get chicken smoked with cherries, chicken smoked with habanero and tequila, beer sausage, Merguez (lamb & beef), duck sausage with figs, smoked lamb with sun-dried tomato and potato, Nuernberger Bratwurst, Italian, Hungarian, Andouille Cajun, Knockwurst, Weisswurst (veal with onions and leeks), and even a vegan organic spicy sausage. The menu clearly leans toward the spicy side, but the chicken and duck sausages are pretty mild if you aren't in the mood for an inflamed mouth.

You get two free toppings with each sausage. The grilled onions and sweet peppers are usually the way to go, but the sauerkraut and beef chili are also both good enough to be tempting. The one weak point here is that sides are a little short. You can get a bag of chips, some potato salad (at 2.50), or a lone pickle at an astounding one dollar. There's also really not much space in which to eat in, but there's always Golden Gate Park right nearby for a picnic, and the adjoining bar Toronado (divey place with some fairly good beer at semi-high prices) is amenable to people bringing their food over as long as they buy something to drink there.

Possibly the coolest deal here is that you can buy their sausages uncooked for about $2 each and take them home to whip up your own breakfast or sausage sammie. Be aware that a can of soda is outrageously priced at 1.50 though, so you might want to hit Walgreens before or after if you're taking your meal out to the park instead of boozing it up in Toronado. They are also open all seven days of the week from 11:30 in the morning to 10:00 at night.