The city is expensive, but your next meal doesn’t have to be. In our weekly column The $25 Diner, we hunt down the best restaurants where you can eat like royalty for a song.
“Do I look trendy to you?” asks Andre Larzul, the trim, shorts-wearing 60-year-old owner of Alamo Square Seafood Grill. “That’s not where this restaurant is going.”
Thankfully, the fact that there aren’t many surprises at this French-y spot, tucked between apartments on a residential stretch a block from Alamo Square, is part of the charm. For more than two decades, Larzul has kept roughly the same menu, lest his regulars fret that their favorite item has been swapped out for the latest culinary craze.
The floors are checkered linoleum. Inexplicably, a tree-size houseplant sits on the countertop, a little flag from Larzul’s native Brittany poking out.
But you’re not here to be wowed by the decor. You’re here for the nights when you hit the dining matrix: 1) You’re craving home cooking but don’t want to cook it yourself, 2) you don’t want to pay a lot for it, and 3) you’re sick of Souvla.
The food is the kind a French grandma might serve up on a Monday. Appetizers include mussels — served in white wine and garlic or with chorizo and a tomato cream sauce — escargot, tuna carpaccio, crispy calamari, lump crab cakes, soups and salads. For a main, you can choose from several types of fish — perhaps salmon, snapper or trout — that’s grilled, sauteed, poached or blackened (fittingly, an ’80s culinary trend that is no longer trendy). Add a sauce, such as garlic and parsley butter; tomatoes, capers and olives; green peppercorn with a red-wine reduction; béarnaise; or beurre blanc. Each preparation comes with roasted vegetables and perfectly cooked rice, every grain intact.
Larzul’s mother and grandmother were in the restaurant business, so the work is in his blood. He opened Alamo Square Seafood Grill in 1998 after training at another French stalwart, Cow Hollow’s beloved Baker Street Bistro, which closed in 2020 after 30 years. He wanted his restaurant to feel like a bistro in Paris, with simple, fresh fare.
“I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he notes.
He is also determined to keep his menu affordable. Almost every item comes in under $20. Better yet, every evening, he offers an early-bird prix-fixe menu (before 7 p.m. on weekdays and 6:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays) for $19.75. For this paltry sum, what diners receive is beyond generous: a soup or salad, a fish entree and dessert. (If dessert isn’t your thing, you can opt for just the entree and a glass of wine.)
On a recent Friday, a meal started with Larzul dropping off complimentary warm bread and a little bowl of garlicky oil with parsley and basil for dunking. The soup of the day was tomato with crispy croutons. The entree was a substantive filet of sauteed trout atop creamy beurre blanc, with rice and a side of roasted carrots, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. A generous helping of tiramisu with a crème anglaise and almonds sprinkled over the top was the dessert.
Like it is at many San Francisco restaurants, business is down by about half from before the pandemic, Larzul says. But he’s able to keep prices low thanks to his long-term relationships with local fishmongers, and because he himself does the bulk of the work.
“Before, I had much more of a managerial role,” he says. “Now, as you can see, I’m the waiter, the host, the busser, the water filler and the sommelier.”
Make a meal out of it:
💰 Prix-fixe menu (includes soup or salad, fish entree and dessert), $19.75
📍Alamo Square Seafood Grill, 803 Fillmore St., Alamo Square