This Michelin-starred lunch might be SF’s best restaurant bargain

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When I think of a bargain lunch, Angler, the Michelin-starred Embarcadero restaurant, isn’t where my mind goes. The waterfront restaurant — with its hulking hearth and walls covered in taxidermy, like a billionaire’s hunting cabin — is a destination for live-fire cooking and pricey seafood. It’s only slightly more approachable than sister restaurant Saison, where dinner begins at $328 per person.  

So I was delightfully surprised — shocked, even — to find that Angler might be offering the best value of any Michelin-starred restaurant in the city. That is, at lunch. 

In March, the restaurant rolled out the “Quick Catch” lunch menu (available Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 2:30 p.m.). At $45 for three courses, it will make you wonder if they’ve made a mathematical mistake. 

“It’s a great deal,” Angler chef de cuisine Joe Hou confirms with a wry chuckle. “I say it every time I see an invoice.” 

The prix-fixe menu starts with two Pacifica oysters, ferried through the dining room on a bed of pebbled ice and served with a kombu-infused riff on mignonette and “embered tomato,” a chile-spiked cocktail sauce made with slow-smoked Dirty Girl tomatoes. It’s a dainty way to begin a weekday lunch — a little treat, you might say, that’ll make you forget the emails piling up in your inbox. 

There are just two options for main courses, both of them eye-popping half-portions of Angler’s signature evening dishes: a whole sea bream ($65 at dinner) or a roasted chicken ($80 at dinner). 

Crispy blistered skin covers the mild white fish, which is grilled on an open hearth and served with a side of lightly sweet coconut and swarnadwipa, a bright and acidic Southeast Asian-inspired sauce made with lemongrass and a blast of lime. 

Angler’s roasted chicken is a master class in whole-bird cookery. Its preparation is a multi-day process similar to making Peking-style duck: brining, drying the skin and separating it from the meat before blanching twice. The result is an umber, shatteringly crisp exterior. “It’s probably the most intensive chicken [preparation] I’ve done,” Hou says. It comes with Angler’s version of “good ol’ American barbecue sauce” made with French’s yellow mustard, in the golden style of South Carolina. Both entrees come with a generous salad that’s hardly a side note: a pile of local lettuces — watercress, arugula, the kinds with extra oomph —dressed à la minute in a light vinaigrette.  

If you think there’s no room for dessert, I dare you to pass. Letting even a spoonful of Angler’s soft-serve sundae go to waste would be an insult to the dairy gods. The twisted tower of vanilla is coated in smoked caramel, a sprinkling of candied cocoa nibs and smoked sea salt. It’s both playful and distinctively adult.

Hou says the prix-fixe menu’s bargain-basement price point is meant to tempt people to Angler’s stretch of the waterfront, from which you can overlook the Bay Bridge and the Embarcadero. The views, too, are better in the daytime.

Angler