"Fast casual" is the latest sweetheart term of the culinary world, designating an eatery that's somewhere between fast food and traditional casual dining. Chipotle is the restaurant used to exemplify the term for people like me who don't entirely understand it, but SOMA's Origami Market has undoubtedly perfected it.
Origami Market is the brainchild of local restaurateur Kash Feng, who has spent years working on a way to bring healthy, Japanese/Asian-inspired food to the masses. Sitting across the street from Zynga, and adjacent to sister restaurant Omakase, Feng's latest venture is in the perfect spot to compete with the free lunches offered by neighboring tech companies.
And compete it does (not that anyone is trying to give me free lunches). I stopped in for a meal less than a week after Origami opened to see what fast-casual Japanese food looks like. My first impression was of a clean, spacious restaurant with helpful staff and delightful origami-inspired decorations. Definitely not Chipotle.
The menu is deceptively large, by which I mean there's only a handful of listed items, but everything can be mixed and matched with four homemade sauces. Each combination is meant to take you on a different sauce journey, if you will.
I ordered a crowd favorite, the Wafu Chicken Noodle Soup ($13.50), which is a Japanese re-imagining of Vietnamese pho. It was phenomenal (pho-nomenal?) when paired with tangy-sweet Sriracha, the freshness of the ingredients coming through loud and clear. (Another patron was so intrigued he even came over to ask what I had ordered.) I particularly enjoyed the Chicken Kumayaki ($15.95), one of Origami's signature bowls. The pan-seared chicken was cooked perfectly and generously portioned with udon noodles, all of which went well with the yuzu pepper sauce.
Everything from the beet salad ($9.95) to the smoked salmon rolls ($8.95) smacked of Asian cuisine, but the fact that everything is proudly organic, vegan, gluten-free, or a combination of all three made it decidedly San Franciscan.
People outside San Francisco and Silicon Valley may question why someone would spurn a free lunch at work in favor of $15 Asian-inspired food, but we all know there's no such thing as a free meal. Ditch the Golden Arches and head to Origami Market for truly healthy, fresh, and tasty food.
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