Start with the correction, because it saves an evening. For three years the default answer to "where do I get hand rolls in San Francisco" was Handroll Project at 598 Guerrero Street, the casual little sister to a Michelin-starred sushi bar, where five rolls cost $36 and seven cost $55. It closed in August 2025. The space became a burger counter from the same owners, and that closed too, in May 2026. If a guide is still sending you to Guerrero and 18th for temaki, it has not been updated in over a year. The good news is that the format survived the shop. A casual sushi night here is now a walk-in proposition spread across three neighborhoods, and the thing that decides how it goes is not the fish. It is the hours.
Tell Karpo which neighborhood you are starting in and roughly when you want to sit down, and it will tell you which of these counters is open tonight, which one is already deep in a queue, and what to do with the twenty minutes while you wait.
Russian Hill: Saru Handroll Bar, 2206 Polk Street
Saru Handroll Bar is the most single-minded room on this list: it is a bar where you eat hand rolls, and that is essentially the entire proposition. No reservations are taken. You walk in, you are given an assigned stool, and you order by pencilling your choices onto a paper menu and handing it back — no server recitation, no tablet. The menu runs a la carte alongside sets of three, four and five rolls, built around salmon, tuna and yellowtail with green onion, plus shrimp tempura, eel and uni. Hours are unusually generous for sushi: noon to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, and noon to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. One search trap worth knowing: look up "Saru" and you will surface a Russian Hill sushi-bar listing at this same Polk Street address marked closed. That is the previous concept in the space. The operating business at 2206 Polk is the handroll bar.
Hayes Valley: Domo, and the Tuesday Trap
Domo at 511 Laguna Street is the smallest room in this guide and the one most likely to defeat a spontaneous plan. It is closed on Tuesdays — a fact that trips up more people than any other detail in Hayes Valley, because the neighborhood's theatre and symphony schedules push a lot of dinner traffic to exactly the nights Domo is dark. The rest of the week splits into two shapes. Monday, Wednesday and Sunday it opens at 5 p.m. and runs to 9:30 p.m. Thursday it opens at noon and runs to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday it opens at noon and runs to 10 p.m. So the only midday hand roll option in Hayes Valley exists Thursday through Saturday, and nowhere else in the week. Plan lunch around that or skip it.
Inner Sunset: Two Counters, Two Very Different Waits
Ebisu, on the corner of 9th Avenue and Irving at 1283 9th Avenue, is the closest thing the Inner Sunset has to an institution, and it does not take reservations in any form. There is a paper waitlist by the door and that is the whole system — the line is part of the experience, and on Friday and Saturday it is a long one. Ebisu runs Tuesday through Saturday only, with lunch roughly 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and dinner 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.; it is dark Monday and Sunday. Two blocks down at 408 Irving Street, Koo runs a very different clock. It serves Monday through Saturday from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Sunday, and its own website posts a last call of 8:40 p.m. — arrive at 8:45 and you are not getting fed, no matter what the closing time says. Koo also skips the big booking platforms and points reservations at a Google Form, and its happy hour runs until 6:30 p.m. for eat-in guests only, which makes a 5:30 p.m. arrival the value play of the block.
When Casual Is Not What You Want: Robin
Robin at 620 Gough Street in Hayes Valley gets folded into casual sushi guides constantly, and it does not belong there. Chef Adam Tortosa's room has been running since 2017 on a pricing model most restaurants would not risk: you sit down, you are asked to pick a number between $119 and $219, and the chefs build your menu to that figure. It is loud, it is contemporary, it involves things like caviar on potato chips, and it is a planned evening rather than a stool you drop onto after work. Useful to know it exists on the same few blocks as Domo, though — if the small room is dark on a Tuesday, the upgrade is two minutes away.
If you want to run all of it as one night rather than one dinner, the sequence that works is Polk Street early, because Saru opens at noon and turns fast, then a drink in Russian Hill, then a late seating in Hayes Valley on a night Domo is open. Sake and beer are the standard pours at every counter here, and the walk between Polk Street and Hayes Valley is steeper than it looks on a map. Please drink responsibly, and take a ride rather than the hills if the sake list got away from you.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #SushiNearMe #HandRolls #Temaki #SaruHandrollBar #Domo #Ebisu #Koo #HayesValley #RussianHill
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Ask Karpo first
Casual sushi is the category where published information goes stale fastest. These are small rooms with thin margins: they close on a weekday nobody expects, they cut last call twenty minutes before the posted close, they move bookings from a platform to a Google Form, and sometimes — as at 598 Guerrero — they close entirely while the guides keep recommending them. None of that shows up in a search result until months later. Before you cross the city for a hand roll, ask Karpo. It checks whether the counter is open tonight, how deep the walk-in list already is, and which nearby room to pivot to if the door is dark.
