Lower Nob Hill Russian Restaurant: Sunday 15% Off at DACHA

DACHA Kitchen & Bar, at 1085 Sutter Street on the Lower Nob Hill side of the Tenderloin, serves dinner Wednesday through Sunday from 5pm to 9pm and takes reservations through OpenTable. It bills itself as a modern Eastern European restaurant rather than a Russian one, but the menu reads like a Moscow grandmother's Sunday table: piroshki, borsch, Olivier salad, cabbage rolls and a stroganoff. Every Sunday the whole bill is 15% off, which is the cheapest way in.

DACHA opened in November 2023, founded by Katya and Suki Skye, a Tiburon couple. The name is the Russian word for the summer cottages where many families, Katya's among them, spend the warm months, and the restaurant's own description leans into that idea of a second home built for rest, family and gathering. Suki designed the interior herself. Co-founder Tanya Ivanovich was born in Saint Petersburg and raised in Belarus, and brand chef Katya Pervushina trained in Moscow before cooking in California.

The team describes DACHA as queer- and women-owned and frames every meal as an invitation to slow down. That positioning matters if you are searching for a Russian restaurant in San Francisco: the cooking comes straight out of the Russian and Eastern European home kitchen, but the room is a California restaurant with a cocktail program, seasonal produce and a crowd that skews toward dinner dates and friends' birthdays rather than banquet tables. The restaurant has also used its stage for fundraising, including a Borsch & Beats fundraiser night for Ukraine.

Start with piroshki, which come in three versions: mushroom for $11, beef for $11, or egg and spring onion for $10. They are small enough that two people can split a pair and still have room. The borsch is slow-simmered with beef, beets, cabbage, potato and carrot, topped with sour cream and fresh dill, and costs $18 for a cup or $26 for a bowl. A cup is plenty if you are ordering a main.

The Olivier Salad is DACHA's take on the New Year's Eve classic, crowned with salmon roe, at $21 vegetarian or $26 with chicken. The headline main is the Sutter Stroganoff, $34: braised beef tongue with sautéed chicken hearts, Yukon gold mash, classic pickles and a creamy dijon sauce. It is the dish that most clearly shows the kitchen reworking a Soviet staple rather than copying it. Golubci, the poached cabbage roll, runs $32.

If you only have room for one sweet thing, the Honey Cake at $15 is layered sponge with honey, sour cream and caramel. Honest verdict: at $15 it is a pricier medovik than the Richmond bakeries charge, so order it to share, not one per person.

On Saturday and Sunday DACHA also opens for brunch from 10am to 2:30pm. Funcheap's listing calls it a weekly brunch built around good food, strong cocktails and a vinyl soundtrack, which is a fair description of the mood. The full-service cocktail bar mixes custom drinks, so this is a place where a vodka cocktail with your blini-adjacent brunch is the norm rather than the exception.

Because dinner only runs four hours a night and only five nights a week, book ahead for Friday or Saturday. If you are deciding late, an early 5pm table or a seat at the bar is the most realistic way in.

Parties of five or more get an automatic 20% gratuity, so a group of six should budget for it. Corkage is $30 per bottle if you want to bring a bottle from home. The restaurant is closed Monday and Tuesday, which trips up a lot of first-time visitors who assume a Sutter Street dinner spot runs all week.

Every Sunday the bill drops by 15%, which makes Sunday dinner the best value of the week. If you miss a table, Polk Street, just west of Larkin, has plenty of walk-in options for a backup meal, though none of them will give you pelmeni-style comfort food.

The 2 Sutter bus stops at Sutter and Larkin and at Sutter and Hyde, putting you within a block of the door, and the 19 Polk runs along Larkin for anyone coming from Civic Center or the Ferry Building side. Street parking in Lower Nob Hill is metered and tight in the evening, so transit or a rideshare is simpler.

DACHA sits at the bottom of Nob Hill, and the obvious after-dinner walk is uphill. Climb Jones or Taylor Street to Grace Cathedral, where the outdoor labyrinth on the terrace is open to anyone walking past and the view down California Street is lit up at night. Huntington Park, across the street from the cathedral, is a calm place to sit for ten minutes before heading back down.

If you would rather keep the evening going, walk west to Polk Street, the long commercial strip of Polk Gulch, which has bars and late-night bakeries stretching north toward Russian Hill. Pairing an early dinner at DACHA with a drink on Polk is how many neighborhood regulars spend a Friday.

DACHA pitches itself as a cozy queer- and women-owned room, and the crowd follows: dinner dates splitting piroshki, friends gathering for a birthday, and Eastern European expats who know exactly what golubci should taste like. The Sunday discount is aimed at the restaurant-industry crowd, so Sunday nights often feel like a neighborhood hangout. The weekend brunch, with its cocktails and vinyl soundtrack, is the more relaxed of the two services.

• Address: DACHA Kitchen & Bar, 1085 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA 94109. - Dinner: Wednesday to Sunday, 5pm to 9pm. Brunch: Saturday and Sunday, 10am to 2:30pm.