Every November, San Francisco's holiday menus converge on the same number, and the number keeps going up. A hundred and twenty-five a head is now unremarkable for a hotel dining room and a hundred and fifty barely raises an eyebrow. Which makes a straight three-course Thanksgiving at sixty-five dollars, three blocks from Union Square, worth a second look — particularly given the kitchen serving it does not cook this food at any other point in the year.
The best holiday value in a city is often a kitchen that does not normally cook that food and is therefore not charging holiday prices for it. Ask Karpo what is open near you and what it actually costs.
Where it is and what it normally does
Bombay Brasserie sits at 340 Stockton Street, inside the Taj Campton Place hotel on the eastern edge of Union Square. The rest of the year it works a French and Indian register — a kitchen with classical technique cooking a South Asian repertoire, in a room built for a hotel rather than for a restaurant group's Instagram account.
That location matters twice. It puts you within walking distance of the square, which on the day after Thanksgiving is the centre of the city's shopping weekend, and it puts you in a hotel, which is why the kitchen is open on a day when a very large proportion of independent San Francisco restaurants are not.
The menu is traditional, and that is the point
This is not a spiced reinvention of Thanksgiving. The holiday offering is a traditional three-course prix fixe at sixty-five dollars a person: the recognisable American holiday meal, cooked by a kitchen that happens to be very good at technique, in a room that does not normally serve it.
That restraint is a deliberate and slightly unusual choice. The easy move for an Indian kitchen on Thanksgiving is the fusion menu — masala turkey, tandoori this, chutney that — and it almost never works, because the people at the table wanted the meal they grew up with and the people who wanted Indian food wanted the actual menu. Doing the straight version at a sensible price is the harder and better decision.
The add-on that tells you what the kitchen can do
There is one dish that crosses over, and it is the one to order. Tandoori-spiced butternut squash with sprouted mung bean and pomegranate chaat, at thirty-two dollars, sits alongside the prix fixe as a supplement.
On paper it is an add-on. In practice it is the argument for eating here rather than anywhere else on the list: squash cooked in a tandoor rather than roasted in an oven, dressed as a chaat — sour, sweet, crunchy, cold against hot — and dropped into the middle of a meal that is otherwise soft, beige and rich. One of these between two or three people does more for a Thanksgiving table than another plate of stuffing.
It is also the vegetarian answer at a table where somebody does not eat turkey and is tired of being handed a plate of sides. As a main event with a bowl of something alongside, it holds up.
- 340 Stockton Street, inside Taj Campton Place, Union Square
- Traditional three-course Thanksgiving prix fixe, $65 per person
- Tandoori butternut squash with mung bean and pomegranate chaat, $32, as an add-on
- French and Indian menu the rest of the year
- A hotel kitchen, so it is open on the day when many independents are not
Why the price is what it is
Hotel restaurants price holidays differently to independents, and not always upwards. An independent restaurant opening on Thanksgiving has to justify the whole day's staffing against one service, which is why the set menu is expensive or the doors stay shut. A hotel kitchen is already open, already staffed, and already feeding guests who cannot go anywhere else.
That structural difference is the reason sixty-five dollars is possible at an address where the neighbours are charging double. It is not a loss leader and it is not a lesser meal; it is a kitchen that was going to be running regardless, filling a room it would otherwise have half-filled.
Booking it, and the Union Square problem
Book it, and book it early — a set menu at this price in this neighbourhood does not survive on walk-ins, and Thanksgiving reservations in San Francisco are largely gone by the first week of November. If you are coming as a group of six or more, call rather than using the app, because the room is not enormous and long tables get handled by hand.
Parking around Union Square on the holiday is easier than on any normal Thursday, and the garages under the square are the obvious option. BART and Muni to Powell put you four blocks away, which is the better plan if there is wine involved and the best plan on the Friday, when the same streets become unusable by mid-morning.
What to do with the rest of the afternoon
This is the one genuine advantage of eating downtown rather than in a neighbourhood: you are already in the middle of the city with a long afternoon ahead and nothing shut yet. The square itself, Maiden Lane, the walk up through Chinatown — which, unlike most of the city, carries on entirely as normal on Thanksgiving — and the climb to the top of the Stockton tunnel are all within fifteen minutes on foot.
Book the table for early afternoon rather than evening and the day has a shape to it: a walk, a long lunch, and the light going before you get home. An eight o'clock booking on Thanksgiving is a meal and then a taxi, which is a much smaller day for the same sixty-five dollars.
One more thing worth knowing if this becomes a habit: the room is considerably better value on an ordinary Tuesday than it is on the holiday, because the ordinary Tuesday is when it cooks the food it is actually built to cook. Thanksgiving here is a well-priced, well-executed version of somebody else's meal. Come back in January for the version that is theirs.
Practical notes
Bombay Brasserie, 340 Stockton Street, in the Taj Campton Place hotel on Union Square. The Thanksgiving offering is a traditional three-course prix fixe at $65 per person, with a tandoori-spiced butternut squash, sprouted mung bean and pomegranate chaat available as a $32 add-on. The restaurant cooks a French and Indian menu the rest of the year. Being a hotel kitchen, it opens on a day when many independent San Francisco restaurants close. Reserve well in advance, call directly for groups of six or more, and take an early-afternoon table if you want the rest of the day to be worth anything.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #Thanksgiving #BombayBrasserie #UnionSquare #Restaurants #IndianFood #SFEats #HolidayDining #PrixFixe #StocktonStreet #SFThingsToDo #DowntownSF #Tandoori #FineDining
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