Tosca Cafe

Okay, I love the make over from bar/cafe to stellar restaurant. New management saved the old booths and took out the vinyl and used real leather. The cocktails were delicious; martini extra dry rated and the Cynar Swizzle was a pleasant surprise. Food top notch: I enjoyed the Market salad and polenta with mushrooms while my date started with spaghetti chitarra and followed with the petrale sole.

Bottom line the addition of the restaurant is a great update to a classic San Francisco haunt.

You should definitely get the chicken, make sure to order when you arrive since it takes a while to come (1 hr)

Meatballs and the salad was also great!!

Do not even hesitate to come, it was a we so me !!!!

Came here for a birthday dinner and had some excellent food and even better service that helped overcome a small hiccup in our meal.

We made reservations for just before 8pm and were shown to our seat right away. The space is great. You walk past a long, narrow bar into a larger room that has booths along the wall and tables in the middle with an awesome view into the kitchen. It's very dark inside, but feels cozy and like an Italian restaurant should.

We heard that there was some really good cocktails. My wife enjoyed the May Queen with dinner and their "cappuccino" at dessert. The dessert cocktail was very strong whiskey flavored at first, but after letting it sit for just a minute the chocolate really came to the fore and was very delicious as a post meal liquid treat.

For our meal we started with the meatballs, which were divine. They were cooked perfectly so that they had a nice shell on the outside, but were still very juicy inside. They came with a nice red sauce that was great to soak up with their house made foccacia. The bread was just what you would expect, but very well done. It seemed a little crustier than I usually associate with foccacia, though.

We debated about ordering the chicken or just getting two pastas and went with the noodles instead of the main course. Both the pastas were very good, the bucatini al amatriciano and their polenta. The bucatini had a nice heat to it and the tomatoes were very pronounced without overwhelming the actual noodles which were cooked perfectly al dente. In a past like this that's so important because you can get a sense of that hole in the middle of the noodle when you take a bite. It was excellent.

The polenta almost tasted like a dessert upon first bite with the marscapone, but when you got a bite with the mushrooms it took on a nice earthy quality. The outside was nice and crispy and the inside was fluffy, again cooked perfectly. The problem, though, is we found a hair in the polenta. We were assured that that never happens, but sadly it happened to us. Kind of lost my appetite which was sad because I only had a few bites of either of the pastas. The service was excellent though; the manager came over and talked to us and they comped both of the pasta dishes since we hadn't really touched either of them and offered us a free dessert.

Things like that happen at many restaurants, but rarely do you see such good service to try and make amends, so they get much praise from me for that. Throughout the whole evening they were great at bringing fresh plates and silverware, which too often one has to ask for, rather than it just happening. If we hadn't had the one problem I think this place would have been just about perfect.

For dessert we had our eye on the peanut butter cup, and they brought out cannoli's so we definitely satisfied our sweet tooth craving with these and the cocktail I mentioned earlier. The cannoli had a really strong orange zest flavor that kept the dessert nice and bright, and the peanut butter cup had terrific gelato, I could have used a few more of those caramel peanuts because they were so good.

Overall our meal was a little marred by one incident, but the food was actually really delicious and the service was fantastic. I don't think what we experienced was a common occurrence, so I can almost, without reservation, recommend Tosca.

There is a lot of hype around this place, so I was really excited to try it last night with some friends!

I'll start with the "pros": good service, fun / lively atmosphere (although loud), great tasting food and cocktails.

Here is where they lost me ("cons"): food is overpriced (small salad for $17, small portion of burrata for $18), portions are almost laughably small (try the polenta - about half the portion of any of the pastas on the menu - or one of the $17+ appetizers like the burrata or market salad and you'll see what I mean), we asked our server to recommend a bottle of wine to pair with our food and she suggested something that was SO overpowering for our light pasta / lamb / polenta that it wasn't even enjoyable.

Again, I hate to knock the food as the flavors were great, but this is the perfect example of an SF establishment whose price doesn't match its value. After appetizers, polenta, and sharing dessert I still walked away hungry (which is difficult for me to do!), and, therefore disappointed. Maybe I'll go back again when someone else is paying the bill!

Tosca Cafe was something.

The sole reason for our visit is the interesting pig parts featured on the menu. After Animal in LA and Commonwealth in SF, I had not seen anything exciting that was executed well in restaurant that is not heavily Asian influenced. My philosophy for food is that nothing should go to waste. If you are going to kill the pig, why let the ears and tail and all the inner organs end up in the dumpster?

At the end it wasn't only these 'adventurous' dishes that really impressed. (Granted their Pressed Pig Ear was enjoyable and the Pig Tail was absolutely sinful.) It was that one simple meatball that completely captivated us. It didn't hurt that everything else from service to their creative cocktails were also throughoutly delightful.

My wife and I planned our rehearsal dinner here because this was the location of our first date. I was a bit reluctant on giving them our business because we celebrated dinner there one year and had terrible service (missed items, slow) but we figured since we're planning ahead, things should be fine.

We worked with Tosca's coordinator to ensure that we had plenty of food. We decided to go with 5 item set menu ($95/pp) and little antipasti. I wanted to make sure our guest we well fed.

Long story short, we had 23 guest and each one left our dinner hungry. When we asked for more food, we were met with skepticism. I got so annoyed that I decided to end the party. After spending over $5k, our party left hungry. So much so that a group of us went across the way to get burritos. We had one waitress for 23 guest. While she was nice, she could not keep up with keeping our guest's drinks filled. As an example of their lack of portions, for 23 people we got 24 meatballs.

We emailed our Tosca contact twice, with no follow up or response. I would not recommend them to plan any type of special event.

On my recent visit to San Fran roast chicken was high on my list. I made a few rounds (if you check out my other reviews you'll see more chicken reviews and Tosca (April Bloomfield) has to make that list. So once we arrived it was no question the chicken was the main attraction. Comes with a toast with ricotta on top and a gravy. Not for the weary at heart it has the chicken food at part of the presentation. Ordered roasted potatoes to go with. Gravy, chicken, and toast all together makes a special combo. Not my number 1 in San Fran but definitely in the top 5. Possibly the top 3.

Delightful experience. It's a great place to grab a casual drink or two. The bar itself was full on the Thursday night we stopped by but there was plenty of room and seating along the wall parallel to it.

A friend suggested the place for a rendezvous that turned into a 2 hour long dinner. If they welcomed every repeat patron the way they welcomed him, we're definitely coming back. The staff was so sweet!

I have nothing bad to say about the food here. We did a family style meal with Caesar salad, bufala mozzarella, meatballs and lamb, onion rings, and sausage Mac and cheese. It was delightful, not heavily under/seasoned, and pasta was perfectly al dente. The tiramisu and peanut butter ice cream dessert were equally notable end notes to the evening.

Even without the warm greetings, service was attentive through and through. I'd definitely come back here.

Wonderful! The best tiramisu. My favorite is coming here for a late dinner and sitting at the bar.

Also fun to come with a group, and a reservation, sit at a table, and pretend you are in Italy. Order multiple courses, a couple bottles of wine, ask the waiter to bring you their favorites - what a wonderful way to spend an evening with friends! Good food; the (fairly) recent new chef is a needed and welcome change.

Not really a huge complaint, but Tosca could ease up on the salt just a tad. The cocktails were just okay but the wine list is very good so I would stick to that. The crispy pig tails were not exactly what we expected but were still good in a rib sort of way. We found the Lumaconi to be on point and enjoyed its prosciutto-y goodness. The Beef Tongue was the absolute star of the show and I would highly recommend it. The Lamb Shoulder was a special and although it was okay it didn't hit the same high mark of the beef.

The restaurant is kind of dark and has a certain ambiance, no complaints about the service either.