I’ve walked by this place literally hundreds of times, as it’s on my way home from BART. I was a little leery of it, to be honest – it looked divier than even I was willing to try, a real greasy spoon; it just looked kind of shabby. But I searched for the menu online, and the pictures of the food I found looked pretty good. Still, it was the BF’s idea to go try it, so we did.
The interior is lit with fluorescent lighting, and there are some vibrantly colored local artist’s watercolors on the pink walls. There are a couple of booths along the front window, and four-tops along the side, extending to the back. There’s some counter seating, as any typical diner would have, and then even more counter seating further back at a window overlooking the kitchen so you can watch the action.
Mission’s Kitchen has been around for about 10 years, and the family also owns the very popular El Farolito taqueria on the corner of Mission & 24th. Our server told us it used to be a Korean diner, before the current owners bought it. It turns out this place is just as popular with its regulars as the taqueria is.
The regulars are mostly Latino, but there’s a good sprinkling of everyone else living in the neighborhood. The menu does skew mostly Mexican, although there are items like Philly cheesesteaks, BLTs, a salmon scramble, steak dinner, burgers, scampi, salads, and pasta. And you can get breakfast all day long, from the time they open (7:00 a.m. weekdays, 10:00 a.m. Saturdays) until they close (10:00 p.m.) I love that! And there’s a lot of breakfast to choose from: huevos rancheros, huevos divorciados (usually a dish of two fried eggs, separated, each with its own red or green sauce), huevos con chorizo, breakfast burritos, pork chops and eggs, omelets, steak and eggs, pancakes, French toast, etc., etc., etc. They’ve also got sandwiches, beer, cheap-ass wine (boxed Franzia!), and milkshakes.
I ordered a sangria – made with that Franzia boxed wine and I’m not sure what else (7-Up, maybe?), but it had fresh diced apples on top and was actually quite refreshing. And our server gave me a free refill.
The BF ordered a Mexican beer I’d never heard of – Victoria…
It is Mexico’s oldest brand of beer (since 1865) a lager, and our waitress’ favorite, but I found it slightly sweet and yet bland, and too light for my taste. Give me a good perfumey Bohemia any day.
Thrilled to be able to eat breakfast for dinner (BFD™) I went with the chilaquiles – typically a dish of fried tortilla chips topped with green chili sauce until the chips soften a bit, an egg cooked to your fancy, cilantro, onion, and queso fresco. It’s perfect hangover food. There was a regular and a mole chilaquiles, and I could have sworn I’d asked for the latter, but when it came it had their homemade salsa verde instead, which was billed as spicy, but was not. (It looked so good, I didn’t even remember I’d wanted the mole version until I got home so I didn’t say anything.) The most astounding thing was the size of the dish – easily a 12- inch monster of a platter.
The plate is that big and the eggs are still hanging over the edge.
Good and homey, and the eggs made a nice sauce over all. Their rice looked like it was going to be good, flecked with tomato sauce, but it was unfortunately a little bland. A little Tabasco came to the rescue. I managed to eat about a quarter of the dish.
The BF ordered a bacon cheeseburger MEDIUM INSTEAD OF MEDIUM RARE. Has he not learned anything from me??
Of course, it was overdone and somewhat dry. However, it was still tasty, good with the big hunk of iceberg lettuce, a slice of good old American cheese, a slice or two of bacon, mayo, red onion, all on a squishy sesame seed bun. The fries were meh. Which is a sin, in my book, as it’s hard to ruin fries for me. They tasted like they’d been sitting around under a heat lamp.
Our second time, we went for a really early dinner, and for a while, we were the only ones there. We sat at the counter this time, where we could see a little of the action.
We were really hungry, so we ignored the fact that we knew the portions are enormous, and ordered a side salad ($2.75!) with blue cheese dressing.
The dressing (which came on the side) tasted homemade and was really good and blue cheesy, and the salad greens, while just your basic iceberg, was nice and fresh and crunchy with the croutons and thick-cut cukes, and very good with the heavy food we were about to ingest. And you can’t beat that price.
The BF ordered the top sirloin ranchero. (I can never figure out why he orders steak at places like these!)
The ranchero sauce (tomato sauce, onions, peppers, dried red chilies) was really good, actually quite spicy, very bell (red and green) pepper forward. The meat came sliced in the sauce and was, of course, tough, which was totally expected. His rice and beans, compared to mine from our first visit, were actually very tasty this time, not bland at all; it could be they were flavored with the ranchero sauce. Tough steak or not, he scooped it all up in corn tortillas and nodded his head to me in approval. (The bottle of “sangria” there is not actually sangria, but an alcohol-free grape-y soda thing. I wouldn’t recommend it.)
I was determined to try their mole, so I ordered the chicken enchilada mole. “I’m sorry, we are out of it.” D’oh! So I went for the Desayuno CentroAmericano, recommended by our server…
Yep, breakfast for dinner again. A rice and black bean mixture – gallo pinto, two eggs, a choice of sausage (I chose sausage, and they gave me two whole additional sausages on the side, too), bacon or ham, plantains that were actually fried in the deep fryer, crema, fried cheese, and toast or tortillas.
Gallo pinto is a bean and rice dish common to both Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and thought to have maybe been brought over from Africa, and this one was excellent; very flavorable, almost beefy or porky, studded with sautéed onion, garlic, diced red bell pepper and cilantro. I don’t really know what else was in it that made it taste so good, but now I want to try making it. I’ve had other versions before – the Cuban version is called moros y cristianos – but none this good, even when I was in Costa Rica.
The fried cheese is also a typical Central American breakfast accompaniment – it’s salty and not super melty inside, but rather a bit squeaky, almost like cheese curds, but firmer. This one was a little over-fried, for me, making it a bit dry. The sausages had the flavor of good link breakfast sausages but were much bigger. I’ve never had platanos maduros (ripe plantains) deep fried before, but it turns out it’s the perfect way to cook them, if you know what you’re doing. They were like a sweet jelly, candied, charred in bits, sticky and perfect, and lovely with the cool, thick crema.
We got a look at someone’s pasta dish – Fettucine Primavera – and it looked fresh and very Spring-like, and of course was absolutely a humongous bowl.
Warm, casual and friendly service, huge portions, tiny prices, homey, decent food: if that’s what you’re after, Mission’s Kitchen is your place.
Mission’s Kitchen
2738 Mission St (Btwn 23rd & 24th Sts.)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 648-1577