There’s obviously been a fair number of changes to the San Carlos restaurant scene over the last two-and-a-half years during the pandemic, but the city’s eating and drinking establishments have proven to be fairly resilient. We believe that the partial closure of Laurel Street and creation of restaurant spaces in the street have been an unmitigated success — the scene is as lively as ever!

We have also updated the master list of restaurants to be as current as we know it, including updating the Yelp ratings.

In 2022, there have been a few restaurant replacements:

• Last month, Noshery replaced 3Pigs at the end of Laurel Street, which closed at the end of 2021. Noshery has a unique concept — they partner with a set of restaurants so you can create an order combining items from a mini-menu from each of them. In their San Carlos location, you can order food from The Melt (burgers and fries), Oren’s Hummus (mediterranean), East Side Banh Mi (Vietnamese), The Little Chihuahua (Mexican), and Humphry Slocombe (ice cream). It’s an interesting concept that may get people to go all the way to the end of Laurel.
• This month, Ryu Sushi on the 1200 block of Laurel Street was replaced by (or renamed) Sushi Kazoku. This has never been an ideal location, and it’s a crowded market for sushi in San Carlos, so it will be interesting to see how this place fares.
• Just one block away, a new Hawaiian restaurant — William BBQ — replaces the New Flower Drum, which was the lowest rated Chinese restaurant in the city, and frankly a location that could get patrons a bit nervous about its hygiene. It looks like William BBQ even took over New Flower Drum’s website, because it still references Chinese food in their “About” description, but the menu appears to only have a small selection of Hawaiian lunch plates. This will also be interesting to watch.

Also, the City of Good Eating, in its informal survey walking around San Carlos, noticed at least two reasonably significant changes in menus (at least since we last reviewed the restaurants):

• Taurus, which emphasized various cuts of Wagyu steak at extremely high prices, seems to have broadened its menu to include more starters and seafood dishes, also allowing you to not spend your whole paycheck on dinner (although note that the menu on the website doesn’t seem to reflect the breadth of the menu that was in the window of the restaurant)
• Stamp also appears to have a broader menu from its original Mexican fusion approach to now include a more pastas, salads, seafood, and meats.

The City of Good Living will report back when it both tries the new restaurants and updated menus!