Sons and Daughters () – San Francisco – rough start, fantastic ending

This is my review for my December 2025 visit to Sons & Daughters in San Francisco, a Nordic style fine dinning restaurant.

Service etc:

They have a whole paragraph online about how you should arrive on time because theres a shared experience with other guests at the beginning, so i arrived like 10 minutes early just to make sure I’d be on time. When I arrived there there was no one in the reception area, so i just waited in the completely empty room for several minutes. Then once the receptionist came they moved me to the first seating area and the waiter then came with some drink menus and such.

There was one other table for the introductory experience but they were not on time. They arrived several minutes late and apparently they were some sort of VIPs, and a bunch of people from the restaurant came to greet them and talk to them, and then they got some time to settle in of course. We then had the introductory experience with first bites, and then they promptly took the VIP table to the main dinning area first, but not before asking them if they wanted a (brief) kitchen tour, which they did. After they were taken and did their tour a couple minutes later, I was then also taken to the dinning room (no tour or anything was offered). Though I asked for still water and did indeed receive that in the first room, in the main dinning room they accidentally gave me sparkling water, though they did realize and correct that just a few minutes later.

I dont really mind any of those things individually and I dont need a kitchen tour these days, but all those things I considered very slight annoyances certainly did add up and felt a bit disrespectful by the end. They really should have at least taken me to the dinning room before the other table, since I wasn’t late and had been waiting much longer.

Overall the service was just ok, with one of the people just having a very cold personality, probably one of the coldest I have seen in any restaurant of this level, but the rest were fine.

The biggest miss I saw, which didnt happen to me, was that apparently the restaurant charged some other larger table for the wine pairing at the restaurant, even though they had already paid for it in advance. The guest notified the waiter of this when he saw it on the bill, and the waiter went back to check and confirmed that indeed they already paid, so then took the duplicate charge off the bill. I think thats actually pretty bad, luckily the guest noticed it so everything was fine in the end, but still thats basically a mistake that could have been in the amount of at least several hundreds of dollars if not thousands of dollars.

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Food:

I wont describe each dish since there were over 20 in total, but overall, in terms of flavor, i think most of the dishes before the main courses were below my expectations, and averaged around a 6/10. There were lots of different ingredients and pretty presentations, but I think if you were blindfolded and just tasted everything and forgot about the ** or the $$$, it really just wouldn’t be very impressive. In general some of the dishes tasted too average and not too special or tasty, while others tasted “different” but were just way too acidic or salty or had some unpleasant flavor to them while not actually having some new or memorable flavors.

I will say I feel like I’m probably making the food sound worse than it was. I was happy to try all the different dishes with their different ingredients and preparation methods, but the descriptions were mostly more exciting than the actual flavors, and there were a lot of flowers and other ingredients that made it all seem a bit style-over-substance for me.

There were also some dishes I did quite enjoy and were a 7 or even pushing an 8/10 (which is quite high for my scale). These included one of the starter bites, and the radish dish, and one of the fish dishes. Though thats only like 3 out of 15 dishes at that point, so along with the start of the service, I was feeling disappointed with the meal compared to my expectations.

It should also be noted that the meal cost $315 for something like 22 dishes, and though many are quite small that comes down to only around $14 per dish. At that price point in SF I think its practically impossible to create tons of incredible dishes, especially when lots of high quality ingredients are used throughout the menu. For $14 each I would probably order most of those dishes right now and be happy with them, but its the overall experience not having mind blowing dishes up to this point that made it feel a bit disappointing for me.

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Then the mains came. Usually mains are my least favorite part of fine dinning so I wasn’t expecting too much given the first part of the meal.

The first main had duck as the main component, and also came with a quail on a skewer with truffles. First I had the skewer and again I felt like it was a bit style over substance but still fine. Then I tried to cut into the duck with the knife but it was like super hard to cut at all and I at this point I thought to myself “here we go again another disappointing dish”. However once I was able to cut it, I was actually very surprised and actually thought the flavors were great and also enjoyed the crispy skin on the duck. Though there wasnt anything too unique in terms of flavor (which is what i was hoping for overall from this restaurant), it was still actually one of my favorite duck dishes Ive had this year and I quite enjoyed the flavor. I think they just need to give a different knife for it.

Then came the venison dish. They prepare it in some special way and it looks a bit raw, but thats how its supposed to look like. The flavors of the venison along with the berry sauces were absolutely incredible and interesting, this was love at first bite. This was a 10/10 and in my top 10 dished ive had anywhere. These types of dishes are the reason I love fine dinning.

The desserts were next, and these finally had the interesting types of flavors I was hoping for in the first part of the meal. Though none of them were a revelation like the venison, flavor wise they were very interesting while still being quite tasty. I quite enjoyed almost all of them (with the one exception of the miso petite four which I thought tasted terrible). These had flavors that that were tasty and really interesting and you could taste the unique Nordic theme of the restaurant.

Overall though I thought start was rough, the end made up for it and I will be excited to try their menu in another season too.