Eatery - Cioppino's (CA)

Cioppino's on Urbanspoon

400 Jefferson St, San Francisco, CA 94109 (Neighborhood: Fisherman's Wharf)
Pricing - $$/$$$ | Dining - Casual | Cuisine - Italian, Seafood

One of my life goals (and interestingly enough, one of Duc's goals) is to travel to where particular dishes were created and have the "best" one available there. For San Francisco, the dish created there that is most known is cioppino, which is a rich, seafood stew. I looked on Yelp for places that had the highest ratings for cioppino; since we were going to be in Fisherman's Wharf already, we opted to go to Cioppino's, named after its signature dish. It's a good sign, no?


We got seated promptly (came earlier than our reservation), and started off our dinner with some complimentary sourdough bread and an appetizer of dungenness crab cakes. Fantastic! They had a pesto aioli, roasted red peppers, and a tad bit of greens which cut the aioli well. My particular crab cake probably had too much of the aioli but that was just a plating issue. The crab cake itself was quite fine in terms of shredded meat; I'm used to lump crab cakes that fall apart. This was a fairly unified morsel of greatness. Loved it, particularly because it became more nuanced in flavor as I ate more.

We shared a bowl of the small cioppino which made us ridiculously full! I'm guessing we wouldn't have finished the regular size. I think it had to do with how hearty they made it. It had dungenness crab, mussels, clams, snapper, calamari, shrimp, and tomatoes in a stew. Talk about loading up on the EVERYTHING! I admit that I have no other dish of cioppino to compare this to but it was alright for what it was. I thought the fennel was quite heavily used in this dish's preparation but hey, maybe that's how it's supposed to go. I'm also unfortunately not a big fan of seafood but for what it was, pretty good. We were bursting at the end too - a fun, diverse dinner to end our day with.