Almost every week I turn to Yelp to research restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area. After trying to find a reliable food blog to guide me, I resorted to Yelp to give me reviews from normal restaurant goers such as myself. Last weekend, my boyfriend found a promising Japanese restaurant called “Minako Organic Japanese” in the Mission district. Since we have tried countless places in Japan-town, we decided to branch out and drive to a shoe box that sits between a Hispanic dollar store and a graffitied alley. The website gave us photos of the interior, along with a wide range of reviews. Raters praised the restaurant for its intimate atmosphere, exquisite vegan rolls, and fresh udon. We entered the restaurant hungry, and were seated promptly while Julian Casablancas’ howled in the background. The restaurant is owned by a mother-daughter team, and we were served by the mother who kindly explained dishes. The menu is overwhelming, but I tried an aged tofu and vegetable salad with miso dressing and thin soba noodles as decoration. I also had a California roll with fresh crab legs and veggies, along with a small bowl of purple rice. We also tried the udon, which was by far the best udon I have ever had. You could taste every element of the broth: ginger, salt, and hints of soy. Not to mention the noodles were perfectly chewy. The only draw back to this place is the cost. The udon was over twice the price of what we spent elsewhere ($18) and rolls were upwards of $6.00. Minako also has its share of bad reviews, and has been characterized as ”a conceptual art project curated by wanker-artists.” Yelp has served as a hit or miss tool used to scope out possible good times in SF, or anywhere across the globe. Reading each entry, you begin to analyze the writer and question whether or not they are credible. The writers aren’t reliable food critics, and you have to trust that the food is ten times better than the amateur pictures would have you believe. Yelp can sometimes be too hard to analyze that it makes me want to just explore the city myself and stumble upon things. But in a place as expansive as San Francisco, it can serve as a compass for finding hidden gems like Minako Organic. 
* Best photo, taken from Yelp
By Emma Rogers
