Best Family Style Restaurants in Downtown / Union Square

We have dinner here each year we visit San Francisco. Food is very well prepared. Sauces not overpowering entrees which makes for a very tasteful eating experience. Terrific assortment of wines. Desserts are excellent. Very nice decor. Cesario's can be very busy during evening dinner time. Lunch less crowded. We always book ahead for dinner. The wait staff is excellent. Prices pretty average. Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, coffee, dessert, and tip costs about $135. We make Cesario our definite stop each year.

We had the set Valentine's menu for two and it was very nice. Service was great and not rushed at all. It is part of a hotel. There was a bit of a cold fraught from the door into the hotel unfortunately.

Great food and drink! Casual and comfortable ambiance!

Went with the tasting menu to get outside my comfort zone and see what the best the restaurant had to offer was. For drinks, we got the banh bo gimlet, toastedtini, and a glass of wine. The gimlet was absolutely the single greatest cocktail I've ever had. It was perfectly balanced and aromatic. Not all of the tasting menu was amazing but like 99% of it was. The oysters tasted really bright and fresh. The banh khot caviar is mind-blowing! It was a perfectly balanced single bite of caked and fried shrimp taken to the next level with the addition of a small scoop of caviar. The bo tai chanh also stood out as an exceptional dish because of how every ingredient in that dish felt like it was perfectly used to layer both flavors and textures. You just have to try it for yourself to understand. The Dungeness crab salad clearly tried to do the same thing but I felt that the tobiko was a little overused causing it to overwhelm the other textures. The various components of the manila clams were all executed well and came together to form a delicious dish. I particularly enjoyed the broth and would gladly have just slurped up a bowl of that. After that came the bun cha which had no chance of living up to the excellence of the clams and their unforgettable broth. The bun cha was still good though. The tangy broth that the proteins were marinating in was excellent and the herbs were fresh. It was also fun to put everything together yourself and build your own bowl or lettuce wrap. We got bowls of pho for our seventh course which, at that point, felt less like a treat and more like an obligation. We were starting to get pretty full and the pho wasn't exciting enough to put much effort into trying to finish. Btw, the beef pho is way better than the chicken pho. Honestly, I loved my overall experience so much that I don't even want to mention dessert but I should. It's not good. It's bland and boring. Service and ambiance were top notch. Overall, best Vietnamese restaurant in SF!

The staff took my food allergy very seriously. They knew on the menu what was not Gluten Free, rather than having to go ask the chief. Other than pasta, almost everything was already cooked GF, which was wonderful. Great atmosphere and service as well.