San Pablo Restaurant Week: lamb stew, corner cafés, and the flavor of small business
It’s San Pablo Restaurant Week, the city’s annual excuse to eat your way through every corner of town. The variety reflects San Pablo’s multicultural mix, from Salvadoran and Nicaraguan dishes to Italian pasta, bubble tea, and South Asian sweets.
Organized by the San Pablo Economic Development Corporation, Restaurant Week offers meals and discounts at locally owned eateries throughout San Pablo and nearby neighborhoods. The goal, organizers say, is to spotlight the city’s diverse food scene while driving foot traffic to small businesses that form the backbone of its economy.
Participating restaurants include: Fina’s Pizza, Blue Rabbit Restaurant & Bar, Boba & Beyond, BY2 Bionicos Yahualica, Delicias Express LLC, Delicias Nicaragüense, Donut King, El Agave Azul, El Cuscatlán, El Palenque Grill, La Chona, La Strada Ristorante Italiano, Los Compadres Taqueria, Mely’s Café, Mountain Mike’s Pizza, Noodle 21, O’Henry Donut, Pizza Guys, Pupusas Restaurante Rosita, R&R’s Café, Samraj Sweets N’ Chathut, Sukie’s Country Kitchen, Taqueria San Juan, Universal Bakery, and Yemen Café & Restaurant.
GrandEATS! begins on San Pablo Avenue, a gray ribbon of car part shops, warehouse groceries, and a barber college offering ten-dollar cuts. In the old Royal Indian spot, Yemen Café glows under new lights. Fahsah lamb, they tell you, is a good choice, and people eat it with the rashoosh bread. Yes. We will too.
Yemen Café & Restaurant is located at 13112 San Pablo Avenue in San Pablo.
We sit at a booth in line with the kitchen in the back. The chef began quickly slapping and flinging what looked like pizza dough until it was as large as a tire. They rolled it up and stuck it into a large shopping bag for us. It looked like a yoga mat.
The Fahsah, a shredded lamb stew, is served bubbling hot, with steam rising like a promise. You tear the rashoosh, drag through the Fahsah, top with some sahawig, a tomato salsa that would be at home at any taco truck in the area. It’s lamb and garlic, a little cardamom, maybe cinnamon, though it’s hard to tell. The broth’s hot enough to make you pause. It is like nothing we’ve had before, yet oddly familiar. It is slightly spicy and delicious.
Rashoosh bread is cooked hot, so it develops a crispy, cracker-like texture in parts while remaining pliable enough to use for scooping. Brushed with butter, sprinkled with black sesame seeds, it was also delicious.
You could spend the whole week tracing the map, El Cuscatlán, La Strada, Universal Bakery, Boba & Beyond, all these small places built by people who’ve been betting on flavor longer than the Chamber of Commerce’s been printing flyers.
Outside, the city’s running Restaurant Week, and you could be anywhere, at Noodle 21, or El Cuscatlán, or Delicias Nicaragüense, tasting your way through San Pablo’s mix of small miracles and second mortgages. But this place feels like a story you wandered into by accident, one about travel, hunger, and what happens when people try to recreate home one pot at a time.
And if you start your route at Yemen Café, you will understand what the week’s really about. Not just food, but flavor as memory, hustle, and survival, the kind of thing that makes a small city taste like the whole world.
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