Izzy & Wooks’ answer to the smashburger is the longa smash, which is built on a smashed longanisa sausage that is made in house.
Cesar Hernandez/S.F. Chronicle
At first glance, Saluhall, the two-year-old food hall adjacent to IKEA in downtown San Francisco, is more desolate than ever. The downstairs cafe and pizzeria is closed. Most of the upstairs stalls remain empty and, despite the regular lunch rush, the evening service still sees tumbleweeds.
But there’s vitality in the building yet: Smish Smash, which opened there last year, is a Top 100 restaurant. The shuttered bars are set to spring back to life. And that’s to say nothing of newcomer Izzy & Wooks, a Filipino fusion kiosk that shows considerable promise.
Izzy is part of a recent crop of new Pinoy restaurants that opened within the last year, including Restaurant Naides in the city, Carabao in Napa and FOB West, the second location of FOB Kitchen in Oakland. While Izzy draws inspiration from Filipino cooking, the menu isn’t beholden to it: The flavors of the sour soup known as sinigang show up not in a bowl, but as a hot chicken sandwich. “Doing fusion dishes allows us to broaden what we can do,” said co-owner Manuel “Manny” Ramirez.
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He and Cheryl Ramirez, his wife, started Izzy & Wook in 2024, initially as a short-term smashburger restaurant at the Metreon.
The operation moved to the San Francisco Centre food court last year, which functioned as a commissary base for popups at the Ferry Building and farmers markets. In January, Izzy & Wooks settled into Saluhall, serving rice bowls with barbecued meat and sandwiches filled with either mochiciko fried chicken cutlets or scrambled eggs with glazed pork belly.
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The stand doesn’t sell any smashburgers — to avoid competing with Smish Smash downstairs — but this is in its favor. I found the burgers at Izzy & Wooks’ prior iterations to be serviceable. Their replacement, however, the longa smash ($15), is dramatic, distinct and delicious. It starts with a house-cured longanisa pork sausage patty that’s naturally tinted with beets, sweetened with pineapple and flavored with both black and roasted garlic. The patty is blackened until the sugars fully caramelize into a candy crackle. It’s topped with cheddar, caramelized onions coated in banana ketchup, and a juicy tomato slice, then slipped inside a brioche bun.
Izzy’s unique fried chicken sandwiches start with thighs brined in toyomansi (soy sauce + calamansi), which are then coated in rice flour and fried twice. The Manong ($17) is 420-friendly sandwich with an artery-clogging combo of fried chicken, lacquered pork belly, tangy slaw, and bread-and-butter-style pickled bitter melon. The latter is why it’s Manuel Ramirez’s favorite. Growing up, his father said that bitter melon was a “macho” food that only “real Filipinos” eat. Ramirez maintained a steady aversion to its profound bitterness, but after he started cooking professionally, he grew to appreciate its celery-like crunch. (He balances it out in his dishes with sugar and chiles.)
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Better still is the Scorpion Hot ($15), which sees the cutlet bathed in a hot oil — made with tamarind, cane sugar vinegar and scorpion chiles — that has a forceful but balanced kick, so no medical waiver needed.
It’s a little depressing, though, that none of the aforementioned dishes are nearly as popular as its best-selling bowls, which are topped with crisped mung beans and a vegan green goddess sauce made with herbs, calamansi and edamame (as a thickener). “In a lunch setting, bowls rule all,“ Ramirez said. “We sell more barbecue chicken bowls here than anything else.” It’s a favorite of building tenants, Ramirez said, given that it doubles as a co-working space that is mostly occupied.
The Izzy menu is adaptable to all hours of the day: egg sandwiches for brunch, barbecue bowls for mid-day and hefty chicken sandwiches for dinner. Still, Izzy & Wooks struggles to attract an evening crowd, Ramirez admitted. Those concerns aren’t new at Saluhall, which has wrestled with major shifts over the last year, as nearly all of the original, all-vegan roster has departed (only Curry Up Now remains).
Ramirez said he opened in Saluhall in part because he believes in downtown — he and his family have been running restaurants in the area for more than 15 years, including Filipino restaurant Inlay and a Korean chain Bonchon at the Metreon. (Though both have since closed.)
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In spite of the venue’s ongoing troubles, there remains enormous potential in Saluhall. On busy days, Ramirez said, “we get glimpses” of its possibilities.
Izzy & Wooks. 945 Market St., Second floor, San Francisco.