Ricky Bobby’s Lower Haight Soul Food

Ricky Bobby

Whichever way you say it, either with an outlandish French accent or with an exaggerated southern drawl, the phrase “Ricky Bobby” will heretofore be music to my ears, being now associated with great comfort food.

It’s rare that I get to a restaurant before either of the two weekly San Francisco rags (S.F Weekly and S.F Guardian) do so.  I was able to avail myself of Ricky Bobby‘s sublime cuisine ahead of the buzz due to some inside information from a coworker in the industry, for which I’m suitably grateful.  There are, after all, some perks to be enjoyed living and breathing in the cozy purgatory called the restaurant business.

Ricky Bobby’s is a brimming pot of honey around which I reckon locals and sojourners from other parts alike will swarm to.  It successfully appeals to the caveman core of the being and obliterates rationality or cynicism. I went with a friend and we ordered more than any two people in their right minds should think is manageable in one sitting: a  crawfish meat and shrimp swimming in a rich bowl of grits; lobster mac n cheese, creamy and rich underneath and crispy brown perfection on the surface; two fat chicken drumsticks glazed in some ingenious substance and rolled in what I hazily recollect as being sesame seeds; a generous salad of mache (a mild green), vivid beets and deep fried oysters; and on the side a basket of thin-cut fries.  Added to that were two pints of very good IPA whose name I can’t recall.  All this for about 44 dollars, which for two people is a bargain considering the sweet tune our tastebuds were singing to our brains and the difficulty we had dragging our worldly vessels out of the door and back into the freezing air of Lower Haight.   Even if you think Ricky Bobby’s cinematic namesake is overrated, don’t make the mistake of conflating that film’s mediocrity with this new eatery.

Ricky Bobby

400 Haight St.,

[Lower Haight]