Lunches from Rising Sun Collective (Pre-Grand Opening)

During the middle of last month I headed up to North Park to grab a late breakfast from a place I hadn't been to in a year or so. Sadly, the place was closed….I'm not sure what's going on but will do an update once I get all the info.

Anyway, it was about 1030 am and I decided to just go ahead and take a stroll on 30th Street. As I was crossing University, I thought that it was perhaps time for me to finally revisit Shank & Bone, but another place caught my attention.

In the location of what used to be Sipz was something named "Rising Sun Collective"? I decided to cross the street and take a look. Well, I took a gander of the menus and quickly figured out that this was a conglomeration of various businesses (thus the "Collective", duh…) with drinks from Cafe Maiko, bread and pastries from Salt & Butter by Okayama Kobo, which used to do pop-ups in Sorrento Valley. Okayama Kobo is the chain which has outlets in Little Tokyo and Honolulu, Sipz, and "Rising Sun".

Needless to say, it caught my interest. So, I decided to return at 11 and check the place out. I returned and was kindly greeted by a gentleman, who was quite friendly. The space is quite large and of course, Japanese themed.

There were separate menus for lunch and dinner. I decided to do the Tonkatsu Panini, which came with fries, which was nicely priced at $9. I went for another stroll and returned to pick up my sandwich which was cheerfully handed to me and I headed home.

  I will say upfront that my favorite item were the fries, which had been dusted and were perfectly seasoned and still crisp after the 15 minutes drive home.

As for the Panini….this was a "Salt & Butter" roll that had been stuffed with some really tough and chewy tonkatsu and cheese and pressed. The breading of the tonkatsu hadn't handled the trip home well. The roll was dry, doughy, though I liked the balance of flavors; lightly buttery, decent salt, and not overly sweet.

The katsu sauce was very good, super flavorful; almost too strong.

Overall, not terrible, and at these prices I could easily return for a follow-up.

A couple of weeks later I decided to return.

Things looked like they were really in grand opening mode. It was again lunch time and I decided to order the Salt and Pepper Chicken. ($14). I'm guessing they were in Sipz mode because I had to make sure to order "chicken", not tofu which seems to be the default.

The gentleman working the front was very nice and told me they had starting serving a variety of breads from Salt & Butter and even brought on over a plate of samples.

They had really started selling the breads from Salt & Butter.

I had a sample and it's really not my kind of thing. Too doughy and sweet for my taste. But I'm sure there are folks who will like this.

My Salt and Pepper Chicken really looked like a "classic" Sipz dish, except that it had chicken.

 The rice was on the drier, harder end of the scale. I was asked if I wanted "spicy" sauce with my lunch and I said yes, but I think they forgot it. It's ok, I'll leave that to the "soft" opening.

Lot's of broccoli, which wasn't bad. It still had a bit of crunch to it. There was a good amount of spicy jalapeno as well. Not too much garlic tones and such; very basic and straight forward.

The chicken seemed to have been fried, sliced, and then incorporated into the the dish. It still had a nice crunch to it, salty-sweet-spice. Think a level above Panda Express.

   The "pot stickers" were like a very bland, chewy, fried mandu. This was not terrible; very fast-casual in nature, though not my kind of thing.

So, if you're into that style of food. 

One interesting thing to note, I made sure to indicate that my visits were before the grand opening. What I found strange was that the place just had their grand opening last weekend. Which I found kind of disturbing….a place named Rising Sun had their grand opening on December 7th?  Really, do they know what happened on December 7th, 1941?

When I mentioned this to some folks I was told by a good friend, "well, the owners are not Japanese and I don't think they know". I was told by another person that I'm "just woke and overly sensitive"! Hmmm…… I told him that there's a difference between being "respectful and woke".

Rising Sun Collective
3914 30th St.
San Diego, CA 92104