Butterfly Restaurant

Pier 33 on the Embarcadero is not the obvious address for a chef-driven Asian kitchen, which is precisely what makes Butterfly's positioning worth noting. Chef-owner Rob Lam opened the original location on Mission Street in 2000, then relocated to this waterfront pier in 2003, trading a neighborhood dining room for floor-to-ceiling bay views, an open kitchen, and a dining room scaled for both a weekday lunch and a full evening service. The menu draws across Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean traditions without committing to a single register — what some reviewers have called "Asian within Asian." Dishes like duck egg rolls, lop cheong sticky rice, and garlic noodles sit alongside sashimi preparations and a bone-in ribeye, a range that reflects Lam's intent to hold a broad audience without flattening the cooking into generic fusion. The approach earned the restaurant a feature on KQED's Check, Please! Bay Area, one of the more credible regional broadcast validators for San Francisco dining. Pricing runs at the moderate end of Embarcadero dining: a three-course lunch menu has been offered at $25, with average per-person tabs around $35 before drinks. That positions Butterfly well below the tasting-menu tier that dominates critical attention in San Francisco, which may explain why it draws a mixed crowd of tourists from the nearby Ferry Building corridor and locals who treat the bay-view setting as a reliable backdrop for a business lunch or an unhurried weekend meal.

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