Seakor Polish Delicatessen and Sausage Factory
Categories: Grocery, Ethnic Food, Meat Shops, Delis [Edit]
Neighborhood: Outer Richmond5957 Geary Boulevard
(between 23rd Ave & 24th Ave)
San Francisco, CA 94121 (415) 387-8660
- Price Range: $$
- Accepts Credit Cards: Yes
- Parking: Street
46 reviews
Neighborhood: Inner Richmond
"I've been going here for *mumble mumble* years. They know my order by heart (falafel sandwich, no tomatoes, extra tahini). I get the best…" read more »
16 Reviews for Seakor Polish Delicatessen and Sausage Factory
I love this place! When I need to get my BBQ on with folks and bring some goods from the hood... this is what I bring:
Hunter sausage (heep O)
Summer sausage (heep O)
And that's all a brother needs to make for some tasty BBQ action.
Them's good eats!
Hello, delicious soup mix packets imported from Polska.
Hello, delicious butter lamb carved/molded from butter with love for Easter.
HELLO, delicious home-made klobasy that wasn't greasy and was maybe the best klobasy I've ever had and would have made my stare baba grandmother proud.
Five stars. Hooray for Poles. Going back soon.
People thought this was:
Useful (2)
Funny (1)
Cool (1)
How can I not fall in love with a place with so many tasty looking sausages on the wall, in the case, on the counter. So many sausages so little time.
I made a special trip via bicycle via GG park to try some of the polish treats they have on offer and was quite happy to find they had bigos, a sauerkraut stew with sausages, apparently a Polish national dish. I had wanted to try this for ages after reading about it and being too lazy to gather all the ingredients to make it. So I sat down to a huge plate of bigos, a huge keilbasa, and a few slices of bread at the one little table while listening to customers shout their orders all in polish at this little deli. EXCELLENT, my desires to try this dish have been satisfied. I definitely want to return for some of the other meats and treats they have on offer.
Some of my neighbors swear by the home-made sausage at this little corner-deli. One of those neighbors makes his own olive oil and roasts whole pigs & lambs. Although this has nothing to do with the sausage at the Polish deli, it does make his opinion on meat more credible if you ask me.
Sausages featured include polish, garlic, hunters, slonska, metworst. There's also cheese -- Italian feta, Polis sulwaski-- & European butter & sourcream. Hot lunches are available, such as bigos & kielbasa, golombki, flaczki, as well as the regular ol' deli sandwich, which is huge, and generally runs 5 bucks. If you want, the friendly owner will also make you a half-sandwich for 1/2 the cost.
Polish media available: Polish tv while you wait for your sandwich, deftly and quickly made. Near the door there are Polish newspapers and magazines.
Jars of herring, saurkraut, pickles, horseradish line the walls. Poppyseed and apple cakes add a homey touch to your lunch. Mostly take-out business, but there is a small table by the window if you want to bask in the Geary corridor fog & Polish gameshow a little longer.
People thought this was:
Useful (4)
Funny (3)
Cool (3)
Unlike Michael M., I think they carry very true-to-taste polish sausages! I've had sausages in Poland, Brooklyn (Greenpoint), Linden, NJ and Chicago and this is right up there with their offerings. PLUS, the owner speaks Polish and is fluent in English and very friendly. He'll advise you on what's fresh and of course try to up-sell you on other goodies but it's all great stuff. Oh and they sell the best mustard on the planet...if you like true, brown mustard with a bit of horseradish, get the mustard with the blue cap...I forget the brand name but it's AWESOME!
I go back regularly now to get my Polish sausage fix and my Cambodian boyfriend loves it as well...I highly recommend this deli.
Great little shop, has a good variety of sausages, had the Hungarian one... it wasn't true Hungarian but close enough. Great head cheese, though, my whole family loved it.
Great little shop filled with random Polish food imports and selection of sausages. I was excited to find the same cherry nektar juice I drank when I was in Poland last year. I also discovered borscht ramen, which excited me to no end. The guy was really friendly and helpful, full of suggestions.
The downside is that there are few tpoultry products for non-red-meat-eaters. However, the turkey sausage he did have was faaaantastic!
I will definitely be back again.
People thought this was:
Useful (1)
Cool (1)
Wow, as if SF didn't already have enough ethnic neighborhoods, apparently the Outer Richmond is Little Eastern Europe. Exhibit A: Seakor Polish Delicatessen. You know it's authentic because they have TV Polonia playing.
One of my signature dishes is Forest Pasta, which is basically a creamy mushroom & olive pasta with sausage. I came in here and noticed that none of the sausages were labeled, so I simply described my pasta to the man behind the counter and asked him what kind of sausage I should get. Without hesitation he picked some out for me. It tatsted like a very traditional country-made sausage, perhaps less spicy than I would have wanted but still excellent. Overall, great sausage selection and very friendly and helpful service.
This is also a great place to grab Hunter's Stew (warning: for cabbage lovers only!)
People thought this was:
Useful (1)
Cool (3)
The guy here is ever so friendly and helpful. We've been here in the past and picked out some German Milka and Kinder chocolates. The store is small but has some small selections of meat and cheese with another wall of dry items.
We thought it was Russian for some reason until we saw the signage saying it was Polish delicatessen. Prices seemed reasonable but not very big variety of items.
Mr. Seakor, your sausage is not delicious.
Seriously though, they're not very good polish kielbasa. It's not like the stuff that I had when I was growing up in Poland and Chicago. THIS PLACE IS A FARCE!
2 stars for the crazy import goods he's got.
Okay. Okay.
It's going to take all my restraint to stick to the facts on this one, because describing a place that has the 'balls' to add 'and Sausage Factory' to its moniker in this town plays to my most juvenile impulses.
There. Whew!
Hopefully acknowledging the base creature within with the above sentence (which the kind reader will note was completely devoid of any bad sexual puns, self-conscious straight-guy jokes, or crass double-entendres) will allow me to proceed with straight review of the place.
I mean, we're all adults here, right?
So anyway, my entire nuclear family is in town for the holidays, plus my German aunt and uncle, and we decide that since everyone in our family is hell-bent on turning their arteries to cement at flank speed, we'll host a Raclette dinner on New Years Eve. Easy enough for us to prepare, no one can say no to stinky melted cheese and potatoes, and the only drawback is a house that smells like old hiking socks for three days.
We'd just come back from a month-long trip to Germany, and one of our most mouth-watering discoveries there was Nurnberger bratwurst, the breakfast-link sized flavor explosions they serve in Bavaria that put their bigger, fatter cousins to shame.
After a disappointing trial with some frozen ones from the German Store (they had TVP in them!!! SACRILEGE!!), we decided to try some of the delis on outer Geary. The last of the three, Seakor, was small but uncrowded, and although there's a table in the front to allow people to eat in, it's really a sausage specialty shop -- most of the floor space is taken up by display cases filled with meat. The man behind the counter, a big, silver-haired gent with a mustache, asked, "Vat can I get you?"
"Um . . . do you have bratwurst (the German pronunciation is BGHRAT-VOUAAST)? The small kind?" (I make the 'small' gesture with my thumb and forefinger)
"Yah, ve have Braatwursht, big - small -- for how many people?"
"We're having nine people."
"NO PROBLEM." - at which point he disappears in the back, which confuses me, especially when the disappearance drags on for a few minutes. What is he doing? I mean, why isn't he just grabbing some out of the case? I ask my girlfiriend if she thinks this is is the right way to go and she gives me this queer sort of look and says, "he's MAKING IT. He's making the sausage RIGHT NOW."
I am dumbstruck. I'm so used to buying pre-packaged meat that this is a little weird; at the same time I'm excited by the idea of fresh food.
He comes out a bit later hoisting a massive set of links and says, "See? Small -- very fresh, very lean. It's good. Anything else for you?"
We got so excited we bought a couple of pounds of garlic sausage as well. Both were fantastic, even though the brats were not exactly the kind we were looking for.
I'm sold though -- I'll be hitting this guy for our next barbeque.
People thought this was:
Cool (1)
One of the few Polish deli's in the Bay Area. The treasure in this store is the dried Polish mushrooms.
On the weekends there are some trays of baked goods on the counter. The squares of Polish cheesecake are excellent.
Seakor makes its own sausage, smokes hams and carries a good selection of Polish groceries, cold cuts, cheeses, dairy products, pickled fish and smoked fish. They are average to good.
The mushrooms are spectacular. Some are in jars. Some strings hang from the ceiling. Prices range from $60 to $150 per pound.
When dried, mushrooms have a deep intense flavor. An ounce will go a long way. The aroma is wonderful too. Take a whiff of one of the jars on the counter. The mushrooms can be used in any recipe calling for dried mushrooms.
The stars are an average. Five stars for the mushrooms and cheesecake. Three stars for the rest.
There is another location in Campbell.
http://www.yelp.com/bi...
The guy here was patient with me and offered quite a few samples. I loved the meat I ended up getting.. I was looking for something similar to "tasso" which is a smoked pork we eat in Louisiana. Going there tonight again for some meat to throw in a gumbo :-D
People thought this was:
Useful (2)
Cool (2)
A moderately good deli that is relatively satisfying. Prices are ok, the food is good, but its little on the dirty side if you ask me. There was a wasp crawling on some meat when I was there this one time, but it didnt bother me too much, because its kinda what you expect from a little hole in the wall. Try the smoked pork loin sandwich, you wont be dissapointed. The old guy who works there is nice, and hes very patient too. There was this one her customer lady who was letting him have it because he apparently messed up her sandwich by putting mayo on it. He was very nice to her and fixed it immediately fixed it. Hes a really friendly guy.
My family is 100% Polish and, after moving here from Chicago, I'd almost given up finding a truly authentic Polish deli. Fortunately, there's Seakor! They have REAL kielbasa, poppyseed coffeecake, true Polish pickles, and more packed into a small, cozy space. The owner even sold me some of his own sausage casings for kielbasa I was making at home after I ran out. The quality of the meat is top notch, and everything is authentic and tastes like home. This is a gem - try it! I'm so grateful to have found this. Now, all I need is a restaurant with golabki and dill pickle soup!
Before my time spent on King George Island, I had little to no knowledge of Polish customs and people. Throughout my season doing penguin research in the icy climes of Antarctica, my cohorts and I (we totaled 3 for most of the season) would make a weekly hike to the Arctowski Polish base. The Poles winter over down there whereas the small house-like base that I stayed at is a summer only set-up. Needless to say, the 3 Americans were stoked to see some new faces every week and the Poles were equally excited (it helped that I was a young female and that we always brought booze and microwave popcorn) for their American guests.
Vodka was already my drink of choice when I traveled down there, so we hit it off well. I thought I liked sausage and pork products, but the Poles showed me that I was merely dipping my toes in the pond of pork. Meals at Arctowski usually involved a crock of schmaltz (rendered pork and beef lard) to spread on bread, roughly 5 or 6 cold cuts, plates of sausages, wurst-like links, head cheese, blood sausage, etc., mustard, borscht, and sometimes...fish in aspic. As if schmaltz wasn't schmaltzy enough, they added extra chunks of kielbasa to the crocks. Is it any wonder that I may have returned to the Northern hemisphere a bit more rotund?
Seakor is a great little deli out on Geary in the Richmond that gives me a source for the Polishness that I grew to love. I was feeling a little shy when I went in there, but the older gentleman was very welcoming and gave me some good sausage counsel. He looked like he knew his way around the schmaltz and links, so I asked him which one he liked best. I brought home one kielbasa ring that is larger in girth than my forearm (I think this guy weighed in around 3 lbs) and a double smoked pork and beef beaut. Selected a small jar of pickles and a large jar of kraut (per his advice) from the wall that houses various sweets, sundries, dried and bottled mushrooms, canned fishes, and the like.
The sausage man made it clear that all of the sausages are made in-house. They also have ham, smoked ribs, lardons of bacon, and other types of Polish yummies. Seakor has been in business for roughly 26 years but only around 6 at the Geary location. They have another branch in Campbell that has a wider variety of dried exotic mushrooms and pastries on the weekends. I'm still feeling too shy to mutter any of the Polish phrases I learned to the sausage man (I guess only a handful of them would actually be appropriate).
The Poles, they're good people. They taught me a lot about the Pope, drinking hard liquor at 10am on Sunday, pork products, and that it's possible to have a meal of 13 different fish dishes in aspic, but that's another story. Na zdrowie!
http://sunsite.icm.edu... if you want to check out Arctowski.
People thought this was:
Useful (1)
Funny (1)
Cool (2)
People Who Viewed This Also Viewed...
Related Lists
-
Mid-Outer Richmond
As if San Francisco didn't have enough ethnic…
Hot and New
- Muracci's Japanese Curry &…
102 reviews
Neighborhood: Financial District
- Beretta
217 reviews
Neighborhood: Mission
- Halu
23 reviews
Neighborhood: Inner Richmond
- Bi-Rite Creamery
933 reviews
Neighborhood: Mission
- Cossu Restaurant, Bar & Lounge
8 reviews
San Francisco, CA
