GOOD THING I didn't make it to Forest Hill for lunch last week. I don't think there's anywhere there to eat – unless you knock on some rich person's door, and we all know where that gets you. Death by starvation and/or hypothermia, according to bluegrass music.

My sources are "The Frozen Girl" and "The Little Paperboy." Plus, didn't Dolly Parton do a song? – yeah, "Little Orphan Andy," or something like that. I don't really remember it, but you gotta figure the kid dies at the end, right? I don't know.

I have to admit that I looked something up online, though. I looked up "Forest Hill Restaurant San Francisco Neighborhood Good Food Cheap Particle-Board Lou Groza." I like to put a lot of words into my online lookups, including at least one proper name. Otherwise they come back with 1,247,332 matches, and I just don't have that kind of time.

Anyway, I learned that there aren't any restaurants in the Forest Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. In fact there aren't any businesses or retired kickers of any kind. It's just an upscale hot-shit high-end residential part of town, the southwestern foothills of Twin Peaks, where Adolph Sutro planted a shitload of trees in the 1880s, where Willie Mays lived in the 1960s, and where, in the 1970s, some tweaked teenager lynched a lot of cats and dogs and hamsters.

No mention of Sal's Diner, Ed's Feedbag, Mojo's Barbecue, or Shirley's. So ... fuck it, I say. I'm going back to Osaka.

Osaka's that sushi place in the Castro where I over-tided myself over last week, between Nizario's and Marcello's, instead of ever making it to Forest Hill, to freeze to death no doubt on some pet-icidal billionaire's steps, according to sources.

And remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about Hamano Sushi? This is the place I thought I was going to that time. Osaka. It's not exactly any all-that cheaper than Hamano, regularly speaking, but it's nice and pretty inside, with purplish lights and a long, numbered counter, super hip cool bing boomy music going, nice service, and they do have an $8.50 bento box lunch special, which includes miso soup, rice, and salad. Tea too. You get to choose a choice of 2 out of about 20 things, very few of which are actually sushi. So be careful. That's why I had to go back this week, because last week, being careless, I wound up without any raw fishes in my bento box.

That was because the first 2 things I saw, and all I really needed to know, back then, were chicken kara-age and saba shioyaki. I didn't have to look into it any further than that, chicken kara-age meaning fried chicken, and saba meaning mackerel, my favorite kind of sushi. Unfortunately, shioyaki means cooked, or probably cooked-in-a-certain-particular kind of way ... I'm not up on my Japanese.

It was all well and good, at any rate, but you kinda miss wasabi and pickled ginger, not to mention the feel and fun of raw, fishy fishiness on your teeth and tongue. So I went back this week and got sashimi, which I hadn't even seen on the list last time.

The only other kind of sushi sushi was a California roll, but those usually have mayonnaise on them, don't they? So what kind of choice is that? I got sashimi and chicken teriyaki. Plus the rice, the salad (with lemon wedges instead of their mayonnaisey dressing), a little bit of cucumber salad, miso, tea.

The bento box, in case you're not familiar with the concept, is a boxy, compartmentalized plate – I can't help thinking of John Lurie in Stranger than Paradise, going, in defense of TV dinners, "What? You got your meat here. You got your potato here. You got your vegetable here" ... or whatever the hell he says.

Only what you got, of course, is not meat and potatoes and wrinkly peas.

The sashimi, chef's choice, was salmon and tuna, and both were delicious.

The teriyaki was also delicious, and there was plenty of it – two layers of grilled chicken strips – which is a good thing and a bad thing. Good because lots is always good, and bad because it was at the expense, methinks, of the sashimi. Which was not lots, just like two or three little nigiri-sized slices of salmon, two or three of tuna.

What are you gonna do?

Well, what I should have done was asked for sashimi and sashimi, huh? For my pick-two. I wonder if they'd do that?

Guess I'll have to go back a third time. Damn.

Osaka Sushi. 460 Castro (at Market), S.F. (415) 255-8828. Sun.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-midnight. Takeout available. Beer and wine. American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.