Recently in Longer Reviews Category

This past weekend, Manresa hosted Chef Mauro Colagreco of Mirazur, a one-star Michelin restaurant set in a cliff-top grove of lemon trees in Menton on the Côte d'Azur. Manresa executive chef David Kinch shared creating a menu with M. Colagreco and two evenings of dining were presented.

I was fortunate enough to attend Sunday evening. My dinner proceeded as follows:

Three Amuse bouche:

Garden barbajuans (beet greens, chard, chrysanthemum...) - small pastry filled with creamed (though I don't think there was any cream involved) garden greens.

Shot of shallot cream, Granny Smith apple, & 'sode de dulse' - an 'Arpege Egg' substitute with layered ingredients/flavors, with rich and salty tastes and contrasting textures.

Oyster with kohlrabi choucroute, champagne vinegar - an oyster shell filled with shredded pickled kohlrabi, topped with a raw oyster and covered with a champagne vinegar foam. Yummy!

Elizabeth Falkner, of Citizen Cake renown, has launched her new venture: Orson. Located in a two-story building on 4th Street near Bryant the undertaking is audacious, both for its considerable size and for the edginess of the menu. The space uses the full height of the building with the ground floor featuring a large horseshoe shaped bar at the center of a large open lounge area, with dining areas at the edges. The décor features dark soundstage-like grays, with glass and chrome. The upstairs areas, open to the lounge area below, are currently devoted to private dining rooms. Background music (depending on how you define background) is techno-pop.

The menu is divided into five sections, with three of them leading up to dessert: “teasers,” “shorts,” “premiere,” and two of them being dessert: “naughty” and “nice.”

Tuesday night, June 19th, 2007 and Wednesday night following marked the end of a short tradition at Manresa in Los Gatos: the annual Pig Dinner. Chef de Cuisine Jeremy Fox last year put together an evening of dining on pig and this year it returned. The press release put it thusly:

Manresa Chef de Cuisine Jeremy Fox will share his passion for making classic French charcuterie, or Italian affettati, on Tuesday, June 19. In his skilled hands, the art of traditional dry-cured salumi, sausages, terrines, and pâtés takes a contemporary turn. For one special evening, aficionados of nose to tail eating can savor an eight-course dinner of saucisson sec, trotters, tongue, pancetta, boudin noir, chorizo, porchetta, mortadella, all made from the whole hog. Also try delectable cassoulet, agnolotti (stuffed pasta) with sweet and savory desserts by Pastry Chef Deanie Fox.

Near the end of April, the Food Network's popular Iron Chef America program featured a contest between two Italian Chefs, Mario Batali of Manhattan's Babbo and Chris Consentino of San Francisco's Incanto. The secret ingredient was garlic—after all—what could be more Italian? The contest was a close one with Batali edging out his West Coast challenger by only two points (and they weren't important points - "plating" of all things).

Soon after the show was aired on April 22nd, Incanto announced they would be offering the Iron Chef Menu from May 18 to June 30 on Friday and Saturday evenings. I sent out a call for action to the local Gourmet Corps and made a reservation for four. Last Friday the Corps arrived at Incanto at 7:00 p.m. expecting an interesting experience. One of the highlights of the Food Network show had been watching Consentino persuading Jeffery Steingarten to suck out the squab brains. I was really looking forward to the evening.

The question before us can be stated thus: “Is San Francisco big enough for both Zuni and Winterland?” Except for both having names that inhabit the back forty of the alphabet, there isn’t much about these two places that would indicate they are from the same food world.

At Zuni you get freshly shucked oysters on the half shell, at Winterland you get octopus crudo with smoked paprika. At Zuni you get roasted chicken on bread salad, at Winterland you get “New York Sirloin cooked on Hay” (wheatgrass). Zuni is comfortable, Winterland is edgy. Zuni is establishment, Winterland isn’t. Does San Francisco have enough adventurous diners so that these two worlds can coexist?

I have a theory that the best time to visit a popular restaurant is just after it opens. True, you don't yet know if the restaurant is actually going to be popular, but on the other hand, you won't have any trouble getting a reservation. Whether my visit on Saturday to Daniel Patterson's new restaurant, COI ("kwa") falls into this category is something that is yet to be determined, but there are positive signs.

COI is in the corner of a building with the door protected by a small alcove. You enter into a lounge area where there are six or seven tables in front of a pillow-appointed banquette along the wall. While they are starting up you can get all three menus here (ala carte, 4-course tasting menu $75, and the 10-course tasting menu $108), but I suspect plans are to limit these tables to the ala carte menu once things settle down. This lounge area is also the entry hall which leads to the small dining room holding about ten tables. The dining room looks like it can accommodate about 40 people. There is also a private room that can hold eight.

It was Tuesday and dinner time. I picked up a bottle of wine and walked over to my local French Bistro, Fringale. So why am I telling you about dinner at Fringale in a note about the Fifth Floor? Because Fringale, although comfortable, quite accomodating of my BYOB habits, and a purveyor of reasonably-priced, delicious food was busy. Too busy. There were no tables and there were no seats at the bar, and there weren't going to be any tables or seats at the bar anytime soon, either. So on the spur of the moment, after assessing my clothing for the correct degree of formality (adequate), I reversed direction and strode down 4th Street to the Palomar Hotel and rode the elevator up to the Fifth Floor.

The Palomar opened not too long prior to my move to San Francisco in 2000. It is a luxurious and comfortable hotel with new, large and bright rooms filled with all manner of neat toys like CD and DVD players. The decor is retro-chic and is kind of european. As I walked across the art-filled lobby and into the restaurant, it really did seem like I was in the lap of luxury. I was looking forward to being rewarded for my impetuosity.

Zuppa, the new venture by Globe owners Joseph and Mary Manzare opened seven weeks ago. I've visited five times, trying a number of items from the menu, and watching the evolution of the place.

As one would hope, the food has improved and the service has settled into a comfortable professionalism, welcoming and friendly. The menu hasn't changed much, but prices have gone up a bit, though they remain very reasonable. (Appetizers were $6 to $9 and are now $6 to $11, while entrees which used to be $16 - $19, now range from $16 to $24).

There is seating for seven at the small but busy bar, and seating for 10 along a counter in front of the open kitchen along a long wall. Tables (both upstairs and down) make up the rest of the seats (a total of 97 - with about 30 upstairs and the rest on the main floor). Decor, befitting the space's history as the Dot com era Cafe Monk is strictly concrete and stainless steel industrial, but it has been softened a bit with some dark paint.

To properly cap off a day at the Wine Cask Futures Tasting, 18 (!) wine fanatics (including a professional or two -- and why can't someone ITB be fanatical about wine?) met for dinner at 6:30 p.m. in the European Room of the Wine Cask wine store. Why not? Restaurants have private rooms that look like a wine cellar, why not have a wine "seller" that doubles as a private room?

Nine wine lovers from the San Francisco Bay area got together for an evening of memorable wine and food at Manresa in Los Gatos. The tasting was devoted to sampling Shafer wines, especially the fabulous Hillside Selects. Since the wines were so special, we wanted to have food and company that would be worthy of the wine. Chef David Kinch was kind enough to put together a seventeen-course tasting menu customized to the wines. Additionally, we were extremely fortunate in having Elias Fernandez, winemaker extraordinary from Shafer accept our invitation to join us.

Paul Homchick, Randy Wigginton, Sam Lai, Randy Cunningham, David Niederauer, Richard Leland, Ken Emery, David Sankaran, Al Osterheld and Elias Fernandez were all at the restaurant by 5:30 p.m. and the festivities started.

I don’t often get out to Upper Polk or thereabouts for dinner, but the good buzz about Pesce tapped me out of my equilibrium, and sent me careening out of orbit towards the upper Polk.

Pesce is a San Franciso version of a Venetian chichetteria, which is an Italian equivalenent of tapas -- small plates of seafood to sample and share with wine and friends.

If I had been born to old money instead of young love, or had I not procrastinated so much when contemplating an application to Harvard things may have turned out differently, and I might feel more at home in Jardiniere. It’s not that I felt out of place or that someone thought I was out of place -- some day I’ll have to tell you about the time the hostess tried to kick me out of the Concorde lounge in Heathrow -- it’s that Jardiniere is so upscale, so refined, so expensive. When I go to Jardiniere, I take a look at the menu, gulp, and rationalize that I eat there, on average, once every 540 days. Then I look around at my company at the bar and think they must eat here once a week, or at least every time they attend the Opera or the Symphony.

One of my rules to live by is: "Never pass up a chance to learn more about sake." Following this rule insures that I will occasionally have the chance to do some enjoyable comparative sake tasting and experiment with sake and food pairings. It also gives me a chance to meet other Japanese food and sake aficionados. So I felt especially fortunate in being able to attend the Chowhound Crackling-fresh Sake Event at Midori Mushi. Here I met Bryan Harrell and Mark Hokoda: two students of Japanese eating and drinking (and not necessarily in that order) who are far more advanced in their studies of this mysterious Eastern Art than I.

Hayes Street Grill is a comfortable place with a simple neighborhood restaurant feel to it. The walls are whitewashed, adorned with black and white portraits, and festooned with hat and coat hooks. Simple white glass fixtures hang from the ceiling. It looks timeless, but gives the impression that it once was smart. A bar fills the front of the room allowing a view out the large windows overlooking Hayes Street.

On a dark January Wednesday earlier this year, responding to a mild urge for adventure and wanderlust, I decided to strike out from my usual haunts in the Financial District and SoMa and search for dinner. I got on a N/Judah Muni train at Embarcadero station, and rode out towards the ocean stopping often to let out the folks returning from work. The Outer Sunset is not the brightest and most cosmopolitan part of the city, and it was with a bit of caution that I got off at 46th and Judah in front of a convenience store and looked around for Thanh Long. It was on the corner only one-half block away, and was warm, welcoming, and bustling inside.