My four best meals in San Francisco have all been at La Folie, a temple of great French cuisine. The ambience is formal without being over-bearing or self-indulgent thanks to the light-hearted elements of harlequins and circus colors, as the name of the restaurant suggests. The service is always professional and polished. But the food is what truly shines - great food, served consistently well, in surprisingly healthy portions (healthy implying large, not small). The menu is divided into five sections, each with 5-10 choices, from which you can select 3, 4, or 5 courses. The prices - $60, $75, $85 - reflect good value considering the kind of fanciful crap you're likely to force yourself to eat at comparably priced venues where the only relief is the tiny portions.
I was at La Folie this past weekend to celebrate a special occasion and the restaurant was still in outstanding form. My beet salad had just the right amount of meatiness that was balanced by a light earthy flavor. My friend noted that my scallops were the most properly cooked he had ever had. I agreed, and aggressively guarded my plate so he couldn't swipe another bite. Jerk. The scallops were placed on top of a generous mound of summer vegetables including carrots and peas in a pea-lobster froth. The warmth of the dish was enough to loose the knots in my shoulder from a long work week. There was no question what I would select for my poisson course: lobster. Lobster served three ways - lobster tail on corn, carrots, and peas; petit lobster sandwich with bacon; lobster claws and roe rapped in leeks. Is there anyone who is so adept at preparing lobster? Eating his lobster isn't an acute revelation. Rather, it sneaks an assumption into your brain that there is no other way to prepare lobster. It makes you question why everyone else makes it taste so bad, rather than why chef Roland Passot makes it taste so damn good.
I was stuffed by the time my fourth course arrived - quail wrapped in potato sheets, stuffed with squab and wild mushrooms, in a truffle jus. It was a battle between my desire to consume something so delicious and the fibers of the stomach wall beginning to tear (and if you know me, you know how elastic my stomach is). I have to admit that the desserts weren't as inspired as the other courses - but hell if that or a few rips in my stomach lining keeps me from finishing my dessert. I had their Valrhona chocolate croquettes, which to my delight had perhaps the highest cacao content out of any chocolate based dessert I've ever had. One final note about the food (or rather, the drinks): I can't drink very much alcohol, so I take special note of the water served. La Folie has what must be the best water in the world: Badoit. Badoit falls under the "effervescent" category of sparkling waters - and the bubbles are so tiny you'll wonder if it really is sparkling water or just amazingly refreshing still water.
The funny thing about La Folie is that I've always been able to book reservations the day of the reservation, and this utterly boggles my mind when a mediocre restaurant like Quince can be booked solid for a month. There are two restaurants I place on the same league as La Folie: the French Laundry, the only restaurant to which I would assign a higher food score, and Bastide, where although the food isn't quite as good, the service and ambience is unparalleled ANYwhere I've dined. But why bother with making reservations two months out (if you can even get past the busy signal all morning) or flying down to Los Angeles when Roland Passot is, without so much fanfare, cooking something so fanfare worthy right here in the city?
During truffle season, La Folie used to (and may still) pass around at the beginning of each seating a basket of the fragrant bulbs for their guests to smell, like truffle sniffing pigs - an appropriate foreshadowing of how you will feel at the end of what I promise will be a near perfect meal.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Three Strikes: Michael Mina, Fifth Floor, and Quince
When I returned to San Francisco after a two-year stint in Los Angeles, I was excited to try some of the new restaurants that had been receiving a lot of attention in the media as well as some well-established ones that I had never tried in the past. Unfortunately, I struck out with three bad ones in a row.
Michael Mina - I never thought Aqua was in the same league as La Folie and Gary Danko, but I figured that after a very public separation with the parent company of Aqua and a new eponymous restaurant (true to the size of his ego) Michael Mina couldn't fail. The SF Chronicle hailed it as the most highly anticipated restaurant opening in the past 5 (or was it 10?) years. I couldn't wait. The food was okay - interesting in the triptych presentation of every course, curious in the flavors. But it wasn't anything I loved. One falls in love with the butter poached lobster on pea shoots of La Folie, or crisp sturgeon with Jerusalem artichokes at French Laundry. This was interesting, the way one thinks many modern pieces at an art museum are interesting: they're fun to look at, but you would never really buy even the poster to hang on your wall. Unfortunately, the food - mediocre as it was - was the star of the evening. The atmosphere was bizarre, as the restaurant opens into the lobby of the Westin St. Francis creating a cacophonous cave-like environment. The sound was mind-numbing. What really did it was the service. The guy at the table next to mine said it best: when the waiter came at the end of a long laborious meal (over three hours for three courses!) to ask if there was anything else they needed, the man replied "no! I just want to go home." I myself had better service at Chevy's.
Fifth Floor - Two friends had told me with much enthusiasm that this was their favorite restaurant in the city. I had heard Laurent Gras's name numerous times in the media, all raving about his culinary skill. I stopped by one day to read the menu and two items seduced me enough to get me to just grab a seat at the bar and go for it. Pork Belly with a crispy skin served with truffle jus and Cherry Clafoutis (one of my favorite desserts) - how could you go wrong with those luxurious flavors? How naive I can be. There was so much cracked peppercorn on the pork belly, that the warm fatty flavors of the pork and the luxurious earthiness of the truffle I had eagerly anticipated was replaced by a burning sensation. No flavor, just burning. The cherry clafoutis fell flat on my tongue, pasty and tart (compare with the cherry clafoutis of Gary Danko!). The other courses from the chef's tasting menu weren't memorable. The service was standard. The decor was an eyesore (faux zebra patterns?). I am now with two fewer friends.
Quince - I imagined Quince to be the perfect nice neighborhood restaurant. Entree prices in the $20s, elegant but casual ambience, friendly service - the Volkswagen Passat of restaurants. Accessible and nice. It was impossible to get reservations - one month out to the day of your call. Surely, this is the restaurant I'd been waiting for. Wrong. Although the prices were right, the atmosphere was stuffy, dark - there was strained formality and the wait staff spoke with detachment and aloofness, with hushed velvety tones as if they were used to serving people better than you. Oh brother - I was tempted to walk over to the wall and turn on the lights so the whole act would evaporate under the full light of reality. 'Wake up everyone! You've been brainwashed and living in a dream! Phew, thank God you're snapping out of it. Now get me my goddamn TAP water!' The food, a refined Italian cuisine, was decent. The menu is divided into four courses. The first course was excellent - we tried the thai snapper tartare and an oxtail rotolo - described so beautifully by our waiter, again with a hushed velvety tone, as braised oxtail meat reformed into a cylinder, lightly breaded, then pan fried. The second course: the pasta was a bit too egg-y for me but the flavors were fine. The meat course was where they really stumbled: the sauce on my lamb and the sauce on my friend's rib-eye were suspiciously alike, my lamb was unusually gamey, and my other friend's pork was tough. Now the reason why I like to order pork at a nice restaurant is that it's so hard to cook perfectly at home. If they can't get it right at one of the most popular restaurants in a city like San Francisco, what's the point of going on? I might as well go to the corner of my room and rock back and forth in a fetal position in resignation. Fortunately, there's Jardiniere and Woodward's garden - two restaurants where their pork dishes never disappoint.
Strike Three. But not out.
Michael Mina - I never thought Aqua was in the same league as La Folie and Gary Danko, but I figured that after a very public separation with the parent company of Aqua and a new eponymous restaurant (true to the size of his ego) Michael Mina couldn't fail. The SF Chronicle hailed it as the most highly anticipated restaurant opening in the past 5 (or was it 10?) years. I couldn't wait. The food was okay - interesting in the triptych presentation of every course, curious in the flavors. But it wasn't anything I loved. One falls in love with the butter poached lobster on pea shoots of La Folie, or crisp sturgeon with Jerusalem artichokes at French Laundry. This was interesting, the way one thinks many modern pieces at an art museum are interesting: they're fun to look at, but you would never really buy even the poster to hang on your wall. Unfortunately, the food - mediocre as it was - was the star of the evening. The atmosphere was bizarre, as the restaurant opens into the lobby of the Westin St. Francis creating a cacophonous cave-like environment. The sound was mind-numbing. What really did it was the service. The guy at the table next to mine said it best: when the waiter came at the end of a long laborious meal (over three hours for three courses!) to ask if there was anything else they needed, the man replied "no! I just want to go home." I myself had better service at Chevy's.
Fifth Floor - Two friends had told me with much enthusiasm that this was their favorite restaurant in the city. I had heard Laurent Gras's name numerous times in the media, all raving about his culinary skill. I stopped by one day to read the menu and two items seduced me enough to get me to just grab a seat at the bar and go for it. Pork Belly with a crispy skin served with truffle jus and Cherry Clafoutis (one of my favorite desserts) - how could you go wrong with those luxurious flavors? How naive I can be. There was so much cracked peppercorn on the pork belly, that the warm fatty flavors of the pork and the luxurious earthiness of the truffle I had eagerly anticipated was replaced by a burning sensation. No flavor, just burning. The cherry clafoutis fell flat on my tongue, pasty and tart (compare with the cherry clafoutis of Gary Danko!). The other courses from the chef's tasting menu weren't memorable. The service was standard. The decor was an eyesore (faux zebra patterns?). I am now with two fewer friends.
Quince - I imagined Quince to be the perfect nice neighborhood restaurant. Entree prices in the $20s, elegant but casual ambience, friendly service - the Volkswagen Passat of restaurants. Accessible and nice. It was impossible to get reservations - one month out to the day of your call. Surely, this is the restaurant I'd been waiting for. Wrong. Although the prices were right, the atmosphere was stuffy, dark - there was strained formality and the wait staff spoke with detachment and aloofness, with hushed velvety tones as if they were used to serving people better than you. Oh brother - I was tempted to walk over to the wall and turn on the lights so the whole act would evaporate under the full light of reality. 'Wake up everyone! You've been brainwashed and living in a dream! Phew, thank God you're snapping out of it. Now get me my goddamn TAP water!' The food, a refined Italian cuisine, was decent. The menu is divided into four courses. The first course was excellent - we tried the thai snapper tartare and an oxtail rotolo - described so beautifully by our waiter, again with a hushed velvety tone, as braised oxtail meat reformed into a cylinder, lightly breaded, then pan fried. The second course: the pasta was a bit too egg-y for me but the flavors were fine. The meat course was where they really stumbled: the sauce on my lamb and the sauce on my friend's rib-eye were suspiciously alike, my lamb was unusually gamey, and my other friend's pork was tough. Now the reason why I like to order pork at a nice restaurant is that it's so hard to cook perfectly at home. If they can't get it right at one of the most popular restaurants in a city like San Francisco, what's the point of going on? I might as well go to the corner of my room and rock back and forth in a fetal position in resignation. Fortunately, there's Jardiniere and Woodward's garden - two restaurants where their pork dishes never disappoint.
Strike Three. But not out.
Michael Mina does not have a website at this time
http://www.fifthfloor.citysearch.com
http://quincerestaurant.com
The inaugural entry
My first blog is about, quite naturally, dining out in San Francisco. Eating, usually with good friends, is one of my great passions and also the single biggest line item in my monthly accounting spreadsheet. Ever watch Tampopo or Babette's Feast? They illustrate beautifully the power of food, the complex social, cultural, and even spiritual nuances of cooking, eating, sharing food.
Friends and coworkers are always asking for restaurant recommendations. I usually respond with a series of questions: what cuisine do you like? what sort of ambience are you looking for? how much are you willing to spend? I'm certainly no Michael Bauer or Ruth Reichl, but I suppose I've eaten at enough restaurants to at least help them choose a short list to consider, or what restaurants to steer away from. It's a compulsion - a sickness really. I can't help but rave about a restaurant, to cheer it on so they stay in business. But a good critic is judged, perhaps, by what restaurants he doesn't like - and I try to maintain a cold critical stance on those restaurants that fall short of the $150 or even the $5 you pay to nourish your body and your soul.
Happy eating.
Friends and coworkers are always asking for restaurant recommendations. I usually respond with a series of questions: what cuisine do you like? what sort of ambience are you looking for? how much are you willing to spend? I'm certainly no Michael Bauer or Ruth Reichl, but I suppose I've eaten at enough restaurants to at least help them choose a short list to consider, or what restaurants to steer away from. It's a compulsion - a sickness really. I can't help but rave about a restaurant, to cheer it on so they stay in business. But a good critic is judged, perhaps, by what restaurants he doesn't like - and I try to maintain a cold critical stance on those restaurants that fall short of the $150 or even the $5 you pay to nourish your body and your soul.
Happy eating.
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