A Bad French Bistro: Plouf

I was just twenty one years old, fresh out of college, and eating frozen pizzas and taquitos from Costco when a friend invited a group of us to dine at Plouf. It would be my first "nice restaurant" experience and I felt like a grown-up. I was mesmerized by the menu - each item read like a recipe in haiku. Sauteed Pacific Halibut, braised endives, in a saffron sauce. This wasn't Sizzlers, and it certainly wasn't the dormitory dining hall. No, it was something entirely new and satisfying. Dining al fresco in downtown on a brisk San Francisco Summer night while a waiter with a french accent poured water into my glass made me feel sophisticated, cosmopolitan. Even now, the memory elicits a sigh.

So what the hell happened? On my most recent visit, the place was bankrupt in every department. I love energetic spaces. Crowded airports, malls, downtowns - even crowded restaurants (read my entry on Town Hall). But pair it with painfully slow service and the once boisterous murmurs of the crowd begin to press in on you and choke out the fun. Have to ask repeatedly for water, the check, anything, and you begin to suspect that the restaurant is more concerned about generating more revenue regardless of the limited number of pans on the burners than choreographing energy. Belden Lane has the potential to be charming and European - in fact, it once was - but as its popularity has grown the restaurants have seized on the opportunity as if to take revenge for the bleeding during the dot-com bust years by packing tables so tightly outside that you can't tell where one restaurant ends and where another begins. So you find yourself not in Europe, but in Las Vegas.

Unfortunately, the quality of the food didn't help the situation. As an appetizer my guest and I split their house specialty: mussels, marniere in this case. The broth was warm vinegar (never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink) and the mussels were overcooked (always remove from heat just after the shells open). My friend's scallops over corn risotto was standard, perhaps even fine except for the coarsness of the risotto, the grains crumbling between my teeth. I ordered baked lobster with tomato salad and wild mushroom flan. The uneasy look of the waiter when I read it from the menu should have warned me. The lobster was undercooked and came off the shell in shreds (my guess is that they used frozen lobsters), and the flan was lacking any hint of mushroom. It had the flavor of pure cream and the texture of raw fat - and under normal circumstances the words "cream" and "fat" in a single sentence would cause me to swoon with delight, but this time the swooning arose from nausea.

Still... a restaurant that made Michael Bauer's Bay Area 100 as recently as this past year couldn't be entirely bad. The molten chocolate cake with vanilla bean ice cream - a sure fire crowd pleaser any where - would certainly salvage the meal! While we spent 20 minutes waiting for our mussels and about 30 for our entrees, two suspicious minutes passed before the "molten" cake appeared. The cake was pasty and only barely warm, the flavor substandard as if the quality of the chocolate - the chief matter of importance - never registered on the pastry chef's mind. The ice cream was more like icy whipped cream, the kind you buy in a plastic container in the freezer aisle of your local Safeway, except less palatable. More on what I think of Michael Bauer in a later entry.

I'm disappointed by the restaurateurs who also own a handful of incredible french bistros in the city, including Le Suite and Chez Papa. This will be the last time I return to Plouf, I regret to say. I recommend you also avoid it, unless you like the Stinking Rose and Bucca di Beppo and other restaurants that the crowds patronize because they confuse popularity for excellence.