Last week we ate at a hyped new restaurant in town, Qui. It is Paul Qui’s first solo joint, which he has founded since leaving his role as exec chef at Uchiko.
The restaurant doesn’t take reservations so we arrived promptly at 5pm and were joined by Matt and Amanda who had the night off from their baby. It was no trouble to get seated by 5:30 after we’d enjoyed a custom cocktail at the trendy, locally stocked full bar. I popped up to snap a pic of the very jolly and friendly Paul overseeing his kitchen:
The food was high-end but not too pricey, and universally delicious. My favorite dish was rabbit 7 ways, which included consomme in this cute rabbit cup:
The rest of the presentation was nice too:
The food was inventive, playful, delicious, and the whole place was very down-to-earth and unpretentious. The staff seemed to be having a great time and was really into the food and the service. Paul visited our table several times to see how we were doing and gently nudge us toward the real wasabi (“the good stuff,” he called it) and to make sure we ate our cheddar cracker ice cream sandwich with our fingers and not utensils.
There are a few more pics on gallery. I would definitely visit again!
You heard that right, folks: Leslie and I finally made it out to that ultimate west-coast food Mecca: The French Laundry. The trip was sort of a combination long-delayed graduation celebration combined with an anniversary dinner. That’s enough justification, right?
It would take quite a while to describe the whole meal (officially nine courses, but also two bonus amuse bouche and an extra dessert course). If you really wanna know every detail, here’s the menu with our notes:
We arrived about half an hour before our 9pm reservations, figuring there would be stuff to see. And sure enough, there was! Right across the street from the restaurant is the incredibly well manicured restaurant garden, where they get a lot of their produce. Representative pic:
The garden was right off the road, in the middle of town, almost like a public park. It had no gates or entry control at all, so we just walked around through it. Very fun. So I guess what it takes to support sustainable urban agriculture is… to use it to supply a super-high end restaurant across the street.
The food itself was… well, just plain outstanding. It was course after course of expertly combined ingredients (LOTS of them, and never one repeated!), always in harmony, always with high-art-grade presentation. The second amuse bouche was a “coronet” of salmon, but obviously it’s supposed to look like a tiny ice-cream cone. So fun!
I got pictures of several more of the courses, but not all of them, and posted them on gallery. I’ll put one more in here for fun, though, check out this crazy-ass dessert (too many ingredients for a succint name… maybe just “anglaise?”):
The interior of the restaurant itself was pretty interesting… it was in an old house, and it felt pretty cramped (the staff and diners were constantly impeding each other up and down the narrow stairs, for example). I overheard one of the servers say it had 16 tables, which sounds about right. Most were 2 and 4 tops but there were a few bigger, and a private dining room with a table for 10 (every table was constantly occupied, of course!).
We sat down promptly at 9, after I was fitted with a borrowed jacket. Such an anachronism, requiring jackets for men, at a modern restaurant on the west coast! My shirt, tie, and slacks made me better dressed than many of the other male diners I saw, but there’s still something magical about a ratty sport coat that makes you acceptable I guess.
As for drinks, they initially brought out their wine list, on an iPad I shit you not. There we were, in this elegant restaurant, with the blue glow of a frickin’ iPad blinding us. I guess in someone’s demented mind (Thomas Keller? Yep, I’m sure this was his idea) this was trendy and a cool solution. Luckily, we didn’t really have to interact with it: we just gave our server a budget ($150/person, wince) and she brought all the pairings, which were great on the whole. They even included a champagne made exclusively for the French Laundry! They’re mostly written in our notes on the menu.
After working our way through every last course, we speculated as to the time and were pretty shocked to discover it was 12:45am–we’d been eating for almost 4 hours! I guess that’s the kind of marathon meal of relentlessly excellent food you’d want to have experienced before being handed this:
Yeowch! At least the tip was included.
Overall, it was an amazing experience. There wasn’t anything about any individual dish that was unlike what we’ve eaten before–we’ve had courses at several places (most recently Commis in Oakland) that could go head-to-head with anything served at the French Laundry. The difference was the scale of the meal, the ambitiousness and variety of the ingredients, and the complete consistency of the flavor and presentation.
Will we go again? I doubt it… when we eat we’re more interested in exploring new things than seeking out extremes. It was a fun adventure, but I think there’s more to learn by eating everyday examples of regional food from all around the world (plus, that’s the stuff we could actually cook!).
Still, I’ve got to say: The French Laundry is a shining example of what complete, single-minded obsession with great food can yield. Wow.
Last night we tried a new-to-us place in Piedmont: Baywolf. It’s been around for over twenty years, and on our list for at least a couple, so it was high time.
I think they are going for mediterranean food, although if you hadn’t told me that I would have guessed it was just the usual worldly Californian that you see so much around here. I liked the way the restaurant was set up: An old, many-times-refurbished craftsman house with a modern, enclosed deck added to the front for extra seating. Although we sat inside, the deck looked and felt really pleasant.
We started with a grapefruit, avocado, and mango salad with miscellaneous greens that seemed to be spinach and arugula. It was my least favorite dish of the night, mostly because it had this creamy cumin dressing that totally dominated the way everything tasted in my mouth. I get the combination of avocado with cumin, but the sourness of the grapefruit and mango just couldn’t stand up to the aroma.
We also had “duck liver flan” which as far as I could tell was purely a euphemism for foie gras. It was delicious as usual, and served with a nice selection of little pickled this and that (cornichons, shallots, olives).
For the main course, we shared roasted duck with peas, fava beans, artichokes and pancetta. This was the star of the night for me: the duck was perfectly rare in the middle, with a nice crusty coating of fat on top, and the rich, mild combination of vegetables and pancetta was a great accompaniment.
(Not my picture; taken by Flem J. off Yelp, and of a slightly different duck dish. But that’s what the duck looked like).
We also had the Bomba di polenta: polenta layered with short ribs and fava bean greens. The flavor base of this was wonderful, with a great pan sauce covering the plate and smothering some random mushrooms (shitake, and even a few errant chantarelle chunks). The main event though was kind of disappointing: the polenta cakes were all chewy at the edges and I could barely find any trace of the short ribs (though the chunks I did find were darn tasty).
Overall, I’d eat there again, but not before we get through a few more of the east bay places on our list.
Comments
Dan Olin — 2011-03-06 12:07:14
Love the restaurant reports, good vicarious living!
bryan — 2011-03-06 19:25:22
Ever forward toward 100 bay area restaurants! Nice to know someone is out there listening :)
Our little mini-trip to NYC was a blast. We got a hotel in midtown for $100/night on priceline and spent our two days wandering around, seeing sites, visiting clare, and (most of all) eating. A few highlights:
Momofuku Noodle Bar. Shitake buns, hanger steak with polenta, and the best ramen I’ve ever had.
And Peter Luger Steakhouse in Brooklyn. Slice of bacon = $3, and wow. Was probably 1/2 inch thick before they threw it on the grill. Hamburger = $9, best I’ve ever eaten. Steak for one = $40, definitely in my top 5 ever. (They only serve porterhouse, which is great, but I’m more of a ribeye guy if I’ve got the choice).
To celebrate our second wedding anniversary, Leslie and I decided to spend the day in San Francisco eating. We started at Samovar Tea Lounge, where we shared a pot of green tea and another of Pu-erh, which is fermented Chinese green tea–Leslie was a fan. The caffeine seems to have affected my eyebrows.
From there we did lunch at the Monk’s Kettle, which is kind of like Toronado in that it has an amazing bottled and draft beer selection, but minus the sticky counters and loud punk music and plus a very tasty food menu. We kicked things off with 0.5L of Weihenstephaner Hefe, which reminded us of our newlywed summer in Berlin where we drank it in the Weihenstephaner restaurant in Hackescher Markt.
From there, we did some shopping, saw Up at the Castro theatre, then quickly got back to eating at the Anchor Oyster Bar in the Castro. The oysters were just a warm up for the main event, though: Kiss Seafood.
I linked to the Yelp page because Kiss Seafood doesn’t have a website. They also don’t have a lot of other things like a good location, nice decor, a large menu, any employees besides the husband (chef) and wife (waitress) who own the place, nor room to seat more than 12 people (including at the bar). What they do have is the best sashimi I’ve ever eaten. We sat down and ordered the chef’s omakase menu, which is like a prix fixe menu at a French place where the chef decides what you eat. This menu came recommended, and it was also the most convenient option because we couldn’t read the specials anyway:
I’m now going to bore you with a description of each course because this, my friends, was a dinner worthy of rememberance and it is my website after all. We didn’t get enough pictures of the food, but just imagine everything coming out looking half like a sparse, modernist painting and half like something you really want to eat, now. First was a sweet, light salad of soybeans, bean sprouts, and seaweed with a delicate vinegar and sesame dressing. Then, we got a trio of flavors that I’m not used to at a japanese place: smoked (maybe braised?) octopus with what I swear was a barbecue sauce—and it tasted like brisket, not rubbery at all; turnip slices with the most amazing hash of marinated scallop on top; some unidentifiable, firm, delicious root vegetable.
The third course we hit the fish. It was a plate of two slices each of six kinds of sashimi. Here’s the plate after one of each has been eaten:
Let’s be clear: this was the best sashimi I’ve ever had. The pieces were bite-sized, bursting with flavor, each one an adventure of texture in my mouth. I wish had gotten down all the names; here are some snippets from my notes. (Yes, I started taking notes. It’s not weird at all.)
“Something like red striped bass that tastes, according to Leslie, ’like the deck of a ship—but in a good way.’” “Giant clam. Crunchy like the plumpest oyster, but smoky sweet and not salty at all. Wow.” “Thai snapper with the skin still on. Delicate. Perfect.” “Mackerel fin. Totally unique texture, not marinated.” “A chunk of white fish that looks like that flavorless, crunchy stuff you get everywhere but which tastes like cod that was force fed melted butter for its entire life.” “Please, don’t let the sashimi be over.” You get the idea.
The fourth course was a clam broth with steamed clams and turnip slices and a ground fish patty. I wasn’t blown away until I had all the ingredients together, then quipped “Wow! Turnip + patty - what a combo. I’m a bad person for judging it early.” Fifth was a miso soup with egg custard, steamed veggies, lotus root, trumpet mushrooms, and chunks of poached whitefish. It was like the platonic ideal of miso–every other bowl I’ve had is a dancing, hollow shadow. I thought for sure that was the end, but no: round six brought an entire plate of nigiri, bite sized and and just as astronomically good as the sashimi (so I guess Kiss is taking “best nigiri” title as well). We waddled out of the restaurant and headed home for sleep.
Not a bad way to celebrate two years.
Comments
Ann — 2009-06-17 06:58:59
Sounds like a really fantastic meal!! I got hungry just reading about it. This is a place to look for when we next get to San Francisco.
Thanks for the review!
