Virtual Gourmet
Marcello Mastroianni in
"Divorce Italian Style" (1961)
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THIS WEEK
SAN FRANCISCO
by John Mariani NEW
YORK CORNER ❖❖❖ by John Mariani As NYC and London wage war to see which city can open the greatest number of restaurants per month during a bad economy, San Francisco always seems to have a few good new ones opening throughout the year, more often than not these days fairly small, often storefront places run by individuals one or two owners or chefs who put their heart and soul into the kitchen rather than the dining room. The finest restaurants in the city endure, even thrive, like Gary Danko, Boulevard, Fleur de Lys, and Ame. Here are some of the newest that have impressed me.
Cotogna
Good
Italian food is usually good enough, and when
things go a bit too fancy, some of its soul may
get lost in translation. A good middle ground occurs
when a San Francisco chef like Michael Tusk
develops a feverish passion for the food, so that
even if his grandmother wasn’t Italian, he tries
to cook like one while adding everything that
Northern California can offer in terms of meats,
seafood, and vegetables. Seven
years ago Tusk opened the still red hot Quince,
but Cotogna is far more rustic and downright
chummy; every bottle on the wine list is just $40. And—get out!--a
three-course fixed price menu runs $24?! The
pastas are all radiant, from the most delicate fagotelli
with ricotta and flowering blossoms to the triangoli
with corn and chives. A fearsome grill/rotisserie
turns out sizzling Gulf prawns with a watermelon panzanella
salad. And for dessert there’s a peach crostata that
would make Alice Waters weep with pleasure. Open Mon.-Sat. for
lunch and dinner, Sunday for dinner only.
Antipasti $12, pastas $15, main courses $22-$24;
fixed price menu $24.
Michael Mina
I was delighted to be back in this
airy space, lighted by the soft, foggy San
Francisco sun, that had long been Aqua, which Chef
Michael Mina had helped open back in 1991. Since
then Mina has built an empire of mostly high-end
restaurants from Atlantic City to Vegas, from
Detroit to Seattle, not least four Bourbon Steaks,
a rampant expansionism that caused me to lose
interest Mina as a working chef. So Mina’s
return to his roots, at this stylish flagship
where he swears he will be cooking most of the
time, was promising news. After visiting the new
restaurant, I realized what San Francisco—and
I--had been missing all those years he was away.
Lunch Mon.-Fri.
dinner nightly. Appetizers $17-$28; $34-$98.
25 Lusk Street
Grandeur
need not be rapturous. At 25 Lusk, in the
fast-developing South of Market/China Basin,
Chef-restaurateur Matthew Dolan and partner Chad
Bourdon found a huge 1917 smokehouse and meat
packing building and utilized all its massive
industrial timbers and exposed brick to create a
shadowy, two-story restaurant of daunting size and
cool, casual elegance. The two men met in
culinary school a dozen years ago, and with a
solid training on both sides of the kitchen door,
they opened this grand venture last year, and it's
been a hit and catalyst for the neighborhood. 25 Lusk is open for
dinner and for weekend brunch. Dinner appetizers
run $12-$18, main courses $23-$48.
Fifth Floor Palomar Hotel 12 Fourth Street 415-348-1111 www.hotelpalomar-sf.com
The Fifth Floor is located,
as you’d expect, on the fifth floor of the Hotel
Palomar, and for about a decade now it’s been one
of the top restaurants in the city, under several
chef changes.
The newest is David
Bazirgan. The
195-room hotel, located off bustling Market Street
and near the Moscone Center, is actually on the
fifth to ninth floors, and the design is built
around geometric forms and formulas, with deep
colors in the fabrics and polished wood, with a
vaguely art deco feel. This is a Kimpton Hotel, so
it contains one of its signature Mind.Body.Spa
program (including in-room), featuring
complimentary yoga basket. They also promise to be
pet and child friendly, and they deliver live
goldfish to your room throughout your stay, not,
apparently, to be eaten as a snack but simply to
calm your nerves.
Which
may be needed if you book a room on the Market
Street side, because, thanks to San Francisco’s
indulgent city fathers, street musicians are
allowed to play all day until nine p.m., and
outside my window was a guy—every day—who
played a full set of drums that was as disturbing
as if they’d put a jackhammer out there. Ask for
an interior room or one facing away from Market
Street. Every evening the hotel hosts a wine
hour from 5 PM-6 PM on the Fifth Floor Lounge, a
nice way to start before dinner (which may also
save you from spending money on aperitifs at the
restaurant). Although some reconfiguring of space
and décor has been done in the restaurant,
which was once oddly broken up, now modern, with
good lighting and semi-circular chairs, and a
definite romantic cast good for a first or tenth
date, as well as 25th anniversary. The Fifth Floor
is a serious restaurant but it manages to convey
that Northern California sense that you shouldn't
take the experience too seriously but relax and
enjoy yourself, perhaps putting yourself in
Bazirgan's hands.
Boxing Room San
Francisco has always drawn the cuisines of the world
to its belly, though it’s not exactly awash in Cajun
restaurants. The
Boxing Room fills that need well and does so within a
fine-looking, big open room with a very popular
28-seat counter where you can just drop in and eat in
front of the open kitchen where Chef Justin Simoneaux
works his spicy magic. He’s a Southern Louisianans
native who grew up eating—and sometimes catching—the
food of the region, and began cooking at 15,
eventually moving to California to attend the California Culinary Academy in 2005,
then worked his way around the Bay Area.
Boxing
Room
is open daily for lunch, dinner and weekend brunch.
At dinner appetizers run $8-$13, main courses
$14-$24.
Down in San Mateo,
about thirty minutes from San Fran proper, Chef Sachin
Chopra and his lovely wife Shohana (who herself helps
run her family's vineyard, Wolff & Father Wines,
in the Santa Cruz Mountains), working out of a
charming western Victorian house, have married a
North Cal sensibility to Indian food culture with
dazzling, novel results. The place is so pretty, inside
and out, very truly like a home, with fireplace,
small, trim rooms in bright colors and trim, and a
sense that you really have been welcomed to the Chopra's for a
home-cooked dinner. But the menus go much
further than the usual Indian menu of mulligatawny
soup, samosas, and lamb vindaloo. Mr. Chopra
does do a vindaloo, but it is a short rib with molten
goat’s cheese, baby bok choy in a roasted onion,
fennel, ginger sauce. All Spice is open for dinner Tues.-Sat.
Appetizers $8-$14, main courses $13-$25.
❖❖❖ NEW
YORK CORNER Crown
T here
are some food writers who will always lament the
quality of the restaurants on the Upper East Side,
despite the existence in that affluent stretch of
real estate of first-rate restaurants like Daniel,
Café Boulud, Café Sabarsky,
Caravaggio, David Burke Townhouse, JoJo,
L'Absinthe, The Mark by Jean-Georges, Park Avenue,
and others. Too often the criticism is aimed
at minor eateries that a certain type of UES
crowd has tended to favor, lackluster places
like Nicola and Swifty's, where the food is never
the point and money no object. It is easy
enough to satirize such people--just page through
any issue of the New
Yorker's cartoons--but I think it's
sufficient to say that if that's the kind of food
they want to eat and the prices they will pay for
a Waldorf salad, let them munch away. All
NYC restaurateurs should be so lucky. Crown
is open for lunch Mon.-Fri., for dinner nightly. ❖❖❖
THAT'S IT? FIVE PERCENT????!!!
MAYBE THE PLANET URANUS? "Earlier Kinch told me,
`When the Savoy cabbage is ready, we're prepared to
use it, because it's been growing in my head...,' and
again he trails of. At first you think he is
apprehensive about questions and answers, and then you
sense he is not completely present, that he listens
and speaks, he physically takes up space, but he is
actually somewhere else, in a secret world he explores
and from where he files little reports from time to
time, as menus."--Charles Bowden,
GQ.
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Any of John Mariani's
books below may be ordered from amazon.com.
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FEATURED
LINKS: I am happy to report
that the Virtual
Gourmet is linked to four excellent
travel sites: Everett Potter's Travel Report: I consider this the best and
savviest blog of its kind on the web. Potter is a
columnist for USA
Weekend, Diversion, Laptop and Luxury Spa Finder,
a contributing editor for Ski and a frequent contributor
to National
Geographic Traveler, ForbesTraveler.com
and Elle Decor.
"I’ve designed this site is for people who take
their travel seriously," says Potter. "For
travelers who want to learn about special places
but don’t necessarily want to pay through the nose for
the privilege of staying there. Because at the end
of the day, it’s not so much about five-star
places as five-star experiences." THIS WEEK: VISITING PHILLY; THE
PLAYBOY SKI GUIDE/
Eating Las Vegas is the new on-line site for Virtual Gourmet contributor John A. Curtas., who since 1995 has been commenting on the Las Vegas food scene and reviewing restaurants for Nevada Public Radio. He is also the restaurant critic for KLAS TV, Channel 8 in Las Vegas, and his past reviews can be accessed at KNPR.org. Click on the logo below to go directly to his site.
Tennis Resorts Online: A Critical Guide to the World's Best Tennis Resorts and Tennis Camps, published by ROGER COX, who has spent more than two decades writing about tennis travel, including a 17-year stretch for Tennis magazine. He has also written for Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, New York Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Esquire, Money, USTA Magazine, Men's Journal, and The Robb Report. He has authored two books-The World's Best Tennis Vacations (Stephen Greene Press/Viking Penguin, 1990) and The Best Places to Stay in the Rockies (Houghton Mifflin, 1992 & 1994), and the Melbourne (Australia) chapter to the Wall Street Journal Business Guide to Cities of the Pacific Rim (Fodor's Travel Guides, 1991).
ALL YOU NEED BEFORE YOU GO
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