ONE MARKET
1 Market Street
415-777-5577

    Few restaurants ever get to celebrate their 25th anniversary, especially when it started out in a derelict corner of a city.
    “There was a soup kitchen across the street and the restoration of the old Ferry Building was years away,” says owner Michael Dellar (below on the right), who, with general manager Larry Bouchard, opened One Market Restaurant in San Francisco in 1993 on Market Street.
    The grotesque Embarcadero Freeway had been torn down after the 1989 earthquake, and grindingly slow construction of the city’s BART rail system ruined Market Street’s retail business. Street crime soared. Even as late as 2009 Streetsblog SF described the area as “congested, hazardous, and in poor repair.”
    “When we opened the restaurant people asked us if we’d be here in twenty-five years,” says Dellar, “and I told them, `Of course we will; we signed a 30-year lease!” He paused, then added, “At a dollar per square foot.”
    An affordable thirty-year lease on a less-than-prime property allowed the partners to gamble on a neighborhood largely devoid of any restaurants, much less a grand American brasserie with an open kitchen and rotisserie, vast wine cellar and its own meat locker for aging.
    Now, twenty-five years later, One Market has served three million diners, which Dellar notes is “three times the population of San Francisco.” And the blossoming of the area—now nicknamed Soma for South of Market—was kick started by the restaurant and the restoration of the Ferry Building into a marketplace by bringing a vitality and tourists to the block.
    If not ideally situated, One Market was among the first of a new generation of San Francisco restaurants that followed trailblazers like Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse (in Berkeley), Jeremiah Tower’s Stars, and Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio. By the mid-‘80s San Francisco had changed from being a tourist dining town with a slew of brocade-wallpapered continental restaurants like Ernie’s and The Blue Fox to a crucible of so-called “New California Cuisine” that stressed the freshest local ingredients and the best wines coming out of the nearby Napa and Sonoma valleys. Dellar’s wife, Leslye, still does the restaurant’s flower arrangements.
    Dellar first joined forces with young chef Bradley Ogden at the acclaimed Lark Creek in Marin County. In 1993, they returned to San Francisco to take on the biggest restaurant project seen in the city in many years.  In 1997 chef George Morrone, whose restaurant Aqua pioneered a new style of seafood cuisine in the city, took over One Market’s kitchens, followed in 2001 by Adrian Hoffman, and in 2004 by the current resident, Mark Dommen, who earned One Market its first Michelin star (above).
    To celebrate One Market’s silver anniversary the restaurant threw a charity gala in January for invited guests and included a performance by San Francisco’s iconic jazz singer Paula West—-an original employee at the restaurant. For the event Ogden, Morrone and Hoffman joined Dommen for a five-course meal of dishes they made famous over the years: Ogden’s Point Reyes blue cheese soufflé with a blood orange gastrique; Morrone’s Pommery-poached lobster with vanilla, jalapeño butter and saffron potato; Hoffman’s tortelli pasta of veal breast with bottarga and pine nuts; and Dommen’s prime New York steak with beef cheeks, marrow, smoked mashed potatoes and truffles. Pastry chef Patti Dellamonica-Bauler contributed a chocolate gâteau with chocolate-caramel sorbet.
        California wines were poured by Sommelier and Wine Director Tonya Pitts.    
    In speaking to his guests Dellar stressed that from the beginning the straightforward style of One Market’s food would always be maintained—Ogden’s Caesar salad is still on the menu—whoever the chef may be, and that he had little interest in trendy foods, instead focusing on West Coast seafood like Alaskan halibut, Dungeness crab and Pacific swordfish and not complicating the dishes, many cooked over an open wood fire.
    One Market refined that idea and has stuck with it. Persistence seems to have paid off. While most of the first generation of New California restaurants have closed—Stars, Postrio, Masa’s, Santa Fe Bar and Grill, and others—after their fashion wore thin, One Market thrives on keeping to basics it established a quarter century ago in a location whose current gentrification started when One Market turned its lights onto the street.

    The story of Barbetta has been told ever since its inception in 1906 in its original location on West 39th Street and ever since it moved to West 46th Street in the heart of the Theater District.  The founder, Sebastiano Maioglio, whose brother Vincenzo’s little beard gave Barbetta its name, and his wife, Piera, ran it for decades, drawing every personage of the art and music world from Puccini and Caruso to Mick Jagger and Madonna to its rambling townhouses for Piedmontese cuisine one could find nowhere else in the city.
    With the passing of her parents, the continuance and legacy of Barbetta fell on the shoulders of their daughter, Laura, who had been groomed for a career in the arts but suddenly found herself carrying on in their absence. Laura threw herself into saving Barbetta by bringing to it a unique Italian antique décor and a gorgeous outdoor garden. She was the first to bring Piedmontese wines like Barolo, Barbaresco and Grignolino to the U.S. as well as the first white truffles of Alba (1962) sniffed out by the Maioglios’ own truffle hounds!  Barbetta was also one of the first restaurants to discourage smoking in the dining room by replacing matchbooks with mints on the table.
     Who takes over Barbetta next is very much open to question.  Laura’s husband, Günter Blobel, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1999, passed away recently and now Laura is by herself, with no children to undertake the restaurant’s future. Not that Laura Maioglio has lost any of her legendary spunk and standards, hovering over tables with a spoon out of place, asking why a guest ordered a tomato dish with Champagne and recalling old memories with friends who have dined there for fifty years.
    Barbetta’s menu is long, with dishes with the dates they were added, like a beautiful quail’s nest of fonduta cheese in 1962 ($12). Robiola cheese, rarely seen in the city, is wrapped with grilled zucchini ($11). The salmon is house smoked ($12), and there is an antipasti sampler I’d recommend for the table.
    As in most Italian ristoranti, the pastas are the showpieces, and the Piedmontese specialties are definitely the way to go. Tajarine (tagliolini) are served with a lush, oven-roasted tomato sauce ($11), and agnolotti (above) with ricotta are hand made, of course ($12).  Risotto is the pride of Piedmont, so Barbetta offers several variants (each $12), including with porcini mushrooms, roasted red beets, with herbs, and with Gorgonzola and Camembert, and Rose Champagne. The happy news is you can sample three of them together for $23. By the way, the pasta prices are for second-course portions; for a main course portion figure $21 or a bit more.
    Old fashioned but very good is a main course of jumbo lump crabmeat sautéed in Sherry and served with wild rice ($27), and the roasted rabbit alla Piemontese is done in a delicious white wine sauce ($26).  A break from Piedmont is the Venetian-style calf’s liver with onions ($26) while roast chicken comes in a pomegranate sauce with chive-laced mashed potatoes ($22).
    There are many good reasons to try the desserts, for some are unique to Barbetta, including monte bianco, a chestnut cream topped with snowy whipped cream made to look like Mont Blanc in Switzerland. Also very good is the Gianduja chocolate cake (right) and the pears baked in red wine, once a standard of Italian restaurants now rarely seen.
    I should mention that, despite the beauty of the décor, Old World service, grand wine cellar and superb cuisine, prices at Barbetta are considerably below other Italian restaurants of its ilk, such as Ai Fiori, Del Posto, Babbo or Marea.
    Right now the exquisite and quiet garden is open for dining, and one would search fruitlessly for a more romantic place to dine well in the Theater District,

Barbetta serves lunch and dinner daily. Pre-theater dinner $58.

HEEERE'S JOHNNY!

After Yesha Callahan posted a negative review of the burger platter and zeppoles  ordered through Yelp from La Porchetta in Sterling, VA, she went to bed. only to be disturbed around ten PM by a knock at her door followed by a phone call that left a message saying, "“Hello, this is [inaudible name], the manager of La Porchetta. I am outside your door. I want to speak to you about your Yelp review.” Callahan, who said she didn’t want to get “ax murdered,” stayed in bed and called the police, who arrived and warned the restaurant manager to stay away from the house.

DEPT. OF OXYMORONS

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