Quince in San Francisco, CA
http://www.quincerestaurant.com/
So we came to Quince for our 2-year anniversary dinner. Unfortunately, this was a while ago now, but I'll do my best to recall what it was like.
More...
When we went they were sort of in Pacific Heights, but they're actually moving to a new location now in the Financial District/almost Tenderloin area, a block away from Coi. Clearly I can't speak to their new location, but their Pacific Heights place was dark and quiet, with a bit of an older crowd (at least, for San Francisco), good for a romantic dinner. They were very nice greeting us and gave us customized menus that said "Happy Anniversary Kuau and Ellie" at the top of it, which we got to keep (which is why the titles of the dishes actually appear in such detail for once!). It was the first time I'd been to a restaurant that did that, and I thought it was a really cute touch. We got the 3-course meal with dessert, and we each chose a different option for each course so we could try more. Per usual.
So I ordered the scallops, which were cooked perfectly in an awesome sauce and were really delicious. Kuau's sweetbreads were a little too fried for our taste, I believe.
Course 2: Gnocchi di patate - summer truffle and artichoke; Spaghetti - sea urchin, sea bean and chili
I do remember this gnocchi as being really amazing. Very soft, with a great-tasting sauce, and very clearly homemade. There were some crispy toppings that I wasn't actually a huge fan of, but the pasta itself was great.
Kuau's spaghetti was our version of a "daring" choice because of the sea urchin. And it definitely tasted like a seafood spaghetti, in a good way. It was interesting to have the clearly ocean-y taste of the sea urchin with the spaghetti, but it was a good dish.
Course 3: Liberty duck breast and crispy leg - red cabbage, chaterelle mushroom, apple and radish
By this point I was pretty drunk, so maybe it's the alcohol and the distant memory speaking, but I didn't actually think this duck was all that. It was good duck, but I've had better at a lot of places, notably Ibiza (which may serve my favorite duck of all time ... no matter how they decide to make it). David Burke Fromagerie's duck was also better.
Course 3: Paine Farm smoked squab - sugar snap pea, little gem lettuce and cardamom
Kuau was also disappointed by his squab, but most of that stemmed from the fact that the description didn't mention onions, and apparently onions were a pervasive presence throughout the entire dish. Which is unfair, because Kuau hates onions. Anyway, from what I tried the squab was ... fine, not spectacular. Kuau enjoyed that they left the squab head on the plate, and used the opportunity to sample some of its parts -- I forget which, but I believe he tried to dissect out the cheek, and sucked out the brain. I think he left the eye, thankfully for us all.
Dessert: Beignets - dolce di latte, eggplant and lemon
I actually remember both desserts very clearly. Both of ours had candles in them (obviously), which was a nice little touch to celebrate our anniversary. I had the beignets, which is basically fried dough from New Orleans (well, probably from France originally, but you know. Beignets are to New Orleans what funnel cake is to New Jersey. It's all fried dough). I didn't think it tasted super eggplant-y, but they were good beignets, maybe with a slightly more savory taste than usual. Again, though I remember it clearly this time, I didn't think it was extraordinary.
Dessert: Raspberry clafoutis - black olive oil gelato and earl grey
Kuau's dessert was actually much better. I don't remember the raspberry clafoutis on its own, but I think that's mostly because the olive oil gelato was incredible. It was gelato ... but tasted like olive oil. Since then we have had one other olive oil-based ice cream (I don't remember where), but I thought this one was better. I also remember it blending with the raspberry flavor really well.
As always, Kuau was a big fan of the intricate tea setup that he got. The little rightmost cup had two layers of glass, so that it's not too hot to pick up. I have to admit it was adorable. Although I'm pretty sure right after this I looked online and you can buy this setup, so maybe I'll have to get it so he can get a gleeful look on his face at home as well.
So to be honest, while all the food here was pretty solid, I think we've been to better meals for this price range. There was nothing revolutionary about the food. There was nothing revolutionary about David Burke either (wow, that restaurant got two shout-outs in the same post), but I think David Burke's food had more refined flavors and better cooking. Sorry, Quince! I'm sure you'll still do awesome in your new location.
August 1, 2009 - Quince
August 11, 2009 - Slanted Door
Slanted Door in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, CA
http://slanteddoor.com/
So Slanted Door is one of the current hot places in San Francisco. It's in a great location at the Ferry Building, with huge windows that overlook the water. You may have seen tons of people perched on the benches right outside on farmers' market days. It wasn't quite the atmosphere I expected, as it was a little on the crowded side with a lot of chatter, but it was still nice. It seemed well-suited for bigger dinner parties, but not, like, a romantic evening for two.
More...
Right now, it's supposed to be such a popular place that you should call weeks in advance for reservations, but I made reservations for 5 at 6pm around four days beforehand. Not a particularly bumpin' time or anything like that, but you know, a decent-sized party. When we got there, I heard the host tell the people in front of us (who did not have reservations), "Oh, we've been totally booked up for at least two weeks." ... Riiiight. To be fair, it was a Tuesday night and the place was packed, so it was definitely popular. But no need to lie, people.
Anyway, they encouraged us to eat family-style, which sounded good to us. Everything on the menu sounded amazing, and I remember us having a tough time figuring out what to order. Eventually we didn't pare it down too much -- I think we ordered something like 4 entrees and 3 appetizers, and asked our waiter if there was any possibility we'd ordered too much. Of course, he told us we had ordered the perfect amount of food. To be fair, it kind of was the perfect amount of food, except it left all of us uninterested in dessert.
We started with the Slanted Door spring rolls and the grapefruit and jicama salad. I didn't think there was anything special about the spring rolls. They were good and the ingredients were fresh, but the same can pretty much be said about the $5 version at a Vietnamese hole in the wall (these were $9). The salad, which also came with red cabbage, pickled carrots, and candied pecans, was not as good as most papaya salads that I've had at cheap Thai restaurants. Yes, I recognize this was not a papaya salad, nor was this a Thai restaurant for that matter, and for it to be a fair comparison perhaps we should've ordered the papaya salad, but we weren't thinking about the blog when we ordered. My point is that most of the Asian fruit salad appetizers I've had were better than this one.
We also got the "wood oven roasted becker lane tea smoked pork belly with roasted organic grapes." I do not remember that name being so ridiculously long, but this appetizer was kind of awesome. It reminded me of a Chinese dish, which I don't know the name of, where all of the fat is left in with the meat so that it's incredibly flavorful and soft. The sauce on our pork belly was reminiscent of that, and the meat to fat ratio was as well. My first piece was absolutely perfect, but unfortunately most of the pork belly seemed a little overdone, which was really a shame and took away from a well-flavored dish. The roasted grapes were a perfect side for this dish, and though warm grapes may not sound appetizing, they went really well together.
One of our main courses was these scallops, which were cooked with spinach and "spicy pineapple-coconut sauce." I don't remember any pineapple specifically in the sauce, but now that I think of it perhaps it was mildly fruity. Scallops are always good if they're well-prepared, and these were good. This was an unobtrusive and solid dish.
We got a couple more dishes that I don't have pictures of, so I'm not positive what they were. I think one was the cellophane noodles with dungeness crab meat, which had a pretty generous serving of crab meat but other than that was pretty much exactly what it sounds like without any major twists. We also got the haricot verts (that's green beans, Kuau), which were again, nothing special. Yes, this theme of "nothing too special" is a preview for what my summary paragraph is going to sound like.
I did think this dish stood out a bit, though. It was Prather Ranch ribeye steak with garlic soy sauce and fingerling potatoes. The steak itself was flavored so well that I had no interest whatsoever in adding any sauce. It was very well-cooked too, and I liked that it was already sliced into pieces to make it easy to share. I'm not usually particularly impressed by steak, either, so for me I think this is a pretty big recommendation.
So the two dishes that stood out were the pork belly appetizer and the ribeye steak. To me, everything else was good, but not quite warranting all the hype that surrounds this place. I don't think it's too difficult to get food that tastes this good at other places, for a much cheaper price. The Ferry Building and the big open space does offer a certain atmosphere which is nice, but again, I don't quite think it's worth it.
September 6, 2009 - wd-50
wd-50 on the Lower East Side in New York City, NY
http://www.wd-50.com/
I originally heard about this restaurant while browsing a Business Week magazine in something like 2005. Business Week doesn't usually write about restaurants (which makes sense since a restaurant doesn't really appeal to a national audience), but the review made it sound really good. So when we finally made reservations, I was ecstatic. We also had the advantage of booking during this recession, which meant that it wasn't too hard to get a table. We just booked it through open table and it only took about 10 minutes to find a good time.
More...
We ordered the nine course tasting menu. This is actually an amuse bouche, four appetizers, four main courses, an intermezzo, and two desserts (I don't know how that is nine courses either). For what it's worth, you can actually do a decent job of making your own tasting menu from the a la carte menu as most items on the tasting menu were off the regular menu. You could quite easily order the eggs benedict (a must), a foie gras, a couple entrees, and the five course dessert menu between a couple and walk out spending less than half the price of two tasting menus. But of course, you'd only get to try half as many things. Which would be the equivalent of going to the best place on earth and choosing to spend half your time sleeping instead of embracing every moment of your magical journey. No really, magical.
Our waiter was very unobtrusive when we were ordering our food. He left us alone, but made sure that we were attended to. He asked us if we wanted drinks, and when he saw that we were looking at the wine menu, he asked if we needed help. WD-50 isn't one of those pretentious places with a sommelier to steer you into the most expensive bottle. In fact, they didn't have a sommelier at all. To help with the wine selection, our waiter informed us that there was a house winester that could help us with any questions we might have. For real. A winester. Like a hipster sommelier? We're not sure, and we didn't utilize him, but I love the idea.
Our second course was the everything bagel. I had seen pictures of this on WD-50's website, so I was pretty excited to actually pick up this baby bagel and eat it. I very quickly ran into a small problem though. This bagel isn't made out of bagel. It's actually bagel flavored ice cream. How does this work? We weren't sure either, so we asked our waiter. I was expecting some answer like, "we have perfected the art of making bagel flavored ice cream", or maybe even, "blend an everything bagel into little crumbs then throw it in an ice cream maker", but what we got was a full description of the entire course which goes something like this.
Wylie starts by soaking an everything bagel in a vat of milk for something like 12 hours until it turns essentially into a milky mix. This bagely milk is then used to make ice cream. Once the ice cream has been made, it is shaped into a mini bagel cut in half. They then spray paint the bagel (with edible paint of course) with bagel colored paint (I'm totally going to look for this next time I'm at Home Depot). Finally, sesame seeds are dropped on top so that it looks exactly like a mini sesame seed bagel. I even tried to pick mine up, but when I stuck my finger in ice cream, I mentioned to Ellie that she would need her spoon for this. She thought I was just being strange, and decided to ignore my comment. She then picked up her fork and knife to cut a small piece off. Only when she tried to cut through melty ice cream did she discover that she wasn't cutting into bread, then figured out that I said something about ice cream.
So that's the bagel part of one dish. The dish also included salmon threads. Threading or dehydrating food actually became a quite common experience by the end of this meal, but at this point it was still very exciting (I can't believe I got use to threaded food). I'm not sure how he did this, but he basically took lox and turned it into the texture of that dried shredded pork that you find in Chinese pork buns, or the pink stuff in sushi (most commonly found in futo maki but I think I'm the only person left who orders that). The cream cheese was freeze dried and shaped like a tiny flat piece of cheese. It was like astronaut ice cream, but cream cheese. And it was on top of pickled onions, which wasn't my thing. I think there was something else under the bagel, and maybe a picture will help me remember the specifics. I just realized that I haven't actually talked about the food quality at all. The presentation was understandably phenomenal, and the food itself was of very high quality. It was certainly strange to have an ice cream course made out of a breakfast served as an appetizer for dinner, but the whole thing worked. Everything was "cooked" perfectly, and the flavors were very compact and complimented each other well (how could they not since we were basically served a lox and bagel with cream cheese).
The next course was foie gras, although it may be hard to tell from the picture. It was actually a pate, but the assumption is that Wylie pureed foie gras as opposed to using pate quality liver. He reduced passion fruit, and stuffed the foie gras with it. Then he dehydrated Chinese celery and I think sweetened some more Chinese celery. I've never actually had a whole foie gras dish to myself, as this is usually a very rich appetizer that Ellie and I split.
I was also expecting a small portion, but it was actually a huge amount of foie gras. As with most of his dishes, it was also very dense. So it was a very rich course, a large portion of the rich item, and it tasted like he had somehow made it more dense than foie gras is supposed to be, which is pretty incredible since it's just fattened liver. It was a flavor sensation all in my mouth. The passion fruit complemented it extremely well.
Course four was our last appetizer course. It was the egg dish. Our waiter was kind enough to substitute one of our egg ravioli dishes with Wylie's famed eggs benedict. And boy are we glad we asked for that. But before we talk about the eggs benedict, I'd like to say that I recall mentioning to Ellie that my egg ravioli course was the best course that I had so far. It was flavorful yet light, which was refreshing after such a large foie gras course. The ravioli was stuffed with scrambled eggs (as opposed to cheese or ground beef). And it came with a smooth charred avocado. It seemed like he bruleed guacamole. But guacamole from a Haas avocado picked off a California tree in April. I don't know how he got a hold of such a good avocado, but he did. This dish also came with "potatoes", which are those tiny little brown specks that look like carob pieces, or blackened course salt. I laughed in the waiters face when he told me what they were. They were pretty good though, and as usual, everything worked well together.
I'd like to mention that this dish got much worse when it was cold, and Ellie basically hated it. She had a few things going against her. She had just had the eggs benedict course, the dish was naturally much worse cold, and she likes food very hot. Much hotter than I like food. When Ellie gave me her remaining portion of this dish (after I had my eggs benedict portion), I also didn't want to finish it. This after just proclaiming that it was my favorite dish of the night. The eggs benedict was that good.
The fifth course was "cold fried chicken". In retrospect, this is the dish that I want to eat right now. After a couple weeks of thinking about WD-50, the cold fried chicken wins best dish. Although I didn't think so at the time. You surely can't tell from the picture as this looks like a pretty normal course (of course, the bagel looked normal too), but what's going on here is actually quite amazing. The chicken part of the fried chicken was boiled in a bag, with some kind of seasonings I imagine. Or a magic bag. It was then refrigerated, and at a later time was covered with bread crumbs. The chicken tastes like fried chicken, but it's very clean as it is never actually fried at all.
The thing sticking out of the "potatoes" is a chicken skin chip. This was sort of like bacon, or pork skin chips, but it was skinny so less grease stuck to it. The potatoes were actually ricotta cheese transformed into mashed potatoes. I'm not sure if it was made with one part potato and 3 parts ricotta, or if it was actually just ricotta, but it was extremely tasty and didn't really taste overly cheesy (it also didn't taste anything like potato which is why I'm not sure if this was made with potatoes at all). And it was topped with Caviar! It occurred to me that this was my first caviar experience. I think I'm going to go on a mission over the next year to try about five different dishes with caviar (or maybe I'll head to the caviar bar at the ferry building). I'm certainly not ready to fork out $150 for a caviar service add on to a tasting menu (as Cyrus offers), but I'd like to hunt down little tastings. Finally, the orange that you see on the plate was reduced Tabasco sauce. Somehow, this packed in additional Tabasco flavor but it wasn't exponentially hotter. Which was awesome.
We were then served a fish course which wasn't that great. I don't remember anything about it except that the fish was tough but undercooked. Neither of us were impressed and we agreed that it was the worst course of the night.
Course seven was duck leg. As you can see, it looks like a big ravioli. This dish was also very underwhelming. We agree that this was the second worst dish of the night. I'd like to point out that these were the only two dishes that weren't phenomenal. And unfortunately, they weren't even good. One of the sides was popcorn pudding though. I think he took a small amount of popcorn and a large amount of popcorn salt and used those as his flavorings for pudding. It was... weird. Not amazing weird, just... weird.
Our last savory was lamb. This was cooked to perfection. Really it was barely cooked, but the lamb was good enough for that to be plenty well done for me. Ellie also enjoyed the lamb immensely, even though meat that rare is usually only acceptable in duck. And even then it's pushing it. I'll comment more when I see a picture and remember the rest of the dish.
San Francisco walkabout - 8/13-8/24 (Part 2)
Part 1 gets us through the weekend. Here's the week's meanderings.
Included: Cancun, Eiji, Kirin, Lee's, Saigon Sandwiches
More...
Kuau: 08/17/09 - Dinner: We cooked! We had ravioli with asparagus in the sauce. It was good, and refreshing to eat a meal cooked in our own kitchen.
08/18/09 - Dinner: Vietnamese sandwiches. I bought two different types of pork sandwiches from Saigon Sandwiches. I also bought a pork salad and a pork combo (very inexpensive pate being one of the two types of pork) sandwich from Lee’s across the street. We’ll post more extensively on Vietnamese sandwiches shortly, as we are going to Chinatown in NYC in a few days to compare the best of the West vs the best of the East for this western rendition of an eastern food which was created after the West infiltrated the east when France took over Vietnamese and introduced French bread to this authentically noodle or salad meal.
08/19/09- Dinner: We met Tasha and her husband Mark in the Castro for sushi. We went to Eiji Sushi. The place is tiny and apparently has a decent sized cult following. For some reason, when we got home that night, Ellie’s roommate asked us if we had ordered two specific items from the menu. We had. ’m not sure if you understand. This place had like 6 seats. It’s tiny.
I guess they are famous for making their own tofu. Ellie and I split a tofu dish with a bunch of little sides (kind of like Korean, but much smaller, like Japanese) that was pretty good. The tofu was about half water, but somehow that was good too. I was pleasantly surprised, and even more surprising is that Ellie seemed to think it was pretty good too.
We then ordered a bit of sushi and a soupy dish which Ellie said was yosenabe. It was kind of like a seafood casserole. Not exciting in any way, but simple, clean, and filling. They were both pretty good. More like meh, not at all like bleh.
We had the strawberry mochi for dessert. This was really fun. It was one nice jumbo sized strawberry surrounded by red bean paste inside of mochi. It was mild and sweet and tart and extremely fresh and satisfying. A bit small though. I’d probably order it again, although I don’t think it’s quite worth a cult following. Oh yeah, Ellie’s roommate had asked if we got the strawberry mochi and the tofu. It’s all over Yelp too.
Ellie: I was surprised I liked the strawberry mochi simply because it was lined with red bean paste (to stick the strawberry to the mochi). It was actually one of the only times in my life I’ve liked red bean.
8/20/09 – Dinner: Burma SuperStar. See separate post on Burma Superstar.
Kuau: 08/21/09- Dinner: We went to the East Bay on Friday and ended up grabbing a quesadilla from Cancun in Berkeley. It was substantially worse than I recall the burritos being. I should have known since the prices had almost doubled since I went there last time and they had all this local farm crap on the walls. I wanted Mexican, not mexi-cali or some other biodynamic sauce.
Anyway, the quesadilla came with about 8 chips, was $7.00, full of grease and salt, and didn’t have any rice to soak up the grease or nullify the salt of the carnitas. I’m actually curious to eat an El Farolito's quesadilla for comparison (and because that place is amazing and it comes with half an avocado on it). Maybe I just haven’t had a quesadilla in a long time and they are all greasy and salty when compared to a burrito. Either way, it was very disappointing.
Ellie: I thought the most disappointing thing about this was that although the salsa bar looked amazing, and the salsas that we tried were awesome, they were super stingy with salsa cups. They gave us one with our meal, and when I asked for extra, he grudgingly gave me one more. I felt too guilty to ask again. Which is too bad, because the salsas we tried – I think avocado, mango, and a regular one – were great.
Kuau: We then walked to North Berkeley to pick a dinner spot with Andy Storrs and Billy. Ellie ran into a friend from high school drinking a beer while waiting in line at The Cheese Board for a pizza. Right after she finished explaining how he was this world class musician when he was 13 and apparently just got back from some tour, she ran into a friend from college. This was near a bus stop in front of a Safeway one block from The Cheese Board. It was weird. Ellie yelled at her second friend and explained how weird she thought it was.
Ellie: Oh shut up. I didn’t yell at her. I yelled ... with her.
Kuau: With. Sure.
Once that was over, we settled on Kirin. This is a Chinese place that became an Albany kid hot spot in the late 90’s when it came to town. I had been hearing about it for years, so I was pretty excited to eat there finally. It’s pricey for Chinese (which means meals are $13 instead of $10). We got mu shu pork for the table, which Ellie liked. I had been trying to convince her to get mu shu basically since we met, but she was convinced that it some made up California Chinese dish (which may be correct. Like crab rangoons on the East Coast). Anyway, we had mu shu last month at San Tung and she was ready for some more. They were good, and she liked it too, which is great because now I can order it in the future.
Ellie: We also got the Braised Fish a la Kirin, a chicken dish, and some curry, I think lamb. Clearly I don’t remember the curry very well, but that’s probably more because we had awesome curries 3 times that week. I think I need to eat a bad curry to clear my head. Actually I don’t know if I’ve ever had a curry that’s bad, so maybe good curry isn’t too impressive. The chicken dish was also good. The braised fish does actually deserve a mention, though. It was served in one of those cute little black pots and had wonderful flavor and texture.
Kuau: The other dishes were pretty good also, although I was a bit fooded out and sick of eating every meal out at this point. In fact, it is around this point that I started to feel like all food tastes the same. I actually mildly decided that I completely understand why people like to eat cheap food everyday and don’t like going to nice restaurants. It goes like this.
If you eat out every day, the food pretty much all starts to taste the same. Given that everything will taste the same, it makes sense to settle on something cheap, like a burger or sandwich on the East Coast or a burrito on the West Coast. Why bother spending $20 each at Kirin if you won’t remember the food when you can spend $6 at El Farolito and be more full and more satisfied? If a place is similar to El Farolito, but a walk away, then why go anywhere else? Pretty soon it makes economic sense to live above a cheap burrito restaurant and eat them all day. In fact, it doesn’t even decrease your food utils and it decreases your bank account more slowly than Kirin, so why ever go?
You could, of course, just cook. When you cook, eating out becomes fun again. So maybe Kirin would be a good place to go to if we lived in the East Bay and usually cooked. As is, don’t ever travel to the East Bay from SF just to eat at Kirin. Or even Rivoli. And probably even Chez Panisse. Unless you cook. Then you could maybe go to Rivoli. But even then, you can just find a closer Rivoli in SF.
But if you cook and live in the Berkeley area, then Rivoli is probably a great value.
Anyway, so Kirin was fine but it was in this weird category of above average Chinese with an American flair and above average Chinese prices. I don’t think Chinese is the right cuisine to do above average in. I want Peking duck, cheap dim sum, or a $9 shrimp dish smothered in syrupy sauce.
San Francisco walkabout - 8/13-8/24 (Part 1)
Ellie and I kind of went crazy when I visited SF in August. Below are the highlights and occasional mishaps of our eating adventures.
Included: B Star, Blue Wing Saloon, Ferry Building
More...
Kuau: 08/13/09 - Dinner: Burger Joint at the airport. Ellie and I both got cheeseburgers and both thought they were disgusting and ridiculously overpriced. The airport may explain the price, but the flimsy patty is probably the same at the real restaurant. This may have been the worst non fast food burger I’ve ever had.
08/14/09-08/15/09 - Clear Lake. Decent hole in the wall breakfast place, and pretty good reasonably priced dinner spot in Upper Clear Lake called Blue Wing Saloon. We went to a farmer's market for breakfast on Saturday. It was local and tiny but it had some good fruit, as is generally the case in August in the central valley.
Returned for dinner on Saturday night. We tried to eat at Burma Superstar, but the wait was two hours so we went to the sister restaurant B Star instead. It was basically the same price with ever so slightly smaller portions than Burma Superstar. Ellie’s parents were with us so we split five meals. Three were amazing, one was pretty good, and one was okay.
We ordered a taco duo with one cod taco and one pork belly taco. I was very skeptical to eat a taco from a Burmese fusion restaurant that was the sister of a very highly recommended authentic restaurant, but when it came, my fears were completely removed. It did have a Southern Asian flair to the taco, which was delightful, even if Ellie does think that delightful is a stupid adjective in this case.
We also ordered the miso cod. It was cooked wonderfully and had a great sauce I believe. Ellie can add more if she wants. This was one of her choices so maybe she remembers extra details. I was very happy with the dish though.
Ellie: I actually thought it was kind of boring, and I think it was my dad’s choice, but I forget. The cod was cooked well, but other than that I thought it was kind of like any other miso cod I’ve ever had. Of which there have been approximately ... 2.
Kuau: We also ordered the braised lamb curry. This dish was amazing. I think it was my favorite dish of the night. It had a great curry flavor, but was also clean tasting. And it came on top of a coconut rice (although I don’t recall the coconut flavor at all) and some other stuff that mixed very well with the curry. I actually want this curry right now. As I’m at work, I’ll have to suffice with a PB&J.
As for the last two dishes, they either aren’t on the menu or they weren’t good enough for me to remember what they were. Oh, I do see a beer fed pork and bean on the menu now. That sounds like an amazing dish, but the pork was bland and even the beans had no flavor. This was the worst dish we had. It was my top choice when we were initially deciding on dishes.
Ellie: I do think we got a “pork and beans”-type meal, but I don’t remember it being “beer-fed.” Actually I don’t know where you got the beer-fed at all because on my computer the B Star menu says the following: “Pork and white beans – tender pork belly braised until heavenly, jasmine rice, white beans, bok choy.” And I think that’s what we got. Anyway, I agree, it wasn’t a particularly interesting dish, but it was cute to put an “Asian spin” on an American concept (although if I remember correctly my parents actually said it was a pretty typical Asian dish without the beans).
Kuau: Clearly Ellie and I were looking at different websites that showed the B Star menu, because the menu that I looked at said it was beer fed. But her interjection above is correct.
Ellie: The last dish we got was my favorite, and Kuau liked it a lot too, so I don’t know what kind of crack he’s on that he’s saying it must’ve been worthless since he forgot it. It was a salmon curry puff pastry, basically an awesome yellow curry -- better than the lamb curry, although the lamb meat was better than the salmon meat. On top of it was a big piece of puff pastry, which was a nice way of adding a faux French touch to the dish, but wasn’t enough to soak up the delicious curry sauce. Luckily (? it was a ton of food) we had a lot of extra rice from the pork and beans.
Kuau: 08/16/09 - Breakfast: nibbled food from the ferry building on our way to Angel Island. I believe we got some bread from Acme Bread, which I think is overrated. We got a sandwich that was maybe salami. I know the pesto one looked good but was sold out at 10:45am on a Sunday morning. The sandwich was boring.
Ellie: Well, the bread is pretty good and cheap. At least compared to other Ferry Building restaurants. But I suppose it hasn’t stood out to us compared to other bread companies in San Francisco. I totally agree about the sandwich. I’d be willing to give them one more chance though, on one that actually sounds interesting, if they’re ever not sold out. I feel like they must always be sold out for a reason ... right?
Kuau: We also got an egg salad sandwich that was really good. I think it was from Lulu Petite. At this point, I think we’ve actually eaten a little something from about half of the ferry building stalls. Most of the stuff is fine, but I’m starting to wonder why it seems to be the hip and upscale spot to stop by. I suppose I appreciate the ability to get a cooked bite from a local farm, but a below average hot dog for $5 just isn’t worth it. I don’t care if it was delivered on a truck that only traveled for 50 miles. For that kind of gas savings, I want a $1.50 hot dog. For that matter, I’d want a medium drink as well. And I can still go to Costco for that. And my dog would taste better and be bigger from Costco.
Anyway, so the hot dog is the worst thing I remember from the building, and the egg salad sandwich the best. All in all, it’s a nice place to get really good if overpriced produce during farmer's markets (I’m still coming to terms with the concept of overpriced and farmer's market co-existing, as farmer's markets traditionally are extremely cheap because it’s being delivered directly to the consumer).
I’d much rather have equally good nectarines at three for a dollar than a biodynamic one at $3/lb, which ends up being $1.75 each. Or even worse, $3.75/lb because a local fair gave out a best in class award. Needless to say, the nectarines and pluots are amazing either way and I’m really just needlessly counting pennies. So the farmer's market is still the highlight of the ferry building and worth the trip. Especially for someone who calls New Jersey their home during the peak fruit season.
Dinner: We went to Japantown for sushi. Our first choice had a bit of a wait, and it basically just served sushi, so we went to a different place so where people could order hot food if desired. I have no idea where we ended up eating, but maybe if one of us goes there in the near future, we can scope out the name. It was fine. Average Japanese food for below average Japanese food prices. That is all.
Ellie: I was just pleased that hand rolls were only like $2 at this place. At least it stands out among the other 6 (an estimate) Japanese places in that mall since it’s cheap.