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.

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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.