January 23, 2010 - Tommy Toy's

Tommy Toy's in the Financial District in San Francisco, CA
http://www.tommytoys.com/

Another day, another Dine About Town menu. This time I went to Tommy Toy's with a couple of girlfriends. It's another fancy Chinese restaurant, kind of like Wing Lei. Kuau and I had been excited to come here after reading about it in Zagat (which gave it a 24 for food). The restaurant itself is right across the street from the Transamerica building. That building has nothing to do with Tommy Toy's, of course. In fact, I took this picture later in the evening, after we'd left. I just like this picture.

More...



The restaurant decor was very Chinese again. I mentioned in my Wing Lei post about how sometimes the Chinese decor in restaurants seems a little overdone, like they're trying to convince you, No seriously! we're Chinese! This edged on that but it didn't bother me, because I actually thought it looked very authentic. On the way out we also noticed a wall of pictures of Tommy Toy with various celebrities ranging from the former Prime Minister of Singapore to Chuck Norris, which I thought was cute. (Unfortunately Tommy Toy himself died in 2008.)

The Dine About Town dinners are 3 courses, usually an appetizer, entree, and dessert. Tommy Toy instead had 4 courses, with two appetizers and two smaller entrees, and no dessert.

We started out with this barbecued duck salad with jellyfish in a ginger vinaigrette dressing. Re-reading the menu now, I'm like, oh, jellyfish! That's what that was! (The waiter did briefly introduce each course, but I guess I could've used the more detailed version.) Anyway, it was good, but not remarkable really. There were a few too many fried wonton strips, and not enough of the extremely thin slivers of duck. The dressing and jellyfish were really good though.

The second course was a lobster tomato bisque "crowned with puff pastry." This dish was pretty awesome. As you can see, there was a giant puff pastry on top, and when they served it they used my spoon to poke a big hole in it so that I could see what was inside. The first time I dipped my spoon into the soup, I came up with like 4 big chunks of lobster claw. The bisque itself wasn't creamy, it was closer to a water- or tomato-based soup, but it was really good. The puff pastry on top was delicious -- it was easy to dump all of it into the bowl itself and let it soak up the soup. Overall this was a great dish. My only tiny complaint is that it was served ridiculously hot, but the waiter did warn us of that and encouraged us to take our time. (But if Kuau had been there, it probably would've taken ten minutes just for him to be able to try it.)

The third course was the first entree: tiger prawns, filet of sole, and scallops sauteed in kung pao sauce with roasted peanuts. Despite the melange of seafood, this dish was pretty blah to me. It didn't have a lot of sauce, which I suppose is good in that it wasn't like a typical kung pao dish you might get at the cheap corner Chinese place. But it didn't have a lot of taste either. At least the seafood was all cooked very well, though. The fish in particular had a fried outside, but was really tender inside; and the scallops were cooked the perfect amount. This was also served with a side of fried rice, which was just ... regular fried rice.

This was the second entree, medallions of filet mignon in red wine and balsamic vinegar reduction. This dish was SO GOOD. The filet was incredibly soft and cooked to perfection. The sauce was delicious and a little bit of it soaked into the fried rice that it was served on top of (so even though it was the exact same fried rice as had been served with the kung pao dish, it managed to taste much better this time around). That was really all there was to this simple dish (okay obviously there are asparagus spears on there. The asparagus was fine), but this managed to by far be my favorite dish of the night. And it was competing with soup-soaked bread, which is also one of my favorite things to eat of all time, so that is a large compliment.

Since the menu didn't come with dessert, we also ordered green tea ice cream, which was green tea ice cream. I've had better, but I've had worse as well.

The meal made me want to come back and try out one of their more in-depth menus, so I guess Dine About Town was a success as far as that goes. I would say this place and Wing Lei are pretty comparable as far as nice Chinese restaurants in America. It's nice to know that those exist.