So, last Wednesday, i headed out to the Bay Area to check it out for the first time since i learned I'd be living and working there next year. I had to take the first round of certification tests (yay CSET), meet some of the people I would be working with at a meet and greet cocktail party thing, and, of course, check out the city's food scene.
The test went OK, I think - I'll know for sure on the 31st when we find out if we passed, but it was just about what I expected.
The meet and greet went really well. There are always nerves when you're meeting people for the first time, but everyone seemed really cool and nice, which is a really good sign about the next two years.
And the food. Some was good; some was, quite frankly, disappointing.
The first really California meal I had was a quintessentially West Coast thing: In n' Out burger. It really is fast food, but if you need to eat something and your other choices are McDonald's or Burger King, your best bet is to opt for In n' Out. They pack a lot more vegetables onto every burger, so you don't feel quite as sickly overwhelmed after eating one as you would after eating a Big Mac or a Whopper. The burger itself is pretty tender and the sauce is quite delicious. All in all, not bad for fast food.
Our next meal was at the standard bearer for American cuisine: Chez Panisse. Started by Alice Waters, it has espoused the wonders of healthy, fresh, local, farm cooking since the day it opened. Because we had to cancel our original reservation because of the meet and greet, we had lunch at the cafe - the more casual alternative offered in the space above the actual restaurant. The menu is relatively small and simple - all vegetable heavy items aplooking as fresh as can be. I opted for the halibut tartare served in endive wedges and then the house made spaghetti with baby arugula and mint pesto and sun dried tomatoes.
First, the tartare. The dish looked beautiful upon presentation, but was off-balance in terms of taste. The sweetness of the fish was completely overwhelmed by the tartness of the endive leaving this bitter ugly taste behind.
Then, the pasta. The spaghetti was well made, delicious and perfectly cooked with the toothsome quality that you don't find often in the US but that the chefs in Italy could do with their hands behind their backs. The sauce, however, was way too oily and out of proportion to the spaghetti, leaving a bowl full of oil behind once the spaghetti was gone.
Both of these dishes were completely disappointing and I really expected better from what should be the best of the best. Chez Panisse did excel on one point, though: about tphalfway through our appetizers, the electricity went out, leaving the staff scrambling to find alternate sources of light for the guests and to alleviate the smoke from the kitchen since the fans were no longer working. They handled it like pros, however, within minutes, a server had brought a lantern to our table and hey had opened all of the windows to get the smoke out of there. It was really cool to watch and definitely an example of really good service.
That nit, we headed over to a restaurant we had found throu Open Table, called Ame. We didn't really know what to expect, but knew that it "combined Japanese, Italian, and French flavors." Yum.
The space was spare and modern - rather dimly lit with tables spaced pretty far apart. I went for the barbecued eel and foie gras Napoleon - because, after all, if you saw something like that on a menu, wouldn't you have to order that too? The fish and foie were served on top of a daikon radish whose juice perfectly balanced the overwhelming richness. Honestly, when the dish drives it looked overwhelming - too big, too rich, too much, but the end result was amazing. The juice and the radish perfectly complemented the fish and foie. Unbelievable.
The next course - a survey of each offering from the sashimi bar - was less than remarkable. Or, to put it this way, I don't even know what I had because it's not worth remembering.
The next meal was really awesome. To recover from the awfulness that was the CSET and from the awesomeness that was the night out with my fellow future TFAers, we went out for dim sum at the highest rated Chinese restaurant in the Bay - Yank Sing. It's a lot more elegant than your average Chinatown place and the food represents that. It's absolutely delicious and i can't even begin to list the great things we tried but i can tell you to get the pork buns. They are light, fluffy, sweet, sour - really worth the trip.
Monday night was a dinner we had all looked forward to - Quince, an upscale Italian restaurant in San Francisco. I had really high expectations and, like Chez Panisse, the only one that was met was the service. None of the appetizers or entrees really interested me, so I opted for two pasta dishes, both of which were incoherent and lukewarm. Really disappointing.
And that was San Francisco. The trip was really fun and made me excited about next year.
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