Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Adventures in Dining | May/June 2004

Adventures in Dining
By JOHN G. WATSON

Restaurants By the Bay

"Isn't this neat?" says George, to no one in particular.

"The hurricane is going to take place in a minute," enthuses Janet.

"I just love these little umbrellas in our drinks," purrs Sandra.

"San Francisco is such a great city," I add, for all the world behaving like a seasoned traveler, which, as a callow and decidedly provincial 14-year-old, I most certainly wasn't.

It was a balmy spring evening in 1961, and my best friends from Denman Junior High School and I were double-dating for a night on the town: The Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar in the Fairmont Hotel, which, most conveniently for us, had no minumum age limit. To experience the artificial thunder and rainstorms staged across this tiki bar's ersatz lagoon every 30 minutes while drinking Shirley Temple versions of South Pacific-themed drinks in anticipation of a high-end dining experience was pretty heady stuff to our impressionable young minds.

Well, the Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar is still going strong, now serving hip drinks and Pacific Rim cuisine to a fashionable crowd. And, yes, I was right, San Francisco was and still is a great city, especially for dining and nightlife.

Growing up here, we knew The City and environs were special, but that appreciation has only grown as we and the Bay Area restaurant scene itself have matured. There's a combination of great locally grown ingredients, culinary influences from around the world, chefs who've been reared or trained internationally and us, the adventurous locals who are willing to try just about anything that makes for a vibrant, world-class culinary landscape. It doesn't hurt to have renowned wine-growing regions just up the highway and wild spores in the air for the best sourdough money can buy.

This is, after all, where California cuisine was jump-started at a little hippie place in Berkeley in 1971, when its inspired chef/owner, Alice Waters, had the radical idea that fresh, organic ingredients, just out of the ground, served so simply that the natural flavors shout out at you, might be an interesting experiment.

Today, Chez Panisse, which in many ways takes us back to the way our farming forebears ate for centuries, is enshrined as a star in the pantheon of great restaurants of the world. The menu changes nightly here, and it's always prix-fixe with three to four courses. Summer menus have included James Ranch leg of lamb with summer vegetable tian and aioli, and mulberry ice cream with stuffed, baked Frog Hollow Farm peaches. Above the more formal dining room is a casual cafe, perfect for those who wish to experience Waters' sublime cuisine on a tight schedule or budget.

Chez Panisse alumni can be found in critically acclaimed restaurant kitchens throughout the region. Paul Bertolli, a former Chez Panisse chef, is now chef/owner of the celebrated Oliveto in Oakland's colorful Rockridge neighborhood. Featuring contemporary riffs on classical Italian cuisine, Oliveto, like Chez Panisse, is separated into a more casual, less expensive cafe (in this case, downstairs) and an elegant restaurant, considered one of the best in the Bay Area.

Quince, a recently launched eatery in San Francisco's tony Pacific Heights neighborhood, has been an instant smash, due no doubt in part to the chef/owners' backgrounds: kitchen guru Michael Tusk has been a chef at Chez Panisse and Oliveto, and front-of-the-house maven Lindsay Tusk has also worked at Oliveto. Try this spot for adventurous Italian cuisine; the daily changing menu has included such stand-out entrees as deep pink medallions of seasoned pork sausage topped with arugula and surrounded by creamy, translucent roasted turnips, along with spinach tagliolini with citrus and fresh crab.

Certainly the city's dining scene has been enriched by a fraternity of French chefs, who have brought the finest of European gastronomic sensibilities to the City by the Bay.

Just about everyone who's ever experienced Hubert Keller's exquisite Alsatian-French culinary art at his Fleur de Lys has a soft spot in their heart for this intimate, romantically designed restaurant. This is a memorable dining experience for those seeking a special night out, courtesy of a chef who has traded his homeland to take up roots in San Francisco-much to the delight and gratitude of Northern Californians. Signature dishes include sesame prawns with Thai red curry, coconut milk, lemongrass, ginger and shiitake mushrooms.

Keller's buddy, Roland Passot, runs another of the city's great French restaurants, La Folie, whose cuisine is influenced by Passot's apprenticeship at some of the finest restaurants in Lyon, France. Sylvain Portay, who heads up the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco, has among the most sterling credentials of any chef in the Bay Area, having begun his career working with the late, celebrated chef Jean Louis Palladin, segueing to Monte Carlo's Le Luis XV as chef de cuisine under the internationally renowned Alain Ducasse, and finally heading up the kitchen at New York's famed Le Cirque.

Then there's Laurent Manrique, who last year took over the toque at the acclaimed Aqua in the financial district. Manrique is the former executive chef at Campton Place Restaurant in the Campton Place Hotel, where he earned stellar reviews for his versions of dishes from his native Gascony and the neighboring Basque country. At Aqua, he serves up such creative seafood-themed dishes as diver scallops on a bed of oxtail-and-short rib fondue and snapper soaked in an herb broth, surrounded by clams, rock shrimp and artichoke hearts.

Chefs at other lauded San Francisco restaurants have eclectic pedigrees. The kitchen at the eponymous Gary Danko in North Beach is led by Danko, a native of upstate New York who studied at the Culinary Institute of the Arts and was lauded at Chateau Souverain in the Sonoma County wine country and at the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco before opening his own award-winning eatery.

Although popular Postrio near downtown's Union Square is famed chef Wolfgang Puck's key Bay Area outpost, day-to-day menu development and cooking is left to two brothers from New Jersey, Mitchell and Steven Rosenthal, who dish up the best of California cuisine with Asian touches. Mitchell's mentors have included Paul Prudhomme at K. Paul's, while Steven studied at the Culinary Institute of America. Their menus, always changing and full of surprises, have included lamb chops served on an oversized wild mushroom, lamb-stuffed ravioli with spinach pear chutney and a sweet, brown butter sauce seasoned with Moroccan spices, along with seared rare tuna on a salad Lyonnaise with bacon lardoons, sauce au poivre, shoestring potatoes and fried quail eggs.

Do the natives frequent all these foodie havens? Yes, of course, but typically on special occasions. For each one of these spots, there are what seem like a zillion popular hangouts, a couple of them with Hawaiian roots, including Roy's, the local branch of Island chef Roy Yamaguchi's ever-expanding restaurant empire. Located in SOMA (South of Market), its kitchen is headed up by an O‘ahu native with Thai roots, John Sikhattana.

The très hip Bambuddha Lounge features chef Joseph Bosworth, who cut his culinary teeth working with Peter Merriman on Maui and now serves up an exciting menu of vibrantly flavored food from all over Asia.

When it comes to Asian food, locals are just as likely to visit Clement Street from 2nd to 10th avenues as go to touristy Chinatown. This strip is increasingly the real hub of Asian life in the city, particularly its culinary life. A stroll down this bustling street, stopping to look at the exotic produce in its many grocery stores and noshing at its many eateries, can be a wonderful diversion. Just about any restaurant along the way will serve up a satisfying meal, but a top neighborhood favorite is the Shanghai-style Fountain Court, run by the affable Terry and Doreen Chin.

You can find the best of Singaporean cuisine at the friendly Straits Cafe, located on a major thoroughfare, Geary Boulevard, far from Chinatown. Entrepreneurial chef/owner Chris Yeo has started a mini-empire, with Straits Cafe outposts in both Palo Alto and San Jose, the latter in a very happening new upscale shopping center, Santana Row.

Then there are us baby boomers and our elders, who simply like certain bars and restaurants because they've been there forever-not unlike great comfort food. It just makes us feel good to know that they're still going strong.

Who can't help but be glad that the Cliff House, with its spectacular views of the Pacific, is alive and kicking? Built in the 1800s, it's now undergoing a major renovation, but remains open for business. In Chinatown, it's the very humble little Sam Wo that plucks the nostalgia strings with memories of its infamously rude, always screaming waiter, the late, great Edsel Ford Fong. How many locals have fond recollections of their first visits to the Top of the Mark at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, famous for its panoramic views of the city? Who can help but cheer that Trader Vic's is still serving up mai tais and tropical food in Emeryville and at its new outpost in Palo Alto? And I defy anyone who grew up in San Francisco to avoid getting a little choked up when friends suggest an Irish coffee at the Buena Vista Cafe in Fisherman's Wharf, founded in 1898 and reputedly the very spot where that oh-so-popular drink was invented. It's had a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd for at least the past 50 years.

Speaking of nostalgia, I'm trying to remember the last time I dined at the Tonga Room. Could it have been 1961? Omigawd! Excuse me, gotta get to a wireless laptop to make a reservation. Now, where do you suppose I can find Janet, George and Sandra?
JOHN G. WATSON, a native San Franciscan, has written for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Where San Francisco, Food Arts and the food sections of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News.

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