A Full Belly

SF: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Bendean, Hog Island Oyster Bar, Bocadillos, Cuvae.

Bendean is a relaxed, casual eatery on Berkeley's Solano Avenue, and the latest venture of Lance Dean Velasquez. SF Chronicle Michael Bauer gives Bendean two stars (1647 Solano Avenue, Berkeley; 510-526-3700):

Velasquez is a versatile chef, and he excels at the rustic cooking style  he perfected at Home. He changes the menu regularly at Bendean, but features nine starters and eight main courses, which always include a vegetarian option.

One of the best deals is Ben's Supper, where diners who come between 5 and 6 p.m. are offered a three-course dinner for $12. On a recent night, that was a Caesar salad; a really good version of pork rojo with hominy, guacamole and a Medusa-like tangle of crisp tortilla strips; and cherry bread pudding. After 6 p.m., the main course alone is $17 and it's well worth that price.

The warm fuzziness evoked by Ben's Supper fights with the harsh message printed at the bottom of the menu: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, at anytime, for any reason." It's something you expect to see on the wall of a cheesy Midwestern diner, not in a neighborhood restaurant in Berkeley. It's not compatible, either, with comforting selections like tomato basil soup with garlic croutons ($6) and a stew of French lentils with gypsy peppers, butternut squash and curried apples ($15).

Overall, Bendean has the type of menu that makes you feel as if you're snuggling  around a fireplace on a cool autumn night. Some combinations fulfill that expectation; with others, Velasquez seems to be coasting.

Pluses: Some dishes are well priced and exceptional, including the pasta carbonara, pork rojo and roast quail.

Minuses: Other combinations seem to lose focus and are only OK. Service, while accommodating, can be a bit scattered.

SF: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Mangarosa, E & O Trading Company, La Suite, Breads of India.

SF Chronicle Michael Bauer gives Mangarosa two stars (1548 Stockton Street; 415-956-3211):

... The food is orchestrated by Niccolo Leone, who cooked at the well- regarded Verbena in Oakland. He's interpreting the visions of the owners, who are Brazilian with Italian backgrounds: Renato Fusari, who also owns West Brooklyn Pizza Co. in San Rafael, and Gina and Marcelo Betti, who run Red Boy Pizza in Novato. However, you won't find any pizza on the menu at Mangarosa, where the surroundings are upscale, changed only slightly from Jianna.

... The food tries to strike a balance between fine dining and fun, judiciously mixing and matching cultures. You can get a really good Caesar salad ($8), for example, draped with fried anchovies, or a more tropically inspired heart of palm salad ($9) mixed with radicchio, endive, arugula, orange sections and citrus vinaigrette.

... At times the exuberance of the  ingredients adversely affects the balance of the finished dish. The crisp chicken ($16) became a little cloying with a too-generous drizzle of aged balsamic vinegar. Sea bass ($22), a little overcooked and dry, was plated with lemon, olives and mango, adding a sweetness that overcompensated for the pungent ingredients.

An appetizer that pairs crab and salt cod cake ($14) was ill conceived. The crab cake was fine, but the cod cake had all the appeal of a salt lick, as if the kitchen forgot to soak the dried fish before combining it with the red bell peppers and other ingredients.

However, the pork chop Milanese ($17), pounded thin and served to fill the plate, with a crisp veneer of breadcrumbs and cheese, hits the mark, especially when accented with light lemon garlic vinaigrette and more lemon that diners can squirt.

Grilled porterhouse ($35), only about a  1/2 inch thick but nearly 10 inches across, is crisscrossed with a thick string of green herb sauce. The complex flavor of the sauce, mingled with the light kiss of wood smoke on the meat, makes this one of the best steaks I've had in quite some time. As with most selections, diners will want to order side dishes to round out the meal, something servers often forgot to suggest.

SF: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Antidote, Pearl Oyster Bar, Swan Oyster Depot, Hog Island Oyster Company, Blue Jay Cafe.

SF Chronicle Michael Bauer gives Antidote one and a half stars (201 Bridgeway, Sausalito; 415-331-9463):

. . . A meal at this Sausalito restaurant -- previously Valhalla and, before that, the longtime restaurant of former madam Sally Stanford -- could be prime material for a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

Torralba's deconstructionist sensibilities make for some very weird encounters of the food kind. Shots of truffle soup are served in test tubes. As you throw back your head to down the dark, murky contents, visions of Jonestown creep into memory.

. . . Torralba draws miniature full-color sketches of each dish on his 11-course tasting menu ($80) and colorful confetti-like dots and lines around sections of the a la carte menu.

We spent the first few minutes trying to unravel the riddles. What, for example, is "Like a sardine touched for the very first time!" ($14), the "Peach's problem" ($10), or "Implosion of lobster ... as a tease!'' ($25)? These bons mots pepper the menu, leaving me scratching my head. It must be a French thing, I decided, so I rolled the dice and ordered.

The chef, or "Cuisenaire,'' as he calls himself, deconstructs many dishes. The nicoise salad ($18), for example, had triangles of cool seared tuna fanned next to a tower of potato coins topped with a quail egg, sliced artichoke hearts standing stem-up, a lattice of haricot verts and other vegetables and a whole anchovy fillet draped jauntily over the top, all on a mat of anchovy basil cream. It was a pretty plate, but with so much arranging, the flavors seemed a little shopworn. The sardine dish ($14) turned out to be a half-dozen fillets layered over tomatoes and peppers, as if someone had laid out the ingredients for a terrine and forgot to mold them together. Yet even after eating the dish, I'm not sure what "touched for the very first time'' meant.

Descriptions are printed on the menu like the notes of a deranged scientist: "Veg from the moment ... splash of virgin oil" ($16) is eight different riffs on the same seasonal vegetable; "John Dory, black olive cream and artichokes upside up!'' ($29) refers to the placement of the artichokes.

SF: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Tartare, Ritz-Carlton Dining Room, Olema Inn.

SF Weekly Meredith Brody reviews Tartare (550 Washington; 415-434-3100):

. . . We were led to a table for two along the banquette and began perusing the deceptively short menu. I say "deceptively" because, although there were only 18 dishes with brief descriptions, the imaginary tastings they set off in my brain -- the part that decides what I'll be eating -- were complex. The menu has four categories: "raw and rare," comprising five tartares; "naked and natural," including two carpaccios, oysters, and a salad; "simply soup," with four offerings; and "old and new," five entrees. Classic hand-cut beef tartare -- well, the mind thinks it knows what that will be, but even if you've had numerous tartares, and I have, I've never had one with habanero-infused sesame oil, plums, and mint before. King salmon tartare with house-ground banana curry? Carpaccio of opakapaka with orange oil and toasted cumin? And the "simply soups" weren't simple at all: How about a garlic parsley bisque with black mussel flan?

Olema Inn makes diners feel that that they've enjoyed a reprieve from the rigors of urban life, without sacrificing the quality of food that a city has to offer.

. . . The soup was an ethereal yet deep-flavored cream of corn, with a dusting of smoky paprika and a knot of boned pork sparerib meat, infused with ginger, in its center. The cream of corn was genius on its own, and didn't quite seem to need the chewy meat, even as an interesting textural contrast.

The tuna tartare was a fresh take on a dish that has become a cliché -- heated with peppers, cooled with mint, and sweetened with diced plums. Chester adored it, as he did the ostrich tartare, wittily served in what I thought was an exceptionally thick-walled oval soup bowl, which turned out to be an actual ostrich egg shell. The beefy meat was well served by its chunky Roquefort vinaigrette and cracked pink peppercorns: a crunchy and creamy dish.

SF Examiner Patricia Unterman reviews Ritz-Carlton Dining Room (600 Stockton St.; 415-296-7465):

Traditionally, hotel dining rooms have suffered a bad rap for overpriced, fancy but soulless institutional cooking. The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, however, is one of the best high-end restaurants in The City. Run almost like an independent -- except that it's subsidized by the hotel -- the Dining Room offers a $68 three-course menu with lots of choices, augmented by little surprises sent out by the kitchen.

Recently, after seven successful years, Sylvain Portay left the Dining Room and Ron Siegel moved over from Masa's to succeed him. Siegel became an international celebrity a few years ago by defeating the "Iron Chef" on Japanese, and then American, television. Now he offers Japanese-inspired dishes on the Dining Room menu and weaves Japanese ingredients into non-Asian dishes as well. Though you'll find plenty of western luxury items like caviar and foie gras, Siegel does some fairly austere presentations featuring Japanese luxury ingredients like coveted matsutake mushrooms and toro, the rich foie gras-like belly meat of the highest-grade yellowfin tuna.

SF Chronicle Michael Bauer revisits the Olema Inn (10000 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Olema; 415-663-9559):

Vigil's food is the star. The chef takes one of West Marin's most important products -- oysters -- and spotlights them with eight different toppings ($14 for eight), four raw and four cooked. They're simply some of the best around, whether you choose the Flying Fish Roe version, with a Sauvignon Blanc mignonette, fresh scallions and tobiko; a la Russe, with caviar and a cool lemon cream fraiche; Royale, with lemon bearnaise and crisp shallots; or Dizzy, with warm bacon, garlic, fennel and the crunch of warm bread crumbs.

His seasonal menu consists of four salads, five appetizers and seven large plates, including a nightly fish special such as Kajiki ($23), a line- caught marlin from Hawaii. The rich meaty medallion sits atop a blend of fresh runner beans and strings of onions, thickened with flakes of crab and surrounded by a ring of pepper sauce with the smoky nuances of a well-made romesco.

. . . Olema Inn makes diners feel that that they've enjoyed a reprieve from the rigors of urban life, without sacrificing the quality of food that a city has to offer.

SF: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Bocadillos, Midori Mushi, Frisson.

SF Chronicle's Michael Bauer gives Bocadillos three stars (710 Montgomery St.; 415-982-2622):

Bocadillos is owned by Gerald Hirigoyen, who became a local celebrity at Fringale, which he bowed out of a few months ago so he could concentrate on his native Basque cuisine at Piperade. In July he and his wife, Cameron Hirigoyen, opened Bocadillos, on Montgomery and Washington streets next door to the Bubble Lounge.

Together they have created the most captivating and authentic-feeling Spanish tapas-style restaurant in the city. Not that it's all about Spain; Hirigoyen throws in a few Basque and California twists as well. But the point is that he and chef de cuisine Robert Petzold understand tapas.

During the day, the menu is designed for workers on tight schedules; at night, it loosens up to offer more than 30 savory bites divided into 11 categories, including A la Plancha (grilled), Roasted, Fried and my favorite, Innard Circle. . .

Just about everything at Bocadillos explodes on the tongue, making for a very happy mouth. You can pick anything and it will be absolutely delicious: prawns sauteed with garlic flakes and a fresh lemon confit ($12), ground chicken skewers ($7) fried crisp and served with a yogurt mint sauce, or boquerones ($3), three skewers of anchovies, olives, artichokes and small button mushrooms. It's a traditional dish with a flavor that coaxes you to take another sip of wine, preferably one of the crisp Spanish selections.

SF: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Lime, Trattoria Vogalonga, Mijita.
SF Chronicle's Michael Bauer gives Lime two and a half stars (247 Market St. (between Noe and Sanchez), San Francisco; 415-621-5256):

. . . Early in the evening, the crowd is dressed for a party -- men in collared shirts with the tails fashionably askew and women in low-cut slinky dresses and killer pumps. As the evening goes on, the patrons seem to pair off into same-sex couples. It makes for great people-watching, which is about all you can do when the DJ blasts tunes through the speakers and the drinkers crank up their voices to compete. Unlike most of the lounge-restaurants that have proliferated in the past few months, Lime actually seems to have sustainable energy and a menu well-suited to the concept. The homey but worldly selections are grouped on the menu by price, ranging from $5 to $10.

Chef Sharon Ardiana has designed an eclectic menu that has loads of winning combinations in every price category. . .

. . .The menu travels the globe for inspiration, but the concept holds together because the food is familiar -- ricotta gnocchi ($8) with white corn and mushrooms; pork quesadillas ($7) in a rich mole sauce; tandoori chicken skewers ($7) accompanied by a yogurt dipping sauce spiked with cucumber, mint and onion; and Moroccan lamb chops ($10) that are spicy and salty enough to fuel another round of cocktails. However, the couscous underneath the lamb didn't really add much to the dish and defeats the idea of finger food, unless you're OK with eating Moroccan style.