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Happy Birthday To Me (Vignette Restaurant, San Francisco)
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April 26, 2006
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« First Recorded Dinner Party of 2006 | Main | New York Steak with Stilton and Balsamic Vinegar Reduction: »
It's birthday season. Not content with a single day, I've annexed an entire week to celebrate my birthday, at least in spirit. My wonderful and beautiful girlfriend initiated the festivities last Saturday. First, she took me to my favorite shirt store and bought me several great new shirts. We had lunch at The Pork Store, tromped through the Haight for a bit, and then headed home for a leisurely afternoon.
After some relaxation, we got dressed up and headed towards Nob Hill. She took me out to dinner at Vignette, which, despite being three or four blocks from home, we hadn't yet been to.
You can't really tell from the picture (above), but this is a very tiny little cup. What's more,
there's almost no liquid in it -- just a very little bit at the bottom. The cup is mostly
full of foam. Of course, this is what all the cool kids are
doing these days. And, strange as it may seem, it really can be quite impressive. Despite being mostly air, the foam somehow contains the concentrated essence of mushroom.
Not a particularly interesting course. It felt out of place among far more stimulating dishes. The goat cheese was very nice, but even it felt like it was there as a platform for other flavors that the restaurant elected not to actually put in the dish.
We're always a fan of sweetbreads. Actually, that's not true. If they're poorly selected or prepared they can be veiny, rubbery, or mealy. These, however, were quite acceptable. Rebecca specifically asked for this dish to substitute for the Crispy Skin Quail that was supposed to be served. When she'd looked online before making reservations, the menu she'd seen had sweetbreads for this course, and she'd been looking forward to that. Fortunately, the sweetbreads were still on the A La Carte menu even though they were no longer on the tasting menu, so the substitution was no problem.
A very tasty dish. I imagined that the sauce would overwhelm the scallops, either with the
tartness of the vinegar or with the sugar necessary to balance out the vinegar in the sauce,
but I was wrong; the sauce was fairly mild, and though it was rounded out with sugar as I'd
imagined, the scallops were actually sweet enough to stand up to it. The puree it was served
on was impressively smooth and also had a mild natural sweetness. I guessed that it was some
sort of squash that I was not familiar with. When we asked, we were told it was a potato
puree. I have no idea how this could be. I have never made a potato puree that tasted like
this, and I have never had a potato puree at a restaurant that tasted like this. On the other
hand, the menu that we found online (which was, as I mentioned before, not up to date),
corroborates the potato story. Furthermore, Craft's semi-eponymous cookbook describes a potato
puree with exactly these characteristics:
...I was told that the dish had sparked a debate among chefs in San Francisco: What did I put in Craft's
version to make it so sweet? The answer: nothing. Use only Yukon gold potatoes...
If what I had at Vignette was a pure potato puree, I must be doing something terribly, terribly wrong.
Not that that isn't entirely possible. (Note: The current tasting menu posted on the web says that it is, in fact, a potato puree.)
A solid dish, but not stellar. The venison is tasty but not bursting with flavor, and the ensemble is somehow standoffish and never really gels.
The desserts were very good. I actually had the Warm Chocolate Cake with a Port sauce and Berries, which was also good, but the pictures didn't come out well, so what you're seeing is Rebecca's Apple Gallette. Both were worth eating.
We haven't had a lot of tasting menus since we've been back in the town. We enjoyed this one. There were a few weak spots, to be sure, and nothing just killed me, but there were several solid dishes and a few surprises.
After dinner, Rebecca told me we were headed to a show. I expected us to wander toward the Theatre district, but we wound up going along Market towards the Civic Center area instead. No, she didn't take me to an Opera. We went to Snowshow, which was a lot of fun. Much of the clowns' movement reminded me of dance movement, and from that perspective it was enjoyable to watch.
During the intermission, the clowns came out into the lobby to shower people with "snow" (little pieces of paper) and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The ghostly figure below had just finished opening up a woman's purse and filling it with paper snow when I snapped his picture.
I had a great day. Thanks, baby!
April 26, 2006 in restaurants, san francisco | Permalink
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Comments
Happy (belated) Birthday to you! Well done, Rebecca! In Berlin, foam was everywhere, asparagus foam, tomato foam, cucumber foam, foam foam foam! It was a problem in Salzburg, too(foam of white bean soup with truffle oil there). I thought the concept was sort of Spain-in-the-nineties but maybe it's making a resurgence. Two of El Bulli's cooks have migrated to the US - one in NY and one in Chicago, I think, so maybe its making its way around the US- hopefully in a better executed manner from what I have experienced.
Posted by: desyl at May 22, 2006 4:37:51 AM
hey, got one more year older ! Man it has been a year (or is it 2 yrs) while we were in that bistro.. can't believe it.
happy birthday.
Posted by: shoeseal at May 22, 2006 2:38:21 PM
