Finally got around to dinner here…
They give you a little booklet with a page for each course that has space for you to write down notes (and some wilderness survival tips in the back). Cute.
Forager’s Tisane
As a tea snob I appreciate that they called it a tisane. It had 20(?) different things in it; I certainly didn’t write them all down. Quite tasty, for something that’s not tea.
Whipped Scrambled Eggs
Bacon, Maple, Hot Sauce
Looks like this is a staple. The hot sauce was quite good; I didn’t get very much of the bacon (though there was something there). I’m not really sure I’d pick it as something to keep on the menu, myself.
White Asparagus
Three ways: “grilled white asparagus” (milk poached & grilled w/duck prosciutto, and green garlic aioli w/shaved duck egg on top), “white asparagus vichyoisse” (w/charred spring onion rather than leek, on an ichiban oyster), and a “sourdough bread bowl” (fermented white asparagus clam chowder, and lazy bear reserve caviar by Tsar Nicoulai)
The grilled/poached asparagus and vichyoisse + oyster were both quite good. The bread bowl was sort of overwhelmed by the caviar - I could just barely make out the chowder after chewing on it for a while.
Kohlrabi
Radishes, smoked trout roe, wild foraged greens
Kolhrabi here present in two ways - larger chunks braised on top, and in thin strips in an almost coleslaw-like salad undernearth. Kohlrabi foam on the side. The braised kolhrabi was not really my thing (not the kind of funk I like); the salad was exceptionally good. (Coleslaw isn’t really the right pointer but I struggle for a better way to describe it.) Came together very well with the trout roe.
Dungeness Crab
Koshihikari rice, celery root hollandaise. Crab consomme on the side.
10/10, easily the best dish of the night. Generous and very fresh crab, perfectly cooked rice, rich but not overwhelming hollandaise, droplets of some excellent chili oil as counterpoints. Could’ve eaten a bowl of this and been happy. Consomme was pretty good too.
Lazy Bear Cultured Butter
Brown butter milk bread
The bread was good but I didn’t like it quite as much as many other high-end restaurant breads I’ve had in the last few years. As I’ve mentioned many times I’m not a butter person, though at nicer places that do their own butter I do sometimes enjoy it; unfortunately this wasn’t my preferred style (light, fluffy, fresh), but salted, quite thick, and heavily cultured.
Spring Fondue
New potato, stinging nettle, fines herbes, midnight moon
Potatoes were very good, as were the charred leaves (I forget what of). Also present were fresh span peas and spinach(?). Fondue and veggies were good. Bread was helpful in cleaning up here.
Fogline Chicken
Baby artichoke, flowering brassicas, marsala
The execution on the chicken was really something (grilled for crispy skin, sous vide, etc), but, you know, at the end of the day, it was chicken. Ramps up top were interesting, very good crispy grilled bits (chicken?) on top. On top of some pureed artichoke, which was extraordinarily good - competitive with the parsley root at Commis as being the best “mashed potatoes” I’ve had. Grilled artichoke was decent, as was the sausage at the bottom, though it was an herb-y sausage and I’m not a huge fan of that profile.
Grilled Lamb Ribeye
Carrot bbq sauce, smokey carrot
I tried a dab of the “bbq” sauce by itself first and it was honestly kind of weird, but it paired really surprisingly well with the lamb. The lamb itself was perfectly cooked, and marinated for long enough to draw out the gameyness (successfully). I also really liked the smokey carrot on the side - a bit like cured meat, in some ways.
Moved upstairs for the dessert courses…
Dandelion Cacao
Pulp, husk, nib, dark chocolate, dandelion root
Three things on the plate: sorbet made from the cacao pulp (fruity, doesn’t taste at all like chocolate, of course), dark chocolate pudding underneath (w/the cocao nibs), and some not-really-sweet “bark” on the side (I believe this is where the husk and the dandelion root - a play on their source being Dandelion Chocolate - comes in).
The sorbet and bark were both interesting and good; the pudding was the best I’ve had. I often find chocolate-based desserts to not taste enough like chocolate, which happily was not the case here.
This came served in a chilled bowl, I guess to stop the sorbet from melting? A nice touch, but somewhat in tension with our seating arrangement being such that we basically had to pick up the bowls and hold them while eating.
Some local decoration.
“Try our famous pies!”
“Three for the price of one! Sweet potato, pecan, chess”
The “chess” was… not quite ice cream? - it wasn’t very cold - with some pie bits folded in. Really very good, quite unusual, great flavors and textures. Little ball up top was the center of a pecan pie. Tasty but about what you’d expect. Little mini sweet potato “pie” in the bottom right; light and quite nice, very good laminated dough. Miso apple caramel in the center was interesting but not really necessary for most of it.
Mignardises
Blood orange gummy bear (center), fudge w/cherry on top (top), something something cheesecake (bottom). Fudge was good, the rest were kind of underwhelming, somehow.
They gave us a little goody bag to go with some cold brew and banana bread. The cold brew was fine but I’m not a coffee drinker; the banana bread was probably the best I’ve had.
Other thoughts? Service (the explanations/etc) was a little over-bear-ing, but otherwise on-point. Plating, decor, and ambience were great. There were fewer things that knocked it out of the park for me, purely food-wise, than I’d want at this level; it did quite well on the interestingness/novelty side of things (in basically successful ways) so I’m glad I went once but I’m not sure about the replay value, even with a changing menu. I’m not sure if my expectations are out of line, but food-wise there’s a bunch of places I’d take over it - San Ho Won, any Skenes restaurant I’ve been to (Saison 2017, Angler LA pre- and post-pandemic, Leopardo a few months ago), Corridor 109, early Republique, many sushi places… Oddly this has been my experience at all of the 2-star places I’ve been to in the Bay, though I do think I have a pretty clear rank ordering of Commis > Lazy Bear > Californios.
