Roast leg, braised ribs, merguez, couscous with preserved lemon and cilantro, roasted tomato, and tzatziki. If I’d realized how North African this plate was going to be I might have ordered a different wine.
Went to dinner here on our recent trip to SF. Glad we did. Service was excellent. We were tired and so didn’t order the chicken which took 60 minutes to be ready. We started with the fried fish. Excellent.
Husband got the, umm, can’t remember. But it very good. But what was superb was the polenta with two cheeses (the waitress recommend getting it that way.) . I never order or make polenta, or even grits, but this was so melt in your mouth delicious, I am going to make at home!
There was only so much we could eat! We had been to Wursthall for lunch!! But I hope to go back in September. They won’t let you reservations more than a month in advance, though, so I have my calendar marked in August to make reservations.
First post-reopening meal at Zuni. This is the first place I’ve gone where they not only checked vax status but looked at my ID to verify it was mine.
There’s a 20% service charge plus a 5% SF mandates surcharge, so if you don’t like that, don’t go.
House-cured anchovies with celery, Reggiano, and olives were the same as ever, was was the Acme bread with butter.
Execution on the shoestring potatoes was slightly off, 8 or 9 out of the usual 10. Great anyway.
Caesar was perfect. They split it between two plates for us.
Unfortunately by 9:30 they’d run out of the rabbit boudin.
Gulf shrimp in romesco with chard, some little beans, and pickled vegetables, every ingredient was good but it didn’t come together as a coherent dish, let alone a Zuni-style dish.
Spaghetti alla Norma, flawless. Perfectly al dente, lightly sauced like in Italy. Again they split it in two plates for us.
We wouldh’t have ordered dessert but I can’t say no to the granita di caffe and how often does anyone offer you Eton mess?
In classic Zuni tradition, the service was exceptional. Officially they close at 10:00, but when we left around 11:15 there was a table that had just gotten the roast chicken.
Piccolo fritto ($18). Onion rings were maybe the best I’ve had since Kronnerburger closed. Pitted green olives were a nice salty hit, good bar snack. Eggplant was kind of blah. Shisito peppers were good but not battered, which seemed kind of odd for this dish. No thin-sliced Meyer lemon? Didn’t quite come together the way Zuni piccolo frittos have many times in the past.
Ricotta gnocchi ($30) were lovely, texture like soft or medium tofu. Morels were good, peas were starchy, sweet would have worked better. Lots of butter in the sauce. Again this didn’t quite seem to come together the way similar dishes have at Zuni in the past, not that that stopped me from polishing my plate clean with (complimentary) Acme levain.
The chicken ($75) was not the glorious, craveable dish I’ve had many times. The chicken itself was pretty good, though the skin wasn’t as crisp as it could be, but the bread salad was dry, underdressed, and bland. Serving the greens on top means they don’t wilt and aren’t thoroughly dressed they way they were in the original recipe. There was radicchio in the bread salad under the chicken, but it doesn’t really work as well as greens. We took most of it home, and I suspect it will be better as leftovers, since the bread will have a chance to soak up more goodness.
Since I didn’t want to eat the chicken, I got the porchetta ($44). The crackling was nice and crunchy, the meat was fatty and flavorful, the sauce was solid, tiny potatoes were tasty. Roasted seedless grapes were OK as a foil for the fatty pork, but seeded grapes or some other more seasonal fruit with more character such as plums or peaches would have worked better.
Pavlova ($14) was weirdly thick and the peach leaf custard was a bit stodgy, nevertheless overall the flavors were good and we polished it off.
I neglected to take a photo of my “biscottini and digestive” ($12), dark chocolate biscotti with cherries and almonds, which were great after soaking up some of the paired shot of Cardamaro.
I wish I could have ordered the granita di caffe, but since I stopped drinking coffee desserts like that keep me up until 4am.
Service was solid. With a half-bottle of Moscato d’Asti ($25), the bill came to $405. With 5% SF mandates charge ($20.25), 20% service charge ($81), and 8.63% sales tax ($43.66), it came to $549.91.
