Coming up: downhill alert on the roast chicken.
Old favorite. $88 is less than twice retail, so a more customer-friendly markup than most places these days.
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.
It’s hard for me not to order Rossese when I see it. $81, around 2.5X retail (no 2020 available in the US or much of any vintage).
Watermelon salad with ? and pistachios ($18). Nicely seasoned, I just had a bite. Majordomo does this kind of thing better.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/zuni-espresso-granita-whipped-cream/
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.