Campton Place Spice Route Menu
When the Taj Hotel group took over the operation of Campton Place five years ago, they inherited a famous dining room, one that changed the very identity of high-end hotel dining in America. The hotel opened in 1983 with the idea of mounting a top-tier Union Square restaurant that would draw San Franciscans. Then manager [...]
Read More →Paying Respects at Zuni
A handful of the girls got together the other night at Zuni–women mostly in their sixties who have spent their lives in food, and religiously believe in the ultimate happiness of good eating. How come we were still there and one of our sisters, Judy Rogers, had left us? We ate so well that evening: [...]
Read More →Alta, CA
Alta, CA had been open just fourteen hours when I walked over from the corner of Hayes and Franklin, by Davies Hall, through the rain and wind one Friday night. I passed the lively, glass-enclosed Jazz Center and headed east on Fell to Van Ness. Here the landscape started to change, especially when I turned [...]
Read More →What I’m Eating Now, December ’13
Organic Valley Grassmilk and Organic Valley Pasture Butter Those of you who have tasted raw milk know that it is one of the great pleasures of the table. Alive and full of nuance, raw milk is palpably creamier and sweeter than typical pasteurized and homogenized milk. Tasted side by side with raw milk, pasteurized milk [...]
Read More →Shanghai House, Revisited
We are blessed with so many excellent restaurants in San Francisco that sometimes we don’t get back even to our favorites. I was reminded of this after a recent visit to tiny Shanghai House, across the street from the Balboa Theater. When I walked in I saw my last review, written in 2007, facing me [...]
Read More →Hong Kong Lounge II
Nobody handles fish and shellfish with the sensitivity, the timing and the nuanced technique of the Cantonese. Give Italians their miraculously juicy branzino baked in sea salt, and the Japanese their thrilling, animistic presentation of the raw. The Cantonese prepare the whole underwater menagerie in ways that reveal wondrous flavors and textures. No chefs do [...]
Read More →Comal
There is always room in a community for an ingredient-driven restaurant like Comal. But this Mexican cantina is particularly valuable in Berkeley because of its downtown location–a block from BART, less than a block from the Berkeley Repertory Theater, and a 15 minute walk to Zellerbach Hall. Eating pre-performance turns out to be your best [...]
Read More →What I’m Eating Now
Warm Crumb Doughnut from Bob’s On a whim, I popped into Bob’s Donuts at the absurdly early hour of 7 p.m., on the off chance of finding some freshly made, warm doughnuts. I was in luck. The cake doughnuts had just come out of the fryer and were cooling–plain, maple, cinnamon- sugar and crumb. But [...]
Read More →20th Century Cafe
After a lifetime mastering the art of Viennese and Eastern European pastry, Michelle Polzine, the talented, whimsical former pastry chef at Range and many other delectable places, has just opened her own charming little cafe in Hayes Valley, across the street from Rich Table. She raised the money to build it through a Kickstarter campaign, [...]
Read More →Hopscotch
Of the plethora of new places that have opened in Oakland, Hopscotch, a small personal restaurant in Uptown, is one of the best. In a former barbecue joint gently converted in a retro-stylish way to feel welcoming and homey, chef/owner Kyle Itani prepares a compact menu of dishes that conflate comfort and adventure. He worked [...]
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