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It seems as though spring arrived just weeks ago, but here we are already halfway to summer. The Irish even have a holiday to celebrate mid-spring, called Beltane. So, Happy Beltane to those who celebrate it! I thought I'd celebrate by ambulating around the city with a bubbly friend, critiquing two restaurants and laying siege to the two Macy's stores downtown. Yes, here we go again. I also managed to find the time to squeeze in a viewing of the very divisive movie Silent Hill. I will only report on the two restaurants we visited, since Silent Hill is already old news, though it is definitely a splendid work of art. My challenge for today is to capture the food reviews without photos, as any effective writer should be able to do, right?
Basil: Le Herb Royale
First up, my friend and I hand-picked a restaurant among thousands where we had not yet dined. That was a prerequisite, since I was in a critiquing mode this weekend. The restaurant we chose was Basil, located in San Francisco's SOMA district. The dreamy midnight-blue bar and wall-to-wall precision lighting seemed to be its signature items, but luckily we discovered the food to be the restaurant's real savior. That was good news to me, as it breaks the heart to see yet another visually stunning Thai space go belly-up and shut its doors.
We ordered a near-perfect sumptuous beef and cilantro salad, a dish with angry prawns and snow peas, and of course a lamb dish with coconut red curry sauce. It just so happens that we picked the best wine in the house for these dishes: a Ravenswood 2003 Shiraz from South Eastern Australia. It was surprisingly one of the best pairings we have managed all year— strange because this wine is not well-received by critics. Whenever grapes leave their home and start traveling halfway around the globe for processing (for instance, to California), wine critics do nothing more than take a swig of the yield and spit it out.
The waitress was cute and humble, and she was all the more clever. While we were enjoying our appetizer, she delivered the prawn delight and so gracefully verified with my friend that he wanted red curry with his lamb dish. It came out four minutes later, most likely because they botched the original order. Oops! We gave her a generous tip just for her sneaky finesse! As we left, we realized that the owners, the chefs, and the staff choreographed a total experience, so we concurred that this was now one of the best Thai restaurants in the city.
Another Flavor of the Cha-Cha
Our destination for Sunday dinner was a Tapas bar in San Francisco's Mission District called Cha Cha Cha. This has become one of the more successful Tapas joints in the neighborhood, mostly because the menu accommodates any size of appetite. Their tagline is "Sangria!!! Share some with an enemy!" This is an awfully strange motto, but very fitting since we both walked into the restaurant and bumped right into a former date of mine that went sour way back in 2003 (we'll call him Toddy again). The way he scoffed at me would suggest that we are mortal enemies, but such is not the case, since I have no enemies! He may have just tied himself in knots by thinking that my friend was my date for the evening (which he wasn't).
Anyway, we chose one tapas dish, two entrées, and of course a pitcher of Cha Cha Cha's sangria. My friend suggested that I share some of it with the "enemy" now seated to our left. I declined, as it tasted too damned good! In almost no time, we could smell our tapas dish emerging from the kitchen, and when it arrived, we faced a large piquant bed of steamed black mussels and salsa that just swirled our senses silly! It was the best treatment of pungent mussels that my aging brain can recall.
My burger then arrived on an oversized ciabatta bun, alongside a mountain-sized spring mix salad. The burger was phenomenal, not at all greasy, and the ciabatta bun fought back the juices very well (as opposed to soaking and sagging). However, the spring salad is actually what stole the show. The pile of arugula, shredded carrots, crinkle-cut cabbage, thinly-sliced radishes, and crumbled queso cotija were all tossed in what I swear was a coconut vinaigrette. I had to research for hours to uncover what these people put in this Mexican delight. This is salad art, and I savored it even more than the burger! In fact, it was so easy on the palate, I gobbled the whole mound, which probably explains why I didn't finish my burger.
I knew nothing of this delectable destination until my friend dragged me here. It's so typical that a tapas bar as good as Cha Cha Cha doesn't get enough attention. Well, luckily for us foodophiles in San Francisco, there are two. And, lucky them… I'm a blogger!
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by Smita |
posted May 15th, 2006 around 11:39 PM
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Which is the other tapa bar that you are talking of? 'Coz I know I have had tapas in the city but can't remember where.
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