alexhills

I really enjoyed my meals at both Manresa and Danko, but would definitely give my overall vote to Manresa. The best dishes at Danko were GREAT - the poached oyster with caviar app., the lobster tail with chanterelles and tarragon, lamb loin, but the overall meal at Manresa was more exciting for me, more unusual and an incredible progression of things. The other things I tried at Danko - a sea bass dish, the seared tuna app, both foie dishes actually, were mostly at least good but not really so transcendental. Also the food is very very rich, I was fuller after 5 courses there (I tried rather a lot of my friend's too) than after 11 or whatever it was at Manresa. The other kicker is that the room seemed to me oppresive and kinda expense account looking. Still a really really good restaurant though, just a bit more corporate and less foodie than Manresa.

Well, just made my trip to Far West. It has to be admitted that in a way the process does seem slightly illict, all that weighing and sizing up... However, I bought one very excellent looking fresh porcini, a tub of black trumpets and an Oregon black truffle. The truffle smells pretty nice and potent actually, a good size and texture, $25/ounce. They had euro black and oregon white as well, no imported white at the moment. The oregon white was pretty underwhelming on the nose and they were very small, only $16/ounce. Thanks for the tips on where to go, now looking forward to eating the fellas....

Well, I shall head to the ferry building this afternoon and report back. $230/ounce might be a little steep for the white truffles..... sigh.... On the UK board people were buying them for around $4500/kg which if my metric conversion is right is about half the price. Fresh porcini seems, indeed, less likely provoke the fall of our new rome... give me truffles over gasoline any day though.

I'm cooking thanksgiving for a couple of vegetarians and was thinking I'd go with some kind of mushroom and/or truffle risotto. Can anyone recommend any stores in SF that have nice selections?? Fresh wild mushrooms and the odd proper truffle (summer truffles booooo....) would be especially appreciated... cheers, Alex

I can't say enough good things about YumYum Chinese on Valencia at 17th in SF... $5 with soup and egg roll at lunch, $7-8 entrees in the evening. Very fresh, well cooked, occasionally even decently original food. Won't pretend it's spectacularly authentic, but it is really unbelivably tasty and ridiculous value. Absolutely not what I expected from the rather dubious looking outside and the classically grumpy waiters....

i've not been to either chapeau or clementine, but I thought Watercress was fantastic value. Really well prepared food, not too many frills but well done and a nice range of menu options. I think the menu isn't even a earlybird special, although a couple of dishes do have supplements now. The wine list really not fabulous - I ordered something French they didn't have that seemed decently priced on the list and they suggested a blended thing called 'reds' that I should have resisted harder as it was really total rubbish.... Food really quite good though and staggeringly well priced.

I have a vague and probably inaccurate memory of a very positive M.Fort review of the place barely 3 months ago (couldn't find it in the archive though). It seems to me VLS is looking for ways to write bad reviews almost, he seems to want to come across as a hardass, but to me just miserably fails to engage with the food at all. Sigh... Another newspaper goes miserably down the 'novelty' restaurant review path.

1. Manresa - Los Gatos 2. Gary Danko - SF 3. Bistro Jeanty - Yountville 4. Rosamunde Sausage Grill - lwr Haight, SF 5. Yum Yum House Chinese - valencia St., SF (I kid you not). $5 lunches, fresh and very good!! The first 3 are the 3 'best' California meals I've had in the last year, the other 2 I chose because they are food I love and eat on a day to day basis. One of the things that I think is great about the NorCal food scene, especially in comparison to London, where I spend time too, is how great the cheap food is, so I thought my list should reflect that.

i've always thought of talisker as one of the lightest and most immediately appealing single malts. i love them all, but laphroaig can definitely be a bit of a shock the first time. i can see why some people might associate talisker's sharpness with pepper, but i guess i think of it as more of an acidic seasalt-ish crispness. Laphroaig kind of tastes like very good tobacco in some ways I find.

college wine cellars... sigh.... some of them sell to fellows (or graduate students in very rare cases) at the prices they LAY THE WINE DOWN FOR. Good memories from my past of a 1984 Potensac and a 1985 Deutz for less than a bottle of plonk from wine rack...

I read Jim Harrison's L'Esperance piece while on the exercise bike at the gym yesterday. This was truly a very very strange experience, like having your body pulled in two directions at once. Excited by the sound of the food, queasy from the quantity, queasy from the exercise I was actually doing and still more so from the thought of the amount more exercise it would take to recover from that. A lovely piece though....

buseba eathai in london has a unfinished gap in the wall under the sinks in the men's bathroom that leads goodness knows where, in what is otherwise a rather stylishly designed place. my parents were just in a restaurant in mexico where there were tvs advertizing, amongst onther things, lincoln town cars, above the urinals....

I had a bottle at St.John in London a couple of nights ago and was enormously impressed by it - COTEAUX DU LIBRON 2000 (red) Domaine la Colombette Lledoner Pelut Powerful and thick without being at all tannic, rather unusual, I thought sort of a burgundy on steroids..... Costs £31 to drink there, 14 to take away, which I might have to stock up on. I chose it because I knew nothing about the wine or region at all and felt like being surprised. Does anyone have any suggestions for other wines from the area that I might be able to get hold of outside of France or can add to my non-existant knowledge of the region?

I had dinner at Bistro Elan around xmas time, good but not special and a little overpriced I thought. The concept of California-ized bistro French seems nice to me, the dishes were simple and well thought out if not particularly original - foie seared on brioche with peach, crab cake with an avocado salad, steak frites, duck confit and so on. Really rather bland cheese plate - although I had eaten at Danko a couple of weeks before and was therefore rather spoiled on that front... I didn't think the execution was so great in general, things cooked a little long and underseasoned. Certainly not a bad meal, but to compare roughly like with like, Bistro Jeanty impressed me way way more. I can't say I really love any Palo Alto restaurants, although both the Indian places on Emerson, Darwa and I can't remember the name of the other one, are very enjoyable. Oh, actually the Mexican on California Ave, Palo Alto Sol, is very very nice I think, a little unconventional and very reasonable. Very good margaritas too. A Mexican friend actually missed the place when she was back in Mexico last summer!! The higher end places mostly strike me as not really foodie restaurants, much more power lunch venues, but I've not eaten at too many of them.

I certainly understand that wiine markups are a necessary part of making a profit while running a restaurant and on the whole I don't mind paying 2.5 ish times the store price. However, what I don't get from a financial standpoint is how there can be some places that offer wine for so very much less. There's a particular restaurant in England, the Old Fire Engine House in Ely (very very old fashioned English food, totally anachronistic but can be lovely), where the list seems to me to barely reach retail levels. I can't remember particular details off the top of my head, but 1er Cru Burgundys from the mid ninties for 30 odd pounds, a 1978 cru bourgois Bordeaux for 45 pounds. I guess the person running the list buys things in France and then cellars them for a long time - I first went to the place 8 days after I was born, 30 years ago, and I think it had been going a while then so I suppose they can think this way, but still, its like a third of the price of similar in London. Does anyone understand the economics of this kind of list in relation to normal markups or is it just an abberation? And why can't there be more like it please??!!!

is The Hospital the place that charlie trotter was allegdly going to be setting up?? it seems to have been rumbling on for years....

unquestionably the strangest meal of my life was thanksgiving dinner the ifrst year i was in America at a hare krishna temple in san diego. i was invited by my not at all hare krishna but very vegetarian Phd supervisor, who is a very hardcore european intellectual, and his SoCal good time girl wife. The food was a peverse mix of thanksgiving day concept and very very very bad Indian. tofu-turkey substitute with marsala mashed potates. hmmmmmmm...... to make the day even more confusing we followed it with drinks at the sports bar in the la jolla marriot. weird, truely weird. when my mother told one of her friends that i'd been at a hare krishna temple for thanksgiving she sent her some anti-cult websites. my mother explained to her that if that food was their attempt at brainwashing they didn't have much chance.... but if other people speak more highly of hare krishna food maybe i was just unlucky...

brillat-savarin has a whole hierarchy of gastronomy i seem to remember - i too don't have a copy to hand - which i think features gourmand as the pinnacle and glutton as the pitiful bottom of the pile. there is also a hilarious section on how to recognize gourmands by their physical characteristics - other than being fat that is - and his favoured, in his view rare, species, the female gourmand, who he praises for flirtatiousness...

i ate here a few nights ago and had a really good time. getting a table was no big problem, got there at 5.30ish and said i wanted a table for 2 and we were seated as soon as the dining room opened. it loooked a lot more hectic by the time we left though. the food was pretty great, no frills or showiness. i had a snail and bacon salad to start, which also had some roast red onions in, excellent very smokey bacon to go with. the snails added a good deal texture-wise, very soft and not at all chewy, but were pretty much perphiral to the flavor, i guess that the way with those little molluscs anyway... my brother's smoked sprats with horseradish were good and somehow felt very victorian!! we then shared a beef rib with chips and bernaise, the meat was really very good indeed - a massive slab with a beautifully seasoned outside and very rare in the middle, chips extremely thickcut and crisp, the bernaise could have been a little sharper i thought. had a chocolate pot for dessert that was good and very dense without being anything out of the ordinary. drank a very good bottle of corbieres, thick, almost acidic and very alcoholic tasting but just perfect for the meat, then some nice armangac, then some somerset cider brandy the waiter suggested, very surprising, reminded me of the kind of exaggerated and slightly salty taste you get from dried apples, delicious though. an excellent though in the end rather pricey - blame the booze - meal. i'm going to go to st.john's bread and wine next week, be very interesting to compare the two...

had dinner here on Wednesday night to celebrate my increasing ancientness. was generally very good and bits truly excellent. took the tasting menu, which seems very good value at £39 for 6 courses, especially given that some of the tasting menu dishes have supplements on the carte. they also let us make several substitutions without any extra charge. service was extremely efficient and friendly throughout, although it is true that after the initial bread offering we did get any until we asked for some with our cheese. they also now warn people not to park in the dodgy side-road, which I think someone here had mentioned already. the highlights food-wise for me were a ballotine of foie with sauternes jelly that combined sweet and bitter beautifully, i had the lamb main which was very complex, perhaps an excessive number of things on the plate but all very tasty and well prepared, a grilled rack piece and a chunk of confit leg beign the main constituents. what i grabbed of my brother's pidgeon was lovely, yummy puy lentils, very dark and the least summery thing on the summer menu... the rabbit my parents had seemed less exciting but they ate it all so that's my guess rather than the food itself.... the desserts were FANTASTIC however, a vanilla rice pudding with rasberry sorbet and coulis wrapped in tuile, a not quite souffle chocolate thing, i can't remember the right word exactly for it but it was amazing, crisp almost cake like outside and runny rich inside. they also let us split 2 cheese plates between the 4 of us. all very good, unfortunately by this point was in a drunken-order-cheese -in-french competition with my brother which means that although i got what I asked for I can't actually remember what it was. the wine was lovely too, a st.veran to start off with and a 97 st.emillion that was suggested by the wine waiter and really very good and i thought probably not too hideously marked up at 45 quid. a very nice meal indeed overall, a couple of tiny off things, some squid ink pasta that wasn't really cooked anything like enough with the fish, the vegetable components a touch unadventurous for my taste, but these were tiny things.

the food at boogaloos, on 22nd and valencia is fine to good-ish I think, nothing amazing, but watching the seas of hipsters wearing their $200 charity store designer trucker caps is hilarious.

maybe a bit too far, but sun close farm in milton - just outside cambridge - provided the makings for a very good summer pudding this weekend....

hmmmm midsummer house re-enters the equation.... at least no worries about getting home after drinking there! the 2for1 special at rousillion (sp?) sounds very intriguing. does the restaurant have a website anyone knows about, i couldn't find one. i'd never heard of the place before i'm ashamed to say. its hard to sell my ex-hippy parents on places that are too grand (being hippies had its advantages though, they ate at chez panisse in its first week), but i will consult their chequebook as it were and see what comes up. process is still definitely ongoing, any other suggestions welcome... i'll certainly report back after the event... cheers

So I am an Englishperson mostly living in california these days and a little out of touch with london restaurants. I'm going to be 30 - gulp - in a couple of weeks and am looking for a good place for a dinner with my -very foody - family. I'm thinking Morgan M is a good candidate, also perhaps Putney Bridge. I'm very partial to multi-multi-course meals myself, so places that have that option are particularly interesting. If anyone has any other ideas for places in that kinda good but not GR-RHR fancy mode I'd be most grateful. The other place we've thought about is Midsummer House in cambridge, which is a 2 min walk from my parents' house but noe of us have been to in its current incarnation... I kinda don't trust Cambridge restaurants in general, do people have opinions?? anyway, thanks for any tips....

cut myself amusingly last week - dropped a knife which was about to fall on the cat's head, deflected the blade with my hand, saving kitty but dinking my finger. then had to get the cat away from the fish I was working on while I went and repaired myself. kitty was more grateful for the monkfish than the self-sacrifice.... dunno if it will scar though.