Delfina and Tartine

There’s something about the block of 18th Street in San Francisco between Guerrero and Oakwood. Maybe it’s the ancient spirit of the Mission, maybe it’s something in the water, maybe Jimmy Hoffa’s body is under Bi Rite, I’m not quite sure what it is, but some of the best things to eat in the city are right there.

On the corner of 18th is **Tartine**, which is a bakery and café in a big space, yet the tables and chairs are jammed inexplicably into a New York corner. Thanks to California’s progressive ideas about the sale of booze, it’s a proper café, where you can get anything from OJ to a bottle of wine to enjoy with your goodies, savory or sweet. In fact, the kids at the next table over came for a bottle of wine and three glasses to while away the afternoon discussing Marxism. It was so undergrad.

Huge, unsubtle but delicious *croissants* come in plain; (Niman Ranch) ham and gruyere; chocolate and other permutations (though be warned; they cook them dark). Tarts, cakes, cookies, quiches, quick and yeast breads all make appearances, and I have to say they range from pretty good to underwear-changing good. Lemon lovers look out for the lemon meringue cake; a baked Alaska filled with lemon curd. Cute hipster kids swarm both in front of and behind the counters from which they make excellent coffee (though SF has some of the oldest hipsters I’ve ever seen).

The Bay Area, I must say, has the most consistently good coffee from the greatest number of independents than any city I have ever been (calm down, Seattle, I haven’t been there- yet).

Speaking of places I hadn’t been, I took a suggestion and went to dinner at **Delfina**, almost next door. It looks like your typical urban hip place, easily transported to New York, LA, Philly, Chicago or Boston, with distressed metal this and marble that. I didn’t take note of too much of the décor since I was flying solo and ate at the bar, but I did have a nice view of the open kitchen and the very young, mostly cute crew behind the line.

It was an absolute madhouse when I got there at 9, but being a party of one, I snagged the end seat at the bar, next to two completely odious 20-something women that were there to see, be seen and eat expensive food they don’t deserve before going home to vomit it up. The advantage to eating so late (and planning to eat everything in the place) is that you get to watch the place slow down and see how the machine contracts to its slower pace. I have always been fascinated by the operation of restaurants, and this process is perhaps the most interesting bit of theater.

At any rate, I sat down and was brought some dense-crumbed, crusty, but noticeably cold bread, and remarkably good butter, anointed with one of the new salts that all the cool kids have. This was soon followed by mint tagliatelle with porcini. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, so does string theory, but it’s not. This pasta was the kind of pasta that grandmothers make, but flecked with fresh mint, in a butter sauce light enough to keep you hungry, inundated with paper thin shavings of *boletus edulis* that kicked you in the teeth when you bit into them. The whole thing was earth, sex and light-colored sin in my mouth, and I regretted getting the half portion one bite in. Since, however, details haunt me, I have to note that I scratched down ‘tagliatelle’ in my notebook, and the website confirms that’s what the menu had written on it, and it is a free country, but in reality what I was served is tagliarini. No harm no foul.

With this, I drank a Gavi from Villa Sparini, one of a few half bottles available on the short but functional wine list. I was struggling between it and a colline they had by the glass, and the bartender’s rec was right-on. It had just the right amount of citrus to lighten it up.

Next I had quail stuffed with sausage and fennel, a little polenta and a brown, nectarous sauce made of stock and *vin santo*. It was one of those dishes which is merely excellent, that is to say, I wasn’t annoyed by the lengthy list of ingredients or put off by dubious combinations. I had a red wine with this that was being served by the glass after much discussion with the bartender, but I was having much too good a time by then to write anything down.

Delfina is one of those places where everybody loves food. Everyone who works there wants to talk about the wine list and the ingredients and they genuinely want you to have a good time. Unlike the clientele, I observed no posturing. I started talking to the bartender, a mysteriously beautiful young woman who lit up to chat about the minutiae of Gavi. And I got to hear her story since, like New York, nobody is from San Francisco, so everybody has a story.

Then I had cheese, which I will quote right from [their website](http://www.delfinasf.com/index.html):
>Wrinkled pagliarina with marcona almonds
Piemonte- cow, sheep, and goat milks
Moliterno tartufato with housemade quince paste
Sardegna- sheep’s milk
Parmigiano Reggiano with saba
Blu del Moncensio with brachetto gelatina
Piemonte – cow’s milk
Tumin rutulin with wildflower honey
Piemonte- goat’s milk

They were mostly fantastic, and the braccheto gelatina kind of haunts me still. By this point I had fallen completely in love with the bartender, and was overwhelmed emotionally and gastronomically by a big pedestal-dish of strawberry ice cream she put in front of me. It was rich and cold and ambrosial and frankly almost surreal. It was like sitting at the bar chatting with a giant strawberry breathing strawberry breath on you, inundating you with his strawberry presence. It was smooth and subtle, yet frosty and poignant. It was perhaps the best ice cream I’ve ever had in my life.

Delfina. Go there. Fall in love.

Delfina Restaurant
3621 18th Street
San Francisco, CA
415.552.4055

Prune

I’m going to say something scandalous:

Prune is probably the best restaurant in New York City.

Wow. I said it.

Prune is as close as it gets to what I would cook for myself, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. That, and everything I have ever eaten there has made me emote audibly. It’s truly a wonderful restaurant.

It’s teeny tiny, but rather than make you feel like fish in a can who should thank them for letting you in, the staff smiles and somehow makes more room, although I am sure how they do it involves witchcraft. The staff is mostly young and, if not pretty, perky. They all seem to be excited about food and wine, and many realize what an extraordinary thing they are part of. It’s kind of fun to watch them know how good the food they’re bringing you is.

All this, and it’s somewhat affordable, with an intrepid if not impressive wine list. It’s organized “Sparkling, White, Red,” but what’s there is worth taking a look through, especially given the very democratic prices (although markup is no less than standard).

So I guess what I’m saying is, go there.

Prune

54 E 1st St, New York 10003
Btwn 1st & 2nd Ave

Phone: 212-677-6221

Listening: NPR. Fair Game is on. She’s funny.

A light at the end of tunnel

I had brunch today, like a good gay New Yorker. And I had it in the neighborhood, at the sort-of famed New Leaf Cafe in Fort Tryon Park. Having been to pretty destination restaurants before, I withheld enthusiasm. After having the most mediocre $20 hamburger of my life at the Central Park Boathouse, I stand wary of anyplace with a view. The menu didn’t exactly inspire confidence either, loaded with old brunch standbys with a slightly upscale pallor.

Turns out that the eggs benedict- at least- are a solid, predictable favorite in a beautiful space with a beautiful view. Not cheap at 17.95, but all inclusive with coffee and juice and a nice selection of wines, aperitifs and cocktails for your hair of the dog pleasure. They go out of their way to note that the eggs are local and farm fresh, and they were. Not the same as an hours-old Gorzynski egg, but far and away above anything from the supermarket or food distributor.

Very nice flatware, also. Heavy, and good in your hand, but not too fancy. And four tines on the fork, Haddock would be pleased.

New Leaf Cafe, Fort Tryon Park

Listening: “Fly Me Away From Baltimore” Eddie From Ohio

Sabatino’s Baltimore: The Emperor’s New Clothes

There are great restaurants ([Wallse](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/17)), and there are good restaurants ([Elmo](http://elmorestaurant.com/)). There are bad restaurants ([Artepasta](http://www.artepastanyc.com)) and mediocre restaurants ([Good](http://www.goodrestaurantnyc.com/)). There are even restaurants that aren’t that good, but you want to be good because they’re nearby (Trattoria Daniela) or they have a beautiful dining room ([Valbella](http://www.valbellany.com/homeny.html)) or a great wine list ([Bellavitae](http://www.bellavitae.com/)). Then, of course, there are restaurants that are egregiously awful, so bad that when offered a choice between them and Wendy’s, Wendy’s wins with unfettered enthusiasm (Malibu). Rarer still are those restaurants that are sub-Wendy’s that have the the trappings and reputation of something greater.

There is such a restaurant in Baltimore, and it is called Sabatino’s. Somehow, it gets glowing accolades from locals and tourists citywide, and when you visit their [website](http://sabatinos.com/), it seems as though people must be lined up around the block for their “bookmaker salad” and their house dressing by the jarful. And, well, they are; the place was packed. This is the part I don’t get: the food was awful. And just to be clear here, this isn’t picking apart a humble restaurant with an eye for *haute cuisine*, this restaurant was truly without merit and it is inconceivable to me how they could have any repeat business, in the middle of Little Italy with a dozen Italian Restaurants on either side.

Like most meals in American restaurants, we’ll start with the bread. Not everyplace can have [Amy's](http://amysbread.com/) bread, and even when places that go to the trouble to make their own, even from a mix, it’s a nice touch, if not the greatest. The bread presented to us at Sabatino’s, however, was stale, with a thin, sour crust (and I don’t mean sourdough, I mean sour) and a cakey Wonder Bread like interior that was neither as moist nor as flavorful as Wonder Bread, if that gives you any indication. Without even going into the dirty silverware and the melmac plates, the bread was an indication of things to come.

Next up was the “famous” bookmaker salad, a composed salad of wilted iceberg lettuce; supermarket salami; dry, disturbingly tangy provolone cheese, long past its prime; brined banana peppers that were brown and gaunt, basically rotten; and a few of the lowest quality, least flavorful shrimp I have ever encountered. This suspicious melange was completely inundated with a salty, vaguely acidic mixture loaded with the kind of grated cheese that comes out of a cadboard tube. It was reminiscent of a locker room, but not in a good way: busy, smelly and making me wonder why I was there. It did it’s job well enough though, I can’t tell you definitively how awful the shrimp tasted, because the dressing spared me tasting anything, except maybe the canned olives. The ferrous glutamate-aluminum flavor lingers in my memory.

Had I been on my own, or just with The Agent, the story might have ended differently. It might have ended with us getting up and leaving (and maybe going to Wendy’s). But I was out with other people, and we were celebrating something (or at least trying to) and so we soldiered on. Personally, I soldiered on to a “Veal Saltimbocca,” which in Italian means “jumps in the mouth.” It might be better named “Saltdallafinestra” or “jump out the window,” because I would prefer doing that to eating it again. Traditionally, Saltimbocca is a thin piece of veal cut from the leg and pounded completely flat. It sometimes is dredged in flour, but always is covered with a slice of prosciutto and a sage leaf, held in place by a toothpick. These pieces are briefly sauteed, and served with a light pan sauce, usually made with broth, but sometimes with white wine. Often, in America, it features some kind of melted cheese.

Regardless of how you feel about the purity of old culinary names, this is what I was served: thick pieces of tough veal (maybe it was veal, maybe it wasn’t), battered and fried, served with chopped up prosciutto-flavored beef jerky and a brown, primordial sauce, thick with cornstarch and almost crystalline with salt. The sauce was the viscosity of Campbell’s tomato soup, with the texture of motor oil. The only thing that can be said for the dish is that the thick blanket of collagen cheese on top prevented me from looking too closely at what I was eating. It’s in the top 5 worst meals of my life.

My companions didn’t fare any better. A lobster marinara with pasta was brown and mysterious and dishes like it were the reason I didn’t eat seafood until I was in high school. A piece of grouper was baked into submission with a slightly lighter, although identically flavored, version of the sauce on the veal. Two broccoli florets came along it, one raw, the other gray.

How these “legendary” restaurants remain open long after their heyday- if Sabatino’s ever had one- is beyond me. I suppose it’s because if everybody says it’s that good, it must be. How could they all be wrong? But, like a conversation about pizza in New York City, taste doesn’t always win out over conviction. For my dollar, the Emperor Sabatino is naked.