DeadBeefCafe

At 2 PM on Friday afternoon, one of my friends, J. called me. She’d made group reservations at supperclub SF 2 weeks ago for that night, and two of her party had cancelled on her. Did my husband and I want to join her? No, we’d never been, and yes, yes we did.

supperclub is an international chain of restaurants founded in Amsterdam, and the SF branch is the first one to open in the US. It’s a rotating prix fixe menu, $60 ($75 on Friday and Sat), not including drinks. It is indeed a place to get food, but more to the point, it’s a place to be entertained, pampered, and amused. Costumed waiters bring you truffle flavored popcorn as you recline shoeless on a huge bed that rings the entire restaurant and watch the floor show. Masseuses circle the room offering massages ($15 for 15 minutes.) The cooking is all done in a display kitchen in the back of the room (doubles as the bar after 12 AM.) Techno is playing at all times, although not so loudly that you can’t talk over it. They do only one seating per night, at 8 PM, and you should probably expect to be there until midnight. It’s currently one of the see and be seen places in SF, and the the clientele when we were there was strongly dominated by the hot hip young 20-something crowd. You’re advised to dress as if you were going to a club, not an expensive restaurant.

The theme changes every week, but on Friday it was clowns, so we had our *hawt* gay waiter with a red tinsel wig and red clown nose, wearing a t-shirt that said “Jesus is my homeboy.” There was a waitress in rollerskates and clown makeup doing tricks with an umbrella, and a guy with a long long beard, oversized blue coat, clown makeup, and a rubber chicken strapped into what looked suspiciously like a dildo harness, among many others.

We sprawled on the bed and pillows while watching the waitress in roller skates navigate stairs to comic effect, munching down on truffle flavored popcorn and olives, drinking champagne and chatting amongst ourselves. After roughly half an hour, the first course showed up: chicken satay with mango puree on the side served over lightly fermented bean sprouts. The chicken was really tender and flavorful, the bean sprouts unremarkable, roughly the same quality you’d get in any Korean run sushi restaurant as an amuse bouche.

More sprawling, more lounging, more clowns doing silly things. My friend J. was feeling inspired, and was trying out handstands against the wall, while my friend K. was getting a massage from the on staff masseuse. Half an hour later, the next course showed up, a Tuscan tomato and white bean soup in a small metal tin labelled “doggie tin”, with a label explaining in a long winded fashion why it is that Europeans have no idea what Americans mean when they ask for a doggie bag (apparently because they actually go to a restaurant to eat the food, the silly people!)

Post soup, I decided to try out the masseuse myself, and she proceeded to pound my back into submission in an incredibly competent and professional way, including realigning my spine, and massaging the tension spots in my hips without asking, the spots that most masseuses have to be told exist. Fully blissed and relaxed, I was ready to sink into one of the big soft white pillows on the bed, but the next course was appearing.

This time, it was whole leaves of hearts of romaine in a tumbler which had been coated with caesar salad dressing, and garnished with several square inches of a sheet of toasted parmesan, and what looked and tasted suspiciously like a dehydrated sheet of pureed beef jerky. There was also toasted baguette topped with a diced anchovy salad, and this entire plate came with a rubber glove on the side, but no fork. The expectation is that you don the rubber glove and eat the salad that way. Proctology jokes were starting to circulate the table, but the salad was delicious, including the beef, and the rubber glove not terribly intrusive, despite my concerns that it would flavor the food.

J., who was incredibly manic at this point, was beckoning me to the dance floor, as the techno that’d been playing all along started to pick up volume and pace. We went out and danced for about 15 minutes, including dragging my rhythm shy husband onto the floor, but we started to see plates circulating around the room, and headed back to our bed space to find goat cheese stuffed shrimp wrapped in bacon served over risotto and collard greens. I’d been mildly unimpressed with the appetizer and soup courses, but these were amazing. Tender, smoky flavored, rich… Our friend who is allergic to shell fish, had gotten the vegetarian entree, instead, which had roasted portobello mushroom and goat cheese. I thought about asking for a bite, but he was looking very defensive of his plate, so I had to take his word that it was delicious.

A few minutes later, the music stopped, and changed, and we saw the girl clown on roller skates and another male clown wearing a rubber chicken in a dildo harness take the floor. Intrigued, we all wandered out of our corner bed and sat next to the stairs, for what turned out to be a risque cabaret love scene on rollerskates. (Visualize passionate embrace a la one of the Harlequin/Columbine ballets, but on roller skates with rubber chicken.)

At this point, we’d polished off our 6th bottle of champagne, and a bottle of red wine, (amongst a party of 9), and I was starting to think about when I would next need to drive, when the manager came by with a complimentary bottle of ice wine. (One of our party had a rather bad experience on his last visit, and the manager was doing his best to make it up to him, and possibly hitting on him at the same time, since the friend in question is a young and somewhat attractive gay man.) I stole a few exquisite tastes of it off of my husband’s glass, and regretfully stopped there, and started drinking sparkling water.

However, dessert was yet to come. The waiter appeared with plates of pastry rolls, chopped fresh tropical fruit, and cream in little pastry decorating bags. The pastry rolls contained a small rolled up paper that explained that this was do it yourself cannoli. Squeeze cream into pastry, top with fruit, and enjoy. However, handing a room full of tipsy young hipsters a decorating bag of whipped cream can only go poorly, and soon everyone had found new and inapproriate things to do with the cream. I was hiding in the corner of the bed at this point, although J. kept trying to assault me with the cream, and I was going into sugar shock as politely as possible. Between the ice wine and the dessert, I was headed for a diabetic coma.

However, the music was getting louder and louder, and they were starting to let people in from the bar out front. Apparently this is not only a restaurant, it becomes a dance club after dinner. I am neither young nor perky enough to dance the night away after that kind of dinner, however, and my husband and I signaled our friends that we needed to head out as soon as possible. After a minor brawl over the check, as two of our friends simultaneously decided they wanted to make a beau geste, we managed to pay the bill, retrieve our shoes from under the the bed, and get underway. Mostly sober, we plowed a path through the packed throng of well dressed 20-somethings in the bar, acquired our car from the valet, and then made our way out through the lively streets of SOMA.

Bruce Schneier noted security pundit also writes restaurant reviews for a Minneapolis/St Paul newspaper. He and his wife have put together a book of reviews of mostly Bay Area restaurants though there are some in there for Ohio, the UK, and Paris as well. I’ve skimmed through it, its rather well written and I mostly agree with his assessments.

I forget a lot of the details of this meal, it was back in December.

Tempest is in a strip mall, at the other end from the shopping center, and is sparsly decorated with about 25 tables. They took the 10 of us with a reservation, though from the number of customers that night we didn’t really need one. I predict once this place gets discovered a reservation will be recommened to be sure you get in.

Wine: Leaping Lizard Pinot Noir

Butternut Squash Bisque.

Fabulous, light and creamy at the same time with just enough pepper to give it a bit of a bite.

Pork Tenderloin, Haricot Verts, Sweet potato augratin

The greens weren’t the greatest, but the rest of it was amazing.

Banana Pecan Strudel with Caramel sauce and ice cream.

This was amazing, unfortunately I can’t remember much more than that about it.

This is one of those places that really I should have written up the meal right afterwards so I could remember it better.

On the down side, some of the other members of our group didn’t have as good a meal as I did, and hopefully as the restaurant matures they will take care of those sorts of problems.

I’m down in LA to hang out with family (don’t sak, I don’t know either) and I’ve discovered that one of the benefits is that there are some nice restaurants in the area. Last night, it was Christine in Torrance.

The waiter was nice, but trying overly hard to be charming and amusing… or perhaps this is just LA and that’s how waiters are in swanky popular places.

Dinner was excellent:

Baby Beet, Duck Confit, Goat Cheese Gratinee with baby spinach and walnuts.

I was able, with each bite of the rather large salad plate of baby spinach to get a bit of all of the ingredients, and it was delicious.
I must, apparently, learn how to cook a duck, as I have discovered that I very much enjoy the flavor and texture of this wonderful fowl.

Grills Tiger Prawns and Scallops with lobster ravioli

This plate was served with each of these next to each other working their way around, I forget how many of each, but it was not a disappointment except when they were all gone, the tastiness was finished.

Bread pudding with caramel sauce

Mmmmm. Bread pudding is not overly sweet, and the caramel sauce was fantastic. Not quite the best caramel sauce I’ve ever had, but a very close runner.

There was also a bottle of wine, I forget what exactly was selected I wasn’t paying enough attention, which was quite nice with the meal.

Definitely a place that I will go to again if someone offers, or I happen to be in LA and can make reservations. They had inside and outside tables, 2 stories of closely placed tables though I didn’t get run into once by any of the staff or customers, and generally a very nice place. According to their web page and the waiter, the chef teaches cooking classes giving an opportunity to learn some of their dishes and make them in your own kitchen.

Bistro Elan in Palo Alto is nearly impossible to find. No sign marks its existence, you just have to know where it is. A discreet little tangle of vines conceals the dining room from the street, but if you’re paying attention you may notice a lot of people going in twos and threes, and others leaving with a slower gait and a blissful expression on their face.

I had there once before for my birthday, and was incredibly impressed. So when I got a new job and a raise, I decided that the only appropriate way to celebrate was to take my husband out for dinner there. As soon as we were seated, the waiter promptly showed up at our elbow with an small amuse bouche of parmesan biscuits (roughly the size of my thumbnail), thinly sliced salami, and olives marinated in rosemary and salt, and darted off with a promise to come back and discuss the menu momentarily, once we’d looked it over. In the mean time, a basket of crusty warm white sourdough and whole wheat olive breads showed up. The sourdough is tasty, but unremarkable, aside from an incredibly thick crust, but the olive bread is richly wheat flavored, with only a very subtle hint of olive, and very delicious.

Our waiter returned to talk with us, and to mention that, while they did not have a prix fixe menu that evening, they did have a lobster salad with avocado, mango, and beurre blanc. One of the selling points of this restaurant is that the waitstaff is not only competent and well versed in the menu, they’re also clearly food geeks in their own right. The waiter waxed genuinely rhapsodic about the harmony of flavors and texture in the salad, and how good the lobster was. My husband was promptly sold on the salad, as well as ordering the pork tenderloin with rosemary and tarragon beurre blanc. I elected for the slightly more conservative bistro salad, which was a mixure of baby greens and fresh herbs with a light vinagrette, and the duck confit with truffle and onion risotto.

One of the lovely things about high end restaurants is that they ask you what you would like to drink after you have chosen an entree. Having taken our dinner order, the waiter gave us a few minutes to look over the wine list, and then returned to offer useful advice. Trying to find a wine that would suit both the much more mild and subtle pork and the richer, more gamey duck required some thought, but after some thinking and some advice from the waiter, we settled on a tart fruity Syrah from Oregon (is it legal to sell Oregon wines in California? I thought that was a lynching offense….) which turned out to be perfect with both dishes.

The lobster salad was everything it was promised to be, sweet, creamy, and perfectly textured, as well as gorgeously presented. The bistro salad was not particularly interesting to look at, it’s clear this is not the chef’s favorite dish, but the mix of dill and parsley gave it an interesting flavor.

Dinner arrived. The duck was gently crispy on the outside, and falling off the bone, swimming in a pool of reduction. The risotto was a little more al dente than I prefer it, but very creamy and savory, and a few thin slices of delicious smoked roast duck were used as a garnish on the side. The pork was surprisingly mild and subtle, and came with a garnish of miniature french fry cubes and rosemary. By the end of the entree, we were both fairly well sated, but then the waiter waved a dessert menu under our nose. Could I make room for a hazelnut lace cookie layered with praline mousseline and a side of roasted pear coulis? Well, perhaps, yes. My husband opted for the coffee sorbet, with miniature demi-beignets and bittersweet chocolate dipping sauce, and we each ordered a cup of coffee.

Coffee is served in a small french press, brought out just as the coffee has finished brewing. The roast was distinctly a french roast, but well rounded and not too bitter, with not a hint of char, which is my normal aversion to french roasts (and StarFucks). The mousseline was superb, melt in the mouth creamy, and the hazelnut lace crumbled if you waved a spoon at it in a faintly menacing fashion. However, the beignets were clearly the star of the show, coming out still warm and spongy, with a hint of orange, and a VERY bitter chocolate sauce. The sorbet, while supposedly the focus of the dessert, was eclipsed by the beignets.

Supremely well fed, and much poorer, we waddled back out into the night two and a half hours after we had gone in. Good food shouldn’t be rushed.