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Unique Salt & Pepper Tasting
The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco offers a unique eight course salt and pepper tasting
By: Angela Cobban
Stéphane Lacroix, Sommelier at The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, respects his offerings, says Angela Cobban.
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WOW.travel loved the exciting gastronomy at the Dining Room of The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco. We have seen amazing salt selections before (our good friend Heinz Beck, who has three Michelin stars at Pergola atop the Rome Cavalieri, The Waldorf=Astoria Collection, for instance, has a whole cart of different salts for you to choose as condiment). But this was our first experience with an entire salt and pepper tasting menu. Chef Ron Siegel offers here, at The Dining Room, an eight course 'salt and pepper tasting'.
This is what you might get:
1. Soy salt and pink peppercorn with Kindai tuna sashimi, live spot prawn, yuzu gelée.
2. Konbu salt and Tasmanian pepper, abalone, salsify, cara cara and fennel salad.
3. Smoked salt and long pepper, foie gras medallion, pickled buckleberries, fuji apple reduction.
4. Japanese sea salt and Szechuan pepper, Maine lobster, veal cheek, cauliflower, red wine, celery root.
5. Murray River salt and Sancho pepper, quail, satsuma mandarin, crosnes (a tiny, twisted tuber also known as Chinese artichokes or chorogi.).
6. Bolivian rock salt and green peppercorn, beef rib eye, cranberry bean purée, spinach, golden enoki mushrooms (or to be really adventurous, you can choose, for a supplement to the set-price meal, Umami salt and green Szechuan pepper, Yukihiro (8.16.06) medallion - a type of Kobe beef from the black Tajima-ushi breed of Wagyu cattle - with glass noodles, shiitake mushrooms).
7. Verbena sea salt and white Muntock peppercorn, apple cider quince sorbet, cactus pear cloud.
8. Philippine sea salt and pink peppercorn, milk chocolate feuilletine bar, caramel glass (sugar trails), hibiscus gel, ivoire cream.
We find this menu interesting, and imaginative. It is also thoughtful. Take the Kindai tuna, for instance. This is the first-ever farm-raised bluefin tuna raised in captivity from the egg. It produced only by a Japanese university fisheries laboratory, the Kinki University Fisheries Laboratory in Wakayama, and it is said to be not only eco-friendly but more healthy than other tuna. Every week only three Kindai tuna, each about five feet long weighing 130 to 200 pounds, are flown to the USA. One goes to New York, the other two to San Francisco, to such restaurants as the French Laundry in Yountville - and The Dining Room of The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco. In San Francisco, when they arrive at distributor IMP Foods, the fish are cocooned in bubble wrap inside a thick foam container. The champion cutter then segments the fish, whose exquisite fatty flesh ranges in color from sirloin-steak red to the milky pink of the toro (belly), and each section is labeled with a handwritten piece of paper indicating its weight and which restaurant it will go to. The more fat a piece has, the more expensive it is. "The flavor is incredible, and it slices unbelievably well. It's not sticky like other farm-raised tuna," says Ron Siegel - who also offers Kindai-geoduck tartare with cayenne emulsion as an à la carte appetizer.
What can one say? Well, The Dining Room at The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, is one of only two restaurants in California - and 17 in North America - to earn Exxon Mobil’s Five-Star Award for 2008. And so we sat, in the elegant dining room, its immaculate tables set with Bernardaud Limoges porcelain and Spielgau glassware, and pondered the menu, modern French cuisine with a Japanese influence, again. Frankly, we could not eat that much. The Champagne trolley was silently wheeled up, and we were skilfully offered a choice of four. They change every six months, but there is always a US sparkling wine, a French rosé, a French white and a French premium. The night we were there, the choice was Schramsberg Cellars, Blanc de Noirs, California, 2005; Henriot, Champagne, Brut Rosé, NV; Billecart-Salmon, Champagne, Brut Réserve, NV, and Laurent-Perrier, Grand Siècle, Champagne, Brut, NV.
A waiter suggested the best-selling main course, a slow-cooked suckling pig, cooked for 24 hours at precisely 60 degrees. We thought about the new 'small bites menu', a selection of tapas offered with your choice of 100 different 375 ml half-bottles of wine (this was
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introduced February 5th, 2009 and is not surprisingly proving extremely popular). Our orders were taken, an amuse was brought, with the chef's compliments. Tonight we first tasted a tiny pastry pouch filled with carrot and Sonoma truffle. Next taste was oyster and lobster in a martini glass. Third amuse taste was a poached quail egg perched on top of a clear horn-shaped plastic dish filled with wood-smoke; the dish was sealed in invisible clingfilm so the egg appeared to float, as it were, on the smoke.
Hey this 96-seat place is fun. It is far far removed from the traditional Dining Room that we remembered from years gone back (sorry Gary Danko, your food was divine, and sorry Emmanuel Kemiji, your wine choice was memorable, but the whole ambience was so much more serious then - and in these unsure and serious times we need elements to tickle our imagination and make us smile).
And smile we do, constantly, as we eat our 'local choice' selection, served with great pride by restaurant manager Amgad Wahba's team. Chilled Sonoma foie gras, our choice of appetizer, comes with quince jam and a quince terrine, plus a grated marcona almond (a smooth, tan almond known for its sweetness and soft texture, similar to a cashew), and a tranche of grilled sourdough, the bread synonymous with San Francisco - all the restaurant's breads come from Bay Bread, the understandably-cult boulangerie founded by Bordeaux-born Pascal Rigo. Next comes Sonoma duck breast, juicy slices with pickled elderberries, baby leeks, baby fennel, crosnes tubers and matsutake mushrooms - one of the most highly prized fungi (prices in Japan go up to $2,000 per kilogram).
Sommelier Stéphane Lacroix, who was named Best Young Sommelier of Central France during earlier stages of his extensive career, has chosen the wines from a list that today has over 1,400 labels, from around the world. Tonight we are drinking from California, naturally. We start with a glass of Patz & Hall Chardonnay Dutton Ranch Russian River 2006, which displays beautiful aromas of lemon curd and passion fruit with hints of buttered toast and honey. After this we try Merry Edwards Pinot Noir Russian River 2006, a bold, beautiful Pinot from the Sonoma area, and we finish with Peay Vineyards Les Titans Sonoma Coast 2004, whose winemaker Vanessa Wong says has a nose with a clear note of meatiness and graphite, a mouth that hints at youthful flavors of vanilla and blueberry and a true depth of fruit in the mid-palate.
Chef Ron Siegel was born in New York and moved with his family to California when he was seven. After school he first went into the butchery business before switching to culinary. He trained with such luminaries as Daniel Boulud, the afore-mentioned French Laundry's Thomas Keller, and Michael Mina and in 1998, Siegel defeated the reigning Iron Chef champion Hiroyuki Sakai on television. Read more about Ron Siegel, and see some of his recipes, in the beautiful book Savor San Francisco: Recipes from San Francisco's Top Restaurants with Wines from California's Best Wineries, Elizabeth Alain, Sea Script Company, 2005.
The evening has been a homage to the area past and present. Ritz-Carlton San Francisco is a conversion of the stately antebellum-style headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, finished in 1901: the hotel opened in 1991, with 336 rooms. The interiors are by Frank Nicholson, who also collected the fine array of American art displayed in public rooms: we especially liked the painting of the Benjamin F Packard Entering San Francisco Harbor by Henry Scott, 1911-2005, who specialised in ship portraits set within realistic atmospheres. The Dining Room at The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, is open Tuesday through Thursday, 6 to 9pm, and Friday and Saturday from 5:30 to 9:30pm.
The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
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