Star chef Dominique Crenn opens her highly anticipated sophomore restaurant, Petit Crenn, tonight in Hayes Valley. Unlike her other avant garde two-Michelin restaurant Atelier Crenn in the Marina, Petit Crenn will focus on dishes from Crenn's home in Brittany. This means the kitchen will serve up mostly vegetables and seafood, using local California produce with French techniques inspired by her mother and grandmother's cooking.
There are no cocktails at this cozy new spot, but the menu will feature a curation of French and local ciders, as well as natural wines from France. You can see the menu here and here.
One of my guilty home fantasies is to have a fireplace. A big, warm hearth to gather around when the San Francisco fog rolls in—and also so I can burn that perennial almond wood from Whole Foods that always looks so good. But as a city dweller, this is far fetched. Luckily, with the opening of TBD in SOMA, I think I might have found a dream come true.
TBD is the second restaurant project by the young, energetic, and enterprising team that opened the seasonally focused AQ restaurant—which incidentally is right next door to TBD in SOMA.
And if AQ is affordable fine dining, owner Matt Semmelhack and chef Mark Liberman have now opened an even more casual environment in TBD, a place where guests can find hearty seasonal meats and other grilled delicacies, a communal place to gather around an urban hearth, and easy, culinary-style cocktails. Yes, this is where I’m going to get my fireplace fix.
It’s the perfect place for when you want to get a bit, well, lodge-y. The dominant feature in the narrow space is a dramatic open grill, where on open flames cooks grill nice slices of locally source filets and farmers-market-fresh vegetables.
Patrons have a choice of sitting at the bar in front of the open oven or at dining tables either on the ground floor on a loft level looking down into the open kitchen.
Tim Zohn, acclaimed bar director from sister restaurant AQ, takes up the cocktails at TBD. “The cocktails here shouldn’t compete with next door’s program,” he said. “I wanted to do something totally different.”
And to Tim, that meant putting a fresh spotlight on the ever more popular low-ABV cocktails, drinks that rely on wines, beers, and bitters instead of more traditional hard liquors.
Tim calls these drinks "Loopholes." Isn't that cute?
Tim first became interested in low-ABV cocktails when he was designing the bar menu at AQ, before it got its liquor license.
But, at TBD, the reason for Loopholes is not that the spot had trouble getting the highly coveted liquor license, says Zohn. Rather, TBD is the place to find a fresh look at how great tasting drinks can be made with these sometimes denigrated ingredients. Plus, they go pretty great with food.
Of note, this cocktail program is paired with a robust sherry selection, handpicked by AQ sommelier Kristen Capella—something Josh and I are particularly excited about. (Sherry’s time in the sun has been long overdue!)
I tried of few of these cocktails.
First, the Porter Old Fashioned
The cleverly named Nogroni (opposed to the Negroni because this one has no gin, swapping out the spirit for bitters). Like a Negroni, it's bright and rich, but a little more spicy.
Something not on the menu, but a drink I highly recommend if you catch Tim: a Beergarita! It's sparkling, bright, dry, a little savory (from the wheat), and refreshing!
In addition to the drinks, TBD boasts a delightful menu with small, medium, and large share plates focusing on grilled items. The menu is divided into several categories: raw, smoked, hearth and embers, grill, plancha, and sweet.
This dish of cured wild salmon, rye waffle, and dill was particularly delicious. The waffle was satisfyingly crunchy and a little chewy, perfectly sweet with the rich flakes of fish.
The bread, butter, and seaweed offers a really nice vegetarian small plate. The butter is bright and fresh and the seaweed is crunchy and briny.
I also ordered the aged beef sirloin, which was a dense, rich cut cooked perfectly pink.
Cooked on this beautiful grill, no doubt!
And finished with "smores"—satisfyingly smokey and with crunchy chicory!
And super moist dutch oven cake!
TBD in action:
See more pictures in our gallery here:
TBD
1077 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 431-1826
Range is most well known for its kitchen––it earned a Michelin Star from 2007-2010––but its cocktails are exceptional. Like Blackbird, Range blazes its own trail through San Francisco cocktail culture. Three things really impressed us with Range. First, Range is attempting to bring European drinking culture, particularly the aperitif hour, to San Francisco. Second, Range takes uniquely culinary approach to the cocktail menu. Finally, Range is going to, single handedly, integrate sherry into the San Francisco cocktail scene in a big way. Below, we'll walk through the entire aperitif menu, take a look at some of the culinary cocktails, and then wrap up with two fantastic sherries.
Spanish Bramble: amontillado sherry, blackberry-mint shrub (a fruit preservation method of old. It's somewhat like a gastrique), St. George Terroir Gin, soda.
Gemstone: Manzanilla sherry, pear eau de vie, lemon, verbena, grapefruit bitters. A clean drink, very light on the palate.
Paris to Milan: Cocchi Americano Rosa, St. Germain, white verjus (unaged, unfiltered grape juice. It's tart and acidic, almost like a lighter vinegar), prosecco. I found this drink to be dangerous––I could drink it all day. Fortunately it's low ABV, so it's not the end of the world if you knock back a few.
Californio: Oloroso sherry, California bay, Gran Classico, soda. The California bay in this drink is incredible. The acidity of the sherry and the herbaceousness of the bay make for a very flavorful cocktail. With this drink, especially, you can see that Range takes a more culinary approach to its drinks.
Uptown Downtown: Cocchi Vermouth di Torino, Noah's Mill bourbon, bitters. This is basically a reversed Manhattan Cocktail. I think this drink is genius. First, it's has that amazing Manhattan flavor profile we all love. Second, because your'e only using a small pour of whiskey, you get afford a pretty nice one. Finally, you can enjoy more than one without the fear of over-indulging.
Third Rail: Buffalo Trace, Lillet, honey, lemon, Fee's orange bitters. I was very impressed with how well paired the flavors were in this drink. Basically it's bourbon, honey, and orange. The Lillet adds depth and the lemon adds acidity, but they serve only to highlight the main three flavors: bourbon, honey, and orange. Delicious.
Sungold Zinger: 209 Gin, sungold tomatoes, agave, lemon. Another very culinary cocktail. It's not as savory as many tomato drinks are, thanks to the agave and lemon. It's even relatively simple for such a complex looking drink.
Braveheart: Monkey Shoulder Scotch, sherry, apricot, moroccan spices, bitters, lemon. The only thing wrong with this drink is that it's not low ABV, so I couldn't put four of them away like I wanted to. The peaty scotch goes perfectly with apricot. The moroccan spices leave a lingering spice that satisfies and stimulates your palate for more.
Agua Fresca: Siete Leguas Blanco Tequila, watermelon juice, cilantro, lime. The tequila and cilantro go perfectly with watermelon juice. This drink tastes as fresh as it looks.
Sweet Pea: Tito's Vodka, sugar snap peas, sage, lemon, celery bitters, tonic. I like neither peas nor vodka. Somehow, though, I liked this drink. It's perhaps the most culinary-inspired of the cocktails, powerfully herbal and vegetal. Delicious.
La Cigarrera sherry and El Maestro Sierra sherry. These are two pretty standard table sherries. They've got interesting flavors. If you're a wine drinker, they're worth investigating, although they're going to be more acidic than you're used to.
I strongly suggest visiting Range for aperitif hour. Look for this guy, Tayler Buffington. He's the bar manager:
View the whole set on Flickr:
Range
842 Valencia
Aperitif Hour: 5-6 every evening
Hours: Mon-Thu: 6-close
Fri-Sun: 5:30-close
If a person’s character is to be judged by the cocktails they drink, ordering something sweet and low alcohol was a dead giveaway in the early days of craft cocktails. Telling a craft bartender that their cocktails were smooth and sugary could send them into existential crisis. A patron, on the other hand, could be judged as misled or disinterested in cocktails. As a result, it was hard to find low-alcohol cocktails.
But it seems we’ve evolved since then.
We get it, we’re serious about cocktails. But that doesn’t mean that you have to drink a stiff classic to enjoy yourself. In light of that, more and more bars have recently released menus with virgin, low-impact (low alcohol), and long drinks—AQ, Prizefighter, Rickhouse, and Novela, to name a few. And I love it. Just because you go out doesn’t mean you want to drink very much alcohol. Those who are driving don’t have to be left out of the party either.
We recently went down to Elixir, a famous neighborhood saloon in the Mission. The bar is respected as one of the early pioneers in craft cocktails in San Francisco, and today it’s still a great place to catch some solid drinks in a relaxed, unpretentious environment.
Check out their low-impact menu.
Here's the menu and a visual sample of each.
Matcha Mint Lemonade. This drink comes still or carbonated (using a Perlini carbonation system instead of just soda water. They don't use water/soda guns at Elixir because, frankly, they're gross). This was so good I could have ordered about fifty, and it's completely alcohol free.
Schpritzer Sister: Lillet Blanc, chamomile citrus tea syrup, lemon juice, soda, strawberries. The chamomile brings out the spice in the Lillet, and the lemon makes this drink dryer than you'd expect.
Kalimotxo: Mexican coke and red wine. This is an easy one to make at home: 50% red wine, 50% Mexican Coke (it's better in this drink because of real sugar)
Pimm's Cup: Pimm's No. 1, ginger ale, strawberry, mint, cucumber. The ginger ale gives this Pimm's a sweeter and richer consistency than most Pimm's Cups. It's nice if you're in the mood for something a little bolder.
Sutton and Soda: specially made dry vermouth by Carl Sutton, soda, lemon twist. Very dry, very simple, very tasty.
Menta Julep: Fernet, mint. If you like fernet, go get this drink right now. If you don't like fernet, at least give it a try. I'm not a huge fernet fan, and I actually liked this drink.
