Quince

Quince
Wow. What else can I say? I’ve been having a wonderful year gastronomically speaking but I think I will need to rank the experience of Quince as something in a class by itself. I had selected Quince based on an article I read about San Francisco restaurants. Of all that I read about, I was intrigued by this one because its chef was from the Alice Waters/Chez Panisse lineage and allegedly focus his cooking on the quality of his ingredients – a particular passion of mine.
The restaurant itself is small room probably about 1000 square feet with a quadruple line of tables, two of which went around the exterior of the room. As in a lot of large city environments where real estate is expensive, they were eking out every inch of usable space so the tables were quite close together. This meant a rather intimate experience with our neighbors to either side which was ok because both seemed to be there specifically for the purposed of really getting into the food experience.
The service was wonderful. We received personalized menus that said “Happy Birthday Mrs de-I” on them. The wait staff was attentive and knowledgeable without being cloying. No one told us there name (a reference to my pet peeve of current wait staff training – “Hi my name is Mervin. I’ll be your server today and please don’t ask me to do anything other than my automaton performance because I really don’t care).
On to the food – the menu is designed for a three to four course a la carte dinner. Prior to the first official course there were two successive amuse-bouches. The first was a salmon tartar. This was just raw salmon, very lightly cured in salt, chopped roughly and mixed with some olive oil. Then there was a porcini mushroom sformato. This was a custard made with the mushrooms. In both these dishes the salmon and mushroom flavor and aroma just exploded. The “wow” factor was already taking hold.
Quince has a really nice wine selection with some reasonable priced options and an extensive half-bottle list. I went with a half bottle of a 2005 Austrian Helligenstien Gruner Veltiner as I’d read quite a bit about this wine recently. It was a very crisp wine with what tasted to me like very tart apples.
First course – Wife, a burrata cheese cake and de-I an asparagus dish. The former is a type of very fresh mozzarella cheese in two patties with a layer of peas in between, the lightest of crusts on the two outsides but not the sides, fried until the cheese was soft but not completely melted. The later was white and green asparagus, some pancetta and Parmesan for saltiness, and an egg yolk which had been deep fried so it had a very light crust but was soft in the middle and a brown butter sauce. Both were these monuments to simplicity and flavor. Mine had the contrast between the kind of bitter green asparagus contrasted against the sweet white with the creaminess of the egg yolk and the saltiness of the pancetta and the prosciutto.
Second Course was pasta. Mrs. De-I had gnocchi with crab and I had agnolotti dal pin, a traditional Piedmontese filled pasta with a veal, rabbit and pork filling. Both had very light butter sauces. If there were two dishes that screamed “ingredient” it was these two. So many pasta dishes are overwhelmed by the pasta or the sauce. In each of these the protein component dominated the flavor even though from a mass standpoint it did not. So the balance mass wise between the gnocchi and the crab favored the pasta but the flavor of the crab was what dominated. In mine each filled pasta was quite small. Our waiter suggested that I switch to our red wine, a bottle of 2004 Ogier Cote Rotie (a Rhone wine). He was right because the meat flavor literally exploded on the tongue. The Cote Rotie had an extremely powerful aroma, very spicy but was very dry and light in body so it didn’t over power the food flavors at all.
Third Course was pork for Mrs. De-I and rabbit for me. Once again the primary ingredient took the center stage with minimal saucing or side dishes. There was couple of thin pork rib slices from what must have been a whole roast cooked so it was even from edge to center (quite a trick) plus some house made sausage and couple of thin boneless pieces (not sure where they came from). Mine was a boneless loin roasted and covered in this thinnest of egg wrappers.
Wine had a warm chocolate cake for dessert with a glass of port while I just had coffee with a Madeira. It was wonderful.