So seasonal, so local, so organic, so blah
Anyone been to Farina on 18th (in San Francisco)? What’s up with that? Maybe I hit them on an off night, but what a mess. The cheesy focaccia thing was awesome–papery thing bread dough wrapped around oozy, amazingly creamy cheese. And their “La Grande Mela” cocktail of bourbon, cassis, and bitters struck me as just the thing. Everything else had something quite strikingly wrong with it. Watery mashed potatoes under the otherwise perfectly tender calamari; fava beans that were too big to serve raw served raw on the yummy plate of deeply savory salami; grit in the plump borage raviloi; tough, overcooked fish in the balanced broth of the zuppa di pesce.
But the cocktail was good and the company was even better, so I hardly care anymore. I’d go back–and sit at the bar and have a cocktail and order some of that bread. But the rest of it? Too much money for truly mediocre food. Truly mediocre food that just isn’t so tricky to make a bit better.
Plus, they do that thing where they don’t seat you until your whole party is there. Even with a reservation. Even if you’re a party of two so the table couldn’t get any smaller. Just let me sit down. Why punish me because my dinner companion gets lost easily? I sort of forced them/shamed them into letting me sit down–by explaining the logic of me needing to eat dinner anyway, whether or not my “party” arrives at all. It betrays such an utter lack of hospitality. Anyone with me on this one?
