Login Using Facebook
SF Weekly Best Of
Official Recommender: SF Weekly's Best of San Francisco 2008
SF Weekly Best Of's Updates
 |
SFWeeklyBestOf is following AnyaS |
About SF Weekly Best Of
http://www.sfweekly.com/bestOf
- This user's profile is set to private.
People Who SF Weekly Best Of Follows
People Following SF Weekly Best Of's Recommendations
SF Weekly Best Of's Recommendations
SF Weekly Best Of's Inside Word
- Restaurants
- Bars
- Shopping
- Fitness/Spa
- Activities
- Hotels
- Other
Sodini's Green Valley Rstrnt
San Francisco, CABest Old-Style Italian
When you're feeling sentimental for an old-style Italian restaurant, quit reminiscing and get to Sodini's Green Valley Restaurant in North Beach. The ambiance you long for includes the requisite checkered tablecloths and candles stuffed in old wine bottles. There's a cozy bar area, where locals often stop in for a quick glass of wine and a bit of gossip with the bartenders, who seem to know everything going on in the neighborhood. It's also not unusual to see politicos or poets having a drink and acting as if they don't know one another. The menu offers generous portions of excellent pastas, including delicious tortellinis. For an appetizer, try the penne con gamberi in cream sauce; if you're looking for an old-style protein hit, try the pepper steak.
Perbacco
San Francisco, CABest High-End Italian
San Francisco is blessed with many excellent Italian restaurants (several of the best have opened in the past couple of years). They include neighborhood pizzerias, osterias, and trattorias. But for alta cucina, the full-on, high-end experience in a posh place offering everything from soup (minestra) to nocce (frutta secca), the ristorante of choice is Perbacco. The glamorous, two-story space can be noisy, but the extraordinarily exciting food, focusing on the Piemonte and Ligurian regions, will rivet your attention. Everything on the extensive menus meets the same high standards: sparkling crudo (raw fish), unusual house-cured salumi, interesting appetizers (including vitello tonnato and fritto misto), soups, pastas, risottos, seasonal main courses, luscious desserts (chestnut Montebianco is a standout), and Italian cheeses. If somebody offers to take you out for a meal anywhere you'd like, Perbacco should be high on your list.
Serpentine
San Francisco, CABest Lemon Tart
We're suckers for lemon meringue pie. The combination of flaky pastry, smooth tart filling, and airy topping, if done right, never fails to thrill us. (Sometimes we like it even if it's done wrong.) But Serpentine's Meyer lemon tart with toasted marshmallow and blood-orange sections thrilled us as never before. That's because we've never had a lemon meringue pie that threatened to float off its plate and disappear into the stratosphere. It looks like a farmhouse pie made to finish a dollhouse feast: a thin, fragile pastry round layered with sweet-tart lemon curd and crisscrossed with a lattice of carefully browned marshmallow meringue. Here's a sweet that deserves the cliche: it melts in your mouth.
Firenze By Night Ristorante
San Francisco, CABest Pasta Chef
Genuine Tuscan cuisine is hard to find despite all the restaurants in town that promote the authenticity of their menus. But award-winning chef Sergio Giusti, the owner of Firenze by Night, produces the real thing. He is best known for his gnocchi, which have been called "the delectable dumplings of death." Another favorite is his pappardelle Toscana, which he prepares with a delicious rabbit sauce. Giusti's mother was raised in the rugged hills of Maremma in southern Tuscany, where the wild boar (chinghalle) are plentiful and the locals are world experts in the preparation of its lean, flavorful meat. Ask your waiter if by chance Giusti has some pappardelle with chinghalle sauce available in the kitchen, which he does on rare occasions. You won't regret it.
Italian French Baking Co
San Francisco, CABest Macaroon
The essence of the macaroon is its dense, pleasantly coarse texture, a gustatory earthiness achieved by forsaking the affectations of finely milled flour for pestled almonds or hazelnuts or some other palatable pseudostarch. Barely leavened with sugar and egg white and baked in a slow oven, it's one deceptively simple übercookie. At the Italian French Bakery in North Beach, the macaroon attains a lush majesty that belies its prosaic ingredients. Here the filler of choice is flaky coconut meat, and the sweet, tropical pleasures of the flesh combined with a blissfully excessive cloak of rich, dark bittersweet chocolate result in a thick and chewy confection that maintains its moist freshness for the three or four days it takes to consume the thing.
