Greens
For our final Dine About Town dinner, we opted for Greens, the all-vegetarian restaurant in Fort Mason, right next to San Francisco's Marina.
I have always liked Greens, for a number of reasons. One, they actually try, and succeed, to make good food, rather than capitalizing on their stunning view to draw in customers. Two, they don't try and create "fake meat" dishes. The food is vegetarian cuisine, but doesn't feature "sausage" or "steak" or even "fish." To my mind, if you're spending a lot of time doing fake meat stuff, perhaps you're sending a message. And I don't want to eat food that has been highly processed and sculpted to resemble something it's not.
But that rant is for another day. Greens got high points for the composition of their cheap prix fixe: the opener was pre-selected as was the entrée, but they were normal items off the evening's menu, and the two a la carte cost about the same as the whole prix fixe, which included a choice of desserts as well.
And the food itself? We had Rattlesnake bean griddle cakes for the opener, and a squash stew served on warm polenta for the main course. Both dishes were somewhat too spicy for my palate, but I blame my wimpy palate, not them. For dessert, I had a quince tarte tatin, and Melissa had a chocolate tart, which surprised us by arriving cold.
We had opted for a bottle of Ridge Lytton Springs Zinfandel to go with our two savory dishes, but the cellar was out, so instead we went with the 2000 Qupe Syrah. A good wine on its own, but it had trouble retaining identity when paired with the spicy food. A slightly inadequate pairing in my opinion. And yes, they had some Germans and Austrians, but I decided to branch out.
The wine list in general was a little odd. I'm sure their sommelier works very hard, but the list seemed a little lackluster, though it did have a good representation of California wines. (Though not the Ridge we wanted). An Alsatian Gewürtzraminer would have been very nice with the spicy food, I imagine. Too bad they didn't have any. The wine list presented a fair amount of choices, but none that really grabbed us.
And not that Greens is to blame for this, but I have finally found an ice wine which did not send me into bliss: Andrew Rich's 2000 Ice Wine from Oregon. It's not like it was bad, but it was merely okay.
This sort of good-but-not-great feeling pervaded the evening. The food was satisfying but not fantastic, the wine list seemed like it was missing some pages, and the service was adequate. Still, for $30 I felt like I got my money's worth.
The clear winner in our three Dine About Town dinners was bacar, but 2nd place might be a bit of a tie. Acme Chophouse skimped on the opener and dessert, but delivered a stunning steak as recompense. Greens was consistently good for every course, but no one dish was up to the steak at Acme. Or any of the dishes at bacar. So is it better to have one fantastic dish and two mediocre ones, or three above-average but not stellar ones? Hard to know.
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