At Presidio, ambitious touches and serious local ingredients
Presidio has bounced my palate around like a rubber ball over the past six months.
Sometimes straight into a ditch — as in a bowlful of heirloom tomatoes with pickled peach panna cotta, a jarring and unpersuasive combination. Three bites and I was done.
More often to a joyous high: as in a lush summer plateful of figs roasted in brown butter, with whipped goat ricotta and a salty slash of speck ham; or a drop-dead delicious corn cob swathed in electric green-goddess dressing, plus a bouncy dusting of marinated feta. I cleaned both of those plates down to the last errant drop.
You never quite know with this likable, erratic Heights watering
hole. The pint-size kitchen is headed up by the very talented Adam Dorris, who made such a splash at Pax Americana before signing on with Houston bar entrepreneur Charles Bishop, who helped put Cottonwood and Southern Goods on the map. Originally, the idea was that Dorris would keep running the kitchen at Pax while devising more casual Texas eats at the Heights barstaurant.
It didn’t work out that way. Although at Pax Dorris’ food consistently hovered at threeand four-star levels, earning him high rankings in the Chronicle’s Top 100 Restaurants list, the owners eventually balked at his expanded portfolio, installing Martha de Leon, his second-in-command, as chef.
Over at Presidio, where the kitchen was even tinier than the one at Pax, the idea for supercasual Texas grub didn’t work out as planned either. Sure, there are terrific old-school tacos and cheeseburgers on the menu, but Dorris soon discovered “people didn’t just want that from me.” So more and more Pax-like dishes infiltrated the menu, until today Presidio tastes like a looser, more rustic Pax Lite.
The wonderful smoked Akaushi steak tartare Dorris introduced at Pax is on the menu in fine form, with its contrasting notes of pickle, horseradish and unexpected tonnato sauce.
Dorris’ brisk little salads, nests of immaculate seasonal greens and herbs just touched with bright dressings, show up at Presidio on top of a happy-hour sandwich of pork smoked right out back in the herb garden, say; or on the side of a raclette grilled cheese on buttery, thin-sliced sourdough, a sandwich both delicate and thrilling. With just a bit more of that Reading raclette, a raw cow’s milk cheese made in Vermont, it would be outright sublime.
The seasonal vegetable small plates in which Dorris specialized at Pax are present and accounted for at Presidio, where this late autumn has produced a plate of roasted and marinated golden beets on a bed of whipped ricotta spiked with pickled shallot, with slabs of aggressively grill-striped bread to scoop it all up.
Acorn squash roasted to such a tender turn you can eat its skin winds up on a plateful of mustard greens, seeded granola and two-count-’em-two sauces: a tart, spicy North African-style chermoula relish popping with mustard seeds, and spiky dark smears of black garlic caramel, another Dorris signature. It’s both lively and harum-scarum, an effect that’s not uncommon here. The editing in this rougher-edged kitchen just isn’t as rigorous as at a restaurant like Pax, where there’s nearly always a presiding gimlet eye on proceedings.
So a daily catch of fall’s Gulf flounder may emerge a little dry, without much impression of Dorris’ smoked butter against strong, gingery blobs of carrot purée and a tangle of sautéed brassicas. It seemed as if that evocative butter had been trumped by everything else on a recent evening.
But that same night a beautiful rose-red bavette steak, sliced across a bed of Napa cabbage and oyster mushrooms and ribboned with romesco sauce, atoned for the disappointing fish. So did a graceful 2002 Nebbiolo that was worth its $61 bottle price.
Back in late June, I found myself flat-out repelled by a bowl of field peas and roasted mushrooms in which herb broth, greens, fresno chiles and sheep cheese slugged it out, with no one the winner. It’s significant to note that on recent visits, there have been no such jarring failures; the misses, when they come, are slighter. A bit of messy over-exuberance here; a tad of curious, sticky-smooth texture on otherwise agreeable sweet-potato beignets there.
I find myself enjoying some of the funkier, icehouse-worthy items that Dorris wouldn’t have served in his fancier Pax phase. His Texas beef cheeseburger kills with its onion bacon jam and its expansive grain mustard. His “Granny Rose’s Tacos” tuck crumbled grass-fed beef, tart cabbage slaw, pepper jack cheese and sour cream into unusual puff-fried tortilla shells made of part corn, part wheat flour. They are riotous fun, and that’s before you even add the hot-as-hell red salsa.
At the weekend brunch, Dorris’ fascination with toast applications (a souvenir of his San Francisco stage at Bar Tartine) finds expression in brioche toast lavished with supple house-smoked salmon and a brilliant Hollandaise.
I’d come to Presidio just to eat that, with a glass of crisp Slovenian sauvignon blanc, one of the interesting by-the-glass choices, to go along.
I might even come just to partake of the extraordinary warm chocolate cookie dessert, in which hulking clods of dark, gooey chocolate are barely held together with a little cookie dough and a few flakes of sea salt. I am neither a cookie person nor a chocolate-dessert person, and I must confess to being wowed. I even loved the vanilla bean ice cream served alongside by the enthusiastic and friendly staff.
Indeed, with its bushy-tailed servers, high-decibel sound levels and raw reclaimed-wood look — not to mention its expansive patio and porch — Presidio feels much more the watering hole than the ambitious restaurant.
That may be why the ambitious touches and serious local ingredients that weave through the menu seem especially surprising, and sweet.
Is Presidio Adam Dorris’ highest and best use as a chef ? No. Is the place worth your attention? That’s a definite yes.