San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Viridian in Oakland makes magic.
Oakland’s new neon pink bar spins Asian American nostalgia
The first sip of Viridian’s Tomato Beef cocktail is crazymaking, in the vertigoinducing way that a magic trick makes you squint and shake your head as you try to understand what just happened. You’re compelled to take another sip just to verify that you haven’t lost your marbles — that you really did just drink a crystalclear Tequila concoction that tasted like the first time you ever bit into a ripe tomato off the vine.
That effect is multiplied by the Oakland bar’s Wong Kar Waimeets“Enter the Void” aesthetic. The narrow space has hot pink lighting so dense it feels like a holographic fog, and the translucent COVIDera barriers between barstool seating and bartenders seem to be made of flattened lime Jolly Rancher candies. It’s enough to make you topple off your stool.
Dining at Viridian, with all of its sensory overload, is in many ways the ideal postlockdown experience. There is next to nothing about this place that you can do at home. The dessert menu alone awes with its complexity. A halo halolike riff on Thai tea, at just $11, features snowlike tea granita, a caramelly burnt honey custard and wiggly tea jellies. A spiky, UFOlike piece of meringue sits on top, a grand crown for a striking dish that will send you back to a neighborhood Thai restaurant.
It’s a stunning magic trick on a menu full of them. Even if you manage to find some pink light bulbs for your dining room, that alone wouldn’t make you nostalgic for someone else’s childhood, as Viridian does. It’s a reminder of how efficiently restaurants with a firm point of view can shake you out of the everyday. At their best, they give you a rare glimpse of the sublime.
Partners and Oakland natives William Tsui, Raymond Gee and Jeremy Chiu opened the bar in February 2020 with an aim to serve craft cocktails with a small menu of Asian American dim sum and desserts. It was an ode to Oakland’s Chinatown: its dim sum shops, snack food aisles and small markets filled with dried sea cucumbers and mushrooms. When I first visited, I perceived the nostalgic intentions, but it didn’t feel like there was enough food for me to really devote a whole review to discussing.
Then, when the bar reopened in April after its pandemic hiatus, the menu grew. A new team of chefs, George Meza, formerly of Onsen, and Vince Soriano Bugtong, of La Folie and Breadbelly, is cooking up 10 savory items and six desserts that nail the same Asian American vibe as the bar’s White Rabbit cocktail, modeled after the milky Chinese candy. Now you can put together a proper — and exciting — dinner from a menu of dumplings, skewers and other small bites. Everything, from the wontons to the chocolate cake, is plated with the exquisite amount of care you’d expect from a fine dining restaurant. Every dollop of aioli is pert; every flower petal garnish silkysoft.
The first thing on the menu, a $6 thick slice of milk bread, is a portent of what’s to come. Served lightly toasted with a cottony inside, the slice arrives with a pat of verdant green and room temperature scalliongarlic butter. It looks like any old diner toast; it’s the butter that makes it fly. Granules of fermented shiitake seasoning top the butter, an umami boost that coats the tongue and makes you fight with your dinner companions over the green dregs at the bottom. This milk bread converses with other nextgeneration riffs on Chinese scallion bread in the Bay Area, like the delicate green onion croissant sold by Bake Sum in Berkeley, and the puffy sourdough pancake sprinkled with scallion dust at Mister Jiu’s. Meza’s take is comparatively informal, his emphasis on flavor over finesse, though it’s no less exciting.
Other dishes appear more formal. In a marvelous seasonal dish of caramelized asparagus ($13), Meza’s team dresses up juicy green segments with smoked soy sauce, salmon roe and brokendown particles of salted egg yolk. Neutral and creamy elements like ripe avocado and strained yogurt calm the palate in between salty bites, and elegant shards of sesame tuile grant occasional moments of earthiness.
It didn’t have to be a tuile; crisp, toasted sesame would have had a similar effect, particularly for customers who are just there to drink. And yet the tuiles accentuate the textural impact of the seeds, turning something normally crunchy even crunchier. It’s a cheffy dish, and the high caliber of its presentation almost feels like the chef is flexing: reminding you that this isn’t just “bar food,” whatever that is anymore.
Still, there are elemental, cavemanish pleasures here: food you want to rip off a stick with your teeth, and fried stuff made to soak up alcohol. Succulent pork belly skewers ($15 for
two) come glossy with soy sauce and perked up with yuzu kosho paste and spicy mustard. Retrofeeling tuna tartare bites ($14) on platforms of crunchychewy fried rice seem like something passed around in a ’90s “Batman”movie cocktail party. Grated horseradish and flower petals are strewn like confetti and streamers on top of mounds of seasoned raw tuna.
But even then, like a dream, the menu makes memories uncanny, juxtaposing them in surprising ways, such as with the marble potato okonomiyaki ($16). It’s deep fried to a crisp like tempura instead of being seared on a flattop grill like a pancake, as is traditional for okonomiyaki, and as a result, it scratches several itches at once — curly fries, fritto misto, potato chips. Consuming it feels as though you’re touching someone else’s memories of loaded fries and izakaya food. It makes you think about what it means to miss a place you’ve never been to; it’s also just plainly fun to eat. Your attitude might depend on how many drinks you’ve had.
Pastry chef Bugtong’s desserts similarly play with memory through ambitious means. (It’s actually kind of funny waiting for servers to run out of steam as they recite the many elements in each one.) Iconic Asian sweets, like bubble tea, dim sum hall mango pudding and dan tat, arrive through the lens of a kaleidoscope. Each component of what you’d expect is stretched out and warped: cheesecake is collapsed into a creamy quenelle and brown butter soil in a dessert that’s, on paper, cake and ice cream; creamy miso is transmogrified into crisp and savory fragments of fried corn in the usually obligatoryfeeling chocolate dish.
In the cheesecake dessert, called Yin Yang ($12), a creamy trio of quenelles take classics like ice cream for a ride to breakfast at “The Hunger Games.” There’s coffee and Assam teaflavored ice creams and mousse, as well as a raspberry chocolateglazed vanilla cheesecake. The neat mounds come garnished with a vineshaped tuile and brown butter pastry crumbles; the tuile itself is covered in tart red raspberry powder. It evokes the sweetbitter pleasures of a jelly doughnut eaten between sips of black coffee. Functioning like a caricature, the exaggerated presentation of these desserts simultaneously makes you laugh and realize what about these banal dishes you liked so much.
This highlow style is more commonly found at far more expensive restaurants. But like at a tasting menu operation, where chefs pitch big ideas and sometimes miss, not everything quite works here. Pierogilike pot stickers ($14 for four), fat with maitake mushroom and white sweet potato, come off as unbalanced. They’re too gently seasoned and upstaged by their accompanying fivespice chicken jus, a deeply restorative potion so collagenrich that it could double as a skin care product.
And while overall the service style is welltuned and attentive, there is one downer to the experience. Getting the food can be a trial as you adjust to Viridian’s QR codegenerated system; it takes you to a web app that’s not far from the ancient web design used by the California DMV. Navigating between the menu and the order “cart” is unintuitive, and if you screw up, which I did several times, the interface refreshes and you have to start the process all over again.
Thankfully the food and drink are worth the trouble. It’s becoming a much more common trope in restaurants to dig into sentimentality and nostalgia: to engineer Proustian flashbacks with every bite. Not all of them succeed as thoroughly as Viridian does. Consumed in a cinematic, womblike atmosphere, Viridian’s mastery over the flavors of Oakland’s Chinatown can suture you into the minds of strangers — so much so that you may quickly begin to yearn for old Chinatown, too. You might even find it sublime.