Rising above garlic kitsch
Though it has a gift shop, laminated menu and other earmarks of a corporate restaurant chain, the Stinking Rose is not the Olive Garden. It’s not Buca di Beppo, the Old Spaghetti Factory, Maggiano’s Little Italy or any other of those Italian-ish brands that you’ll find in most midsize cities across America.
For better or worse, the Stinking Rose belongs wholly to San Francisco. Its co-owners, Jerry Dal Bozzo and Dante Serafini, grew up in Italian families in North Beach and opened this restaurant in 1991 after an inspiring visit to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. At the time, the city was still recovering from the Loma Prieta earthquake, and North Beach was in the midst of a restaurant revival that the Stinking Rose joined. And even though they opened a second location in Beverly Hills in 1996, that remains the only spin-off, and there are no plans for more.
Whether the Stinking Rose is a good restaurant is another question entirely, and a more difficult one to answer. There is certainly better Italian food in the city, even along the often-mediocre tourist strip of Columbus Avenue. Its kitschy, over-the-top atmosphere, resplendent with garlic ropes and candle-waxdraped Chianti bottles, is the antithesis of the minimalist design that reigns in the restaurant world right now. It is not a cool place to eat dinner, per se.
But people do eat dinner there, a lot. The Rose has served its famously breath-annihilating food to more than 3 million people to date, and still turns 1,000 to 1,500 covers on a busy Saturday night (2,000 on Valentine’s Day, its most popular holiday).
They’re not all tourists, either. Serafini says that a survey of credit card receipts revealed that 70 percent of their clientele is local, though he concedes that many may be escorting out-of-town guests. An anecdotal survey confirms that many longtime San Franciscans have visits to the Stinking Rose in their memory banks.
One of the reasons for the restaurant’s enduring popularity, I think, is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Dal Bozzo and Serafini knew that an all-garlic restaurant was something of a gimmick when they opened it, and to that end, they push the theme by serving novelty items like garlic-infused Chateau du Garlique white wine, made by Rappazzini Winery in Gilroy (it’s terrible, even when served very cold, but that’s sort of the point).
For dessert, there’s garlic ice cream, made by the same Santa Cruz company that supplies the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which has an aggressive, acquired taste; its chocolate shell is a necessary palate cleanser.
A restaurant that served only novelty items wouldn’t have endured for 25 years, however. The long menu, a mishmash of seafood, steaks and pasta dishes unified by their garlic content, actually has some gems. I would happily eat the 40-clove garlic chicken again: a quarter of a bird with moist, succulent meat faintly infused with the taste of garlic and paired with a cream sauce that’s decadent without being too heavy.
I couldn’t detect much garlic in the garlic meatballs, but they were expertly seasoned and came in a red sauce topped with cheese; simple, but welcome in any situation. Another popular meat dish, the certified Angus beef prime rib, may not be quite up to House of Prime Rib standards, but nonetheless, it was cooked a perfect medium rare and served with a garlicky au jus, creamy garlic mashed potatoes and creamed spinach. The Caesar salad was perfectly fine, if a little on the pungent side; the creamy mushroom lasagna was all it needed to be, if nothing entirely memorable.
To me, the best dishes are the ones, like these, that don’t let the garlic theme overpower them, the dishes that allow you to continue your evening without sending off cartoonish stink vibes. (The urban legend that cabs won’t pick up fares from the Stinking Rose is absolutely true, Serafini says. They instruct customers to walk to Broadway and Columbus to hail one.)
But some people just can’t get enough garlic, and finding that balance between the fanatics and everyone else took a few years of experimentation. Eventually, the restaurateurs settled on a compromise. Every morning, they make the on-table Rose Relish, a blend of garlic, olive oil and parsley, so garlicheads can season their dishes to taste.
Connoisseurs can also order the bagna calda, peeled cloves of garlic soaking in warm olive oil. It’s the signature appetizer, and most tables have one bubbling away over a candle, though I found that it added little to the meal, except lingering garlic breath.
Would I personally choose the Stinking Rose on a Friday night instead of Sotto Mare, Tosca or any other excellent Italian restaurant in the neighborhood? Probably not — it’s just not my scene, despite modern menu updates like braised short ribs and sustainable ingredients, like Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch-certified fish.
But that doesn’t discount its importance in San Francisco restaurant lore, and the fact that it’s managed to maintain success for a quarter century in a city where fewer and fewer things seem to last.
Dal Bozzo and Serafini own several other restaurants in the Bay Area these days, including the Crab Shack in Fisherman’s Wharf, the Old Clam House on Bayshore Avenue, and Osso Steakhouse in the historic Vanessi’s space. At one time in their lives, they had dreams of building the Stinking Rose into a chain like Buca di Beppo or the Olive Garden. Now, they just want to operate local chop and fish houses, the kinds of places that remind them of the city as it once was.
“After we opened up the Stinking Rose L.A., we realized we’re kind of local guys. The idea of traveling far from home wasn’t as appealing as we thought,” says Serafini. “Now we have different concepts, but there’s something that runs through all of our restaurants that’s uniquely San Francisco. I think we did that because it’s all we know.”