Pushing the limits in the Avenues
Owing to its geography, moody microclimates and vexingly challenged public transit system, a considerable part of San Francisco will always be far-flung. The Outer Richmond, for instance, unreachable by BART, is perpetually consigned to be thought of as “way the hell out there.” As a Southern Californian by birth, I’ve always found it perplexing that the beachfront property in San Francisco is, relatively speaking, among the least coveted. Karl, the personification of our city’s dogged blanket of ever-moving fog, has something to do with it, I’m sure.
And so the city persists as one of residential neighborhoods and neighborhood res-
taurants.
What is a “neighborhood restaurant,” exactly? It’s a term that I hear used in all kinds of scenarios — as often when flashy places want to seem cozy as when mediocre places want to hide their faults. It carries something of a faux-populist vibe, as in, “This isn’t a foodie place — it’s a neighborhood joint.” Neighborhood restaurants exist, at various times, both above and beneath the attention of the modern restaurant hullabaloo.
I suppose, at the most basic level, a neighborhood restaurant is one that serves the people in its neighborhood. But what happens when the neighborhood restaurant collides with talent and craft that aren’t so easily confined? What if a neighborhood restaurant has something to offer to those outside the neighborhood?
There are moments whenever I eat at Cassava, when I think that, man, with a little work and a completely different location, this could be a great restaurant — both delicious and consequential. As it stands, Cassava is a baby-blue bright spot in the Outer Richmond, with owners that wear their hearts on their sleeves.
My first dinner there began with a warm hunk of bread, sourced from up the street at Marla Bakery. A rugged quenelle of honey butter sat shotgun at exactly the right temperature — spreadable but not greasy. If, like me, you grew up not knowing any better than to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken, Cassava’s bread service will whoosh you backward through time and space to the primal joys of spreading packets of honey on warm KFC biscuits. (At my next dinner, the bread was more than a little bit stale — the sort of thing that happens, I suspect, when the kitchen tries to stretch the previous day’s loaf a little too far.)
Speaking of fried chicken, Cassava fries a fine bird. The breading is crisp — more cornstarch-y than flour-y, to my eye — and threatens to fall off the meat but manages barely to cling on. Tart rounds of sliced kumquat brought a welcome sourness, but a hollandaise foam sauce on the side felt out of place.
An intricately plated salad of endive and stone fruit slightly prioritized form over function. Red and white leaves of endive were shingled in a row with slices of peach, topped with breadcrumbs, soft cheese, pecans and more kumquat slices. It was handsome to behold, but made for uneven eating. Some bites lacked acidity or fat; others were spot on.
Kumquats continued to run rampant into the entree courses, paired with a handful of orange segments atop hillocks of lentils on a plate of pan-fried halibut. The oranges — oddshaped little nubbins with the pith still intact — added little to the dish, but didn’t really detract from what was, on the whole, a nice fish preparation.
I like the way chef and coowner Kris Toliao uses lettuces, tossing them with warm grains or vegetables to wilt them ever so slightly. They showed up this way, mingling with sauteed corn kernels in a duck confit dish, along with two other instances of corn: a sweet mush and a pan-fried purple polenta cake. Again, the dish as a whole was lovely, in spite of one element. The polenta cake’s subtle flavor immediately became impossible to perceive once I tasted anything else on the plate.
The polenta cake made another appearance at my next dinner, when I returned to try Cassava’s $42 four-course tasting menu. That meal began with a better composed salad of stone fruit, radishes and greens. It was a delightful medley of textures — sandy rye crumble, crunchy greens, ripe fruit, creamy house-made ricotta — made more interesting with a small dose of cumin and a couple well-placed fennel fronds. If anything, it could have used a touch of acidity, but only because the fruit was so incredibly ripe. #californiaproblems
The fish on this occasion was halibut, again served atop lentils, but this time with peeled cherry tomatoes that brought a welcome burst of brightness, and thin slices of pickled watermelon rind that were delicious but scant.
The polenta cake showed up in the game hen course, and was again overwhelmed by its plate mates. The hen, though attractively browned and appealingly scented with rosemary, tasted like it had been cooked — or par-cooked — too long ago. One of the hazards of dining at 9 p.m. on a slow night, I suppose.
Dessert was a custardy honey-lavender panna cotta, advertised with an accompanying berry compote that turned out not to be a compote so much as a small spoonful of berries and a few slices of fresh fruit. Still, it was tasty, owing again to the exceptional quality of the fruit. The lavender in the panna cotta was mercifully not handsoap-y, as I tend to fear, and a few small mint leaves were wonderfully complementary.
Forty-two bucks is an absolute steal for a meal of this caliber and quantity, but I hesitate to call it a “tasting menu.” That phrase gets thrown around too easily. Tasting menus should be crafted with a narrative in mind, conveyed through dishes that are not complete unto themselves. In other words, the meat+veg+starch formula that dictates how most restaurants define an entree shouldn’t apply to the dishes on a tasting menu. What I had at Cassava for $42 was a salad, two mains and a dessert.
Toliao has worked at Kikunoi, the famed kaiseki restaurant in Japan, so I’m sure he knows how the very best seasonal tasting menus are able to unfold and reveal themselves over multiple courses. Maybe he feels like he needs to give us our money’s worth. It’s generous, but leaves me curious to see what he might do with a proper tasting menu.
Cassava also serves breakfast, brunch and lunch. This strikes me as somewhat bonkers.
One morning, shortly before I was to depart for Japan myself, I popped in to try their version of a Japanese breakfast. It consisted of an assortment of bowls and ramekins filled with rice, miso soup and various accompaniments: lightly sweet pickles, a small piece of broiled sea bass, baby broccoli dressed in sesame, a sous-vide egg and a small dish of natto (fermented soybeans) for which I paid a few extra dollars.
I arrived during the halfhour overlap between breakfast and lunch, so I decided to dip into the afternoon menu as well, ordering a dish of meatballs in curry, and a slice of avocado toast. The perfectly nice meatballs were smothered in a tomato-y curry, along with chunks of chewy-creamy paneer that felt like an ideal cross between tofu and soft cheese.
Cassava pours a beautiful cup of siphon-brewed coffee from Ritual Roasters, and, in spite of a slightly overcooked egg on my avocado toast and too much arugula filler, I left breakfast feeling totally impressed.
I marvel at what the kitchen at Cassava is able to produce from a tiny room outfitted with induction cooktops and a La Marzocco espresso machine that seemingly occupies half of the available counter space.
Yet there are downsides to always going above and beyond. There are aspects of Cassava that feel strained: the service at certain times is fraught, and I’ve already mentioned how some of the ingredients can be overstretched. Cassava’s co-owner and general manager, Yuka Ioroi, occasionally maintains a blog, in which she refers to the restaurant as “the DIY restaurant.” You can tell they’re bootstrapping it, and it shows — for better or worse.
There’s a lot of ambition and talent and devotion here. Part of me wishes I could transport the restaurant out of its neighborhood setting. I have no idea if that’s what Ioroi or Toliao or their customers want, but I think they’d flourish with more of a challenge and perhaps some additional room to work. Obviously, I can’t move the restaurant — and who knows if they’d succeed anyway. But I urge you to get out there for yourself to see the improbably outstanding work they’re doing with what they’ve got.
Forty-two bucks is an absolute steal for a meal of this caliber and quantity, but I hesitate to call it a “tasting menu.”