In Situ adds its own voice to the menu
In his Between Meals column, Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writes about the restaurants he visits each week as he searches for the next Top 100 Restaurants. His main dining reviews, written after three or more visits, appear in the Sunday Food + Wine section.
I’m trying to finish up my Top 10 restaurants of the year (to be published Dec. 31), and I decided to go back to the 2016 restaurant of the year, In Situ.
It was a clear choice last year because this restaurant in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is like no other place I’ve experienced. Corey Lee, who also owns Benu, meticulously re-creates signature recipes from some of the best restaurants in the world. They are so faithfully rendered that last year, when I tried In Situ’s warm tomato basil tart recreated from Michel Guérard’s Les Prés d’Eugénie in France, it propelled me back to 1981 when I actually had that dish in the French restaurant. Long-forgotten memories of driving down tree-lined roads to get there came flooding back.
Lee and chef Brandon Rodgers have amassed more than 100 dishes, but only 16 or so are on the menu on any given day.
I hadn’t been back in nearly a year, so almost all the dishes were different, except the wasabi lobster ($28) from Restaurant Tim Raue in Berlin. It carried as much kick as I remember: a sharp contrast of sweet, buttery seafood and the sharp heat of the root.
While there were dishes from Seoul, Barcelona, Sao Paulo and Australia on the menu, my favorite dish this time was fried fish cake with ginger scallion ($10), cubes of finely minced seafood browned to form a very thin and tender crust. Ironically, this dish was actually invented at In Situ, as was another excellent dish, the fine herb salad of lettuce, avocado and lemon with a rectangle of lavash with paper-thin slices of zucchini, carrots and other vegetables pressed into the crisp cracker.
I found it interesting they now include some of their own dishes in the mix, showing that what they produce creatively stands up to the best dishes from around the world.
From Daniel Boulud of Daniel in New York, Rodgers re-created the Maine sea scallops black tie ($46), with black truffles in between the slices, and wrapped in puff pastry. It’s set on a rich sauce generously peppered with truffles. According to the menu, which lists each chef and a short bio, the dish was invented in 1986.
The format of In Situ has changed slightly in the last year; dishes are now categorized as small, medium and large. That last category includes The Voyage from the Indies ($42), with John Dory fillets on a cabbage salad with mango-apple compote and a sauce bright yellow from turmeric. It was invented in 1982 by Olivier Roellinger at Les Maisons de Bricourt in Saint-Méloir-desOndes, France.
We traveled to Australia and the year 2013 for dessert from Dan Hunter at Brae. The presentation included a coronet of candy-like tuille of parsnip on an apple purée along with slices of dehydrating apples, with the dry texture of Styrofoam.
In Situ feels like a new restaurant every time I go, providing a sense of discovery that dovetails with the purpose of a museum. Like a piece of great art, each dish has a unique context and stands on its own. In Situ proves in its own way that food is definitely art.
In Situ,
151 Third St. (in SFMOMA near Mission), San Francisco; (415) 941-6050 or http:// insitu.sfmoma.org. Lunch 11 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Thursday-Tuesday; dinner 5-9 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, and until 8 p.m. Sunday. Michael Bauer is The San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic and editor at large. Email: mbauer@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @michaelbauer1 Instagram: @michaelbauer1