At $225, food needs to dazzle, too
If I rated Eight Tables on the flash factor alone it would clearly garner four stars.
A staff member greets diners outside a metal gate on Vallejo Street and leads them through an old alley to an elevator, where they travel up a flight. Then they enter an entirely different world.
The interior, designed by AvroKO, the company responsible for the four-star Single Thread in Healdsburg, is uplifting and elegant, with light wood-paneled walls, round tables inlaid with brass, and partitions that make each of the eight tables (yes, that’s how many there are in total) feel like a semiprivate room.
Waiters move quietly around the room in beige three-piece Ralph Lauren suits and light blue Hermes ties. Each serving piece that holds the 10 courses on the fixed-price-only menu ($225) is gilded, embossed or otherwise refined.
Eight Tables feels like no other Chinese restaurant I’ve seen.
I was also wowed by the cocktails. Anthony Keels, formerly of Saison, is like a mad scientist creating unique concoctions that artfully capture an Asian sensibility: The lily pond ($20) features Martin Miller gin and “forest” water made by pressing sour grasses, including sorrel and cress, into cucumber water and then clarifying the liquid. When he’s finished combining these ingredients, Keels pours the chilled mixture into white bowls and floats tiny nasturtium leaves that resemble lily pads on top. The flavors are as subtle and complex as the best Cantonese food.
In the milk punch ($20), red tea is blended with milk — but milk that Keels has processed to remove the whey to create a clear liquid that retains a viscous texture. It’s a truly amazing drink, where the eyes and mouth experience two completely different sensations. In the house martini ($20), Keels infuses the vodka with wokcharred rice, which produces a subtle, pleasant aftertaste.
Then there’s the food. You may have noticed how I buried writing about it until after covering the interior and cocktails, which exceed expectations.
It’s easy to be dazzled by the surroundings and details, but simply put, when I separate what’s on the plate from what’s around it, many combinations lack the complexity I expect from a $225 price tag. The wine pairings, which really do help to elevate the experience, add another $125 to the tab.
I’ve eaten the handiwork of Yu Bo, considered one of the best chefs in China, at a banquet here in San Francisco. His food displays complexity in flavor and in presentation that’s missing at Eight Tables. For example, one of Bo’s small bites is a dumpling that he lightly cuts more than 100 times so the dough resembles a porcupine, and he braids long beans into a rope and cuts it into bite-size pieces.
Bo’s banquet took the palate on a roller coaster, which is what I expect from an expensive tasting menu. The three dinners I had at Eight Tables were more like a pleasant drive through the country.
George Chen, who has always been more of a frontof-the house guy at his other restaurants, which include the now-closed Betelnut and Shanghai 1930, is executive chef. To help, he’s hired Robin Lin, a Taiwanese chef who was formerly executive chef of several restaurants in Taiwan and was director of the Taiwan Chefs Association.
Some components came from China Live, the other, more casual restaurant on the ground floor of Chen’s $20 million complex, which includes a bar and retail outlet.
It feels like the chefs are trying to dazzle by putting Osetra caviar on duck skin as part of one course, but it actually illustrates a simplistic and obvious approach to cooking.
While much of the food is good, I would rather be eating downstairs at China Live, where I can get that crackling skin attached to the duck and eat more than one slice of barbecue pork (part of another course).
At Eight Tables, Chen is trying to replicate the experience in the Qing Dynasty (from about 1644 to 1912), where the elite had private chefs and would invite friends to their homes for grand meals. It’s known as si
fang cai and today has become a popular way to dine in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, according to Chen.
The designers have captured the spirit of what Chen calls “private estate dining” in the interior, and even in some food presentations. It’s the execution that seems too simple.
However, I applaud the idea of a four-star Chinese restaurant, an idea that makes sense in San Francisco, which I would argue has more high-end fixed price Western menus than any other city in the country.
The 10-course dinner starts with an impressive presentation of nine small dishes arranged on a square plate, each one holding an essential Chinese flavor: sweet (a stuffed date), sour (chicken roulade in rice wine), spicy (a tiny tart filled with meat and seafood), tingling (fried beef tendons dusted with Sichuan green peppercorns). I loved the idea, but none of the bites was distinctive beyond the character it represented, so each dish seemed one-dimensional.
Next came a Four Seas shrimp dumpling: The top is divided into four compartments, each holding a different component that changes slightly each night. On one night, the dumpling included golden Osetra caviar, poached scallops, salmon roe, uni and pickled apples. The dumpling is too big to eat in one bite, so the staff sets a mother of pearl spoon and knife alongside to help. The process of separating the four compartments left more of an impression than the flavor of the doughy dumpling.
The following course also had multiple elements, arranged in a V with a thin slice of barbecued Iberico pork at the top, a bite-size square of a pork belly sandwich on the left, and a diamond-shape piece of duck skin studded with caviar on the left, with two kinds of fruit in the middle of the V. This felt like a dish made from items that could easily have been cooked downstairs at China Live but was elevated to Eight Tables status through presentation.
A course of consommé with pumpkin vermicelli needed a stronger base stock on two visits; on the third, the soup was what Chen called a “deconstructed” sizzling rice, with a square of fried rice topped with poached lobster and sea grapes, with the broth poured table side. This became the most memorable dish on all my visits because of its confident flavors and textures.
Velvet chicken — the meat is ensconced in a cloud of egg whites — was a miss on all three visits. Instead of having a cloudlike texture it was more like poorly scrambled eggs with a strong hint of sulphur that overpowered even the white and black truffles.
Over the course of three visits, the menu changed only slightly. One of the best dishes at all my meals was black cod set on a pad of lotus root and eggplant and wrapped in a banana leaf. It was one of the few dishes that was both subtle and complex.
The meat course was red dongpo pork. The small square of pork belly was good but not much different from what you might find at less-expensive restaurants.
Next came a foie gras pot sticker, presented next to a sticky ball of black sesame and peanut mochi. Again, once you get past oohing and aahing over the idea of this delicacy in a dumpling, you’re faced with a medicore pot sticker.
To bridge the divide between savory and sweet, the next course was fermented rice sorbet, a refreshing intermezzo leading to a dessert that became a conversation piece because of the combination of flavors: A scoop of sorbet with passion fruit and Chinese seagrass was hidden below a thin wafer that looks like chicharrons flanked by clear bubbles that tasted like mesquite. While interesting, it was a confusing blend of sea, land and fire.
On the last visit, the dessert was replaced by an even less satisfying sago pudding made from a starch of various palm stems. It tasted more like unsweetened squash with a little honey and candied chestnut powder.
One element that stood out over the three visits was the lack of luxury or exotic ingredients that one expects in this price range. On the second and third visits they made up for it, but at a cost: Diners could get an abalone course for $30 extra or Wagyu beef at $60 extra. It seemed that these ingredients should be part of the regular menu; at that point it began to feel like we were being gouged.
Or maybe I was just reacting to the fact that the food, while beautiful and interesting, was not that special once the bells and whistles of the stunning decor and good service were taken out of the equation.
Still, I want Eight Tables to succeed. There’s a place for a Chinese restaurant that competes with the likes of Saison, Benu and Single Thread. But to be among that group, the menu needs to be as refined as its service and decor.