San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Like a wrecking ball
A bold, new East Bay restaurant shatters expectations.
Top Hatters Kitchen and Bar is really damn cool. But that’s not the most helpful superlative, since “cool” as a concept is so tough to pin down.
I realized this as I sat in the dining room, where everything is dark blue, from the tile under the bar to the walls, with light wood accents. My dining companion and I had taken BART to get here and had to take a cab ride to the restaurant, which is in a firmly residential neighborhood 2 miles from the San Leandro station. On the way, we marveled at the Los Angelesstyle houses, with pretty front yards (“Can you believe that?!”) and little in the way of foot traffic. We urban folks (and I’m including transplants here) have a tendency to look down our noses at places like San Leandro, thinking that culture rarely sprouts up there with the kind of spontaneity and freshness that we associate with larger cities, but Top Hatters proves that we would be robbing ourselves of many wonderful experiences if we keep on thinking that way.
In a way, the distance is refreshing: Far from the pressures of having to keep up with the Joneses in the city, Top Hatters has taken the best of what diners enjoy about modern California restaurants, from San Francisco to Santa Monica, and developed those things into a distinct sensibility of its own.
The menu’s CalVietnamese dishes are so much like the new wave of Asian American cooking you’d find in Los Angeles: less tortured updates on the classics, more channeling of the ephemera of Vietnamese American cuisine in novel forms. In an interview with Berkeleyside, Top Hatters chefowner DanVy Vu admitted to a love of mixing fish sauce into her spaghetti, marrying the briny umami of anchovies with the acid of tomatoes. You do that when you understand ingredients like those intimately — not as bits of flair to tack on or “make nice,” but as complementary parts of a whole. Now that’s cool.
From my seat near the kitchen window, I looked up and noticed — what else? — a bookshelf and saw books that I’d expect to see at chefdude establishments like Angler or Sons and Daughters: “Sea and Smoke: Flavors From the Untamed Pacific Northwest,” “The Noma Guide to Fermentation,” “The Art of Simple Food” and “A Great American Cook,” for starters. They speak to a seriousness about food and cooking that seems so basic as to be a restaurant licensing requirement in the Bay Area. You can see the restaurant’s focus on ingredient provenance in its highly seasonal a la carte menu, and in little touches like the gorgeous bread, sourced from San Leandro’s womanowned As Kneaded Bakery.
Though, like I said, it’s not too cool for school over at Top Hatters. The servers are the Marge Simpson kind of nice who speak to you in gentle purrs, patiently explaining “shiso” and “pork cotton” to newcomers. There’s no shade to be found here. And, in a very corny but sweet move, all of the house cocktails are named after hats as a nod to the building’s past life as a hat shop. It makes ordering a cocktail simple — pick your favorite hat! I’m partial to the sombrero ahumado ($13), a sour mezcal and absinthe concoction that pairs well with Southeast Asian flavors.
Vu, who runs the restaurant with husband Matthew Beavers, has applied a distinctly cosmopolitan sensibility to this suburban street corner. The couple, who have lived in the area for more than a decade, have faith in their audience. You can tell from what Vu has put on the dinner menu: a deeply savory and sticky hunk of oxtail served on grits and brightened with orange gremolata ($32), “tissue bread” (also known as roti) with pickled fennel ($9) and even Vietnamese drip coffee thickened with egg custard, a rendition first made famous at cafes in Hanoi.
Vu previously ran a food truck named Go Streatery and a doughnut stand by the
name of Girl Friday Zeppole. The doughnuts upon which Vu made her reputation are present here in both savory and sweet forms. I prefer the savory, which remind me of hush puppies, but the sweet lemon ricotta doughnuts (six pingpong ballsize balls for $6) are charming as well.
The menu is accessible at various price points as well. You and a buddy could get away with ordering a shared salad and entree for around $45 total, or grab a bunch of things for around $75.
My favorite dish of the lot, which you should absolutely get, is the seared rice cake ($10, or $12 with softboiled egg), a disc of glutinous rice crisped up like the best part of bibimbap and garlanded with slices of Chinese pork sausage, dried shrimp, shaved fennel and wisps of pork cotton (or floss) made by Vu’s mom. It smells just like the sticky rice my own mom would whip up in our rice cooker on weekends when I was a kid, with a sunnysideup egg being my loweffort contribution to the project. Vu’s version might smell the same, but it’s way more elegant.
The restaurant has few direct competitors — the closest business is an autorepair shop — so, to be honest, it doesn’t have to be this good. Crowdpleasing restaurants like Paradiso do well in San Leandro, but here is something totally different.
Take a recent weekday special: a whole, panseared branzino ($45 or $60, depending on size) flavored with lemon caper butter sauce and a heavy handful of roasted corn kernels. Yes, corn! I hate to say that after years of whipping up that classic butter sauce for sauteed sweetbreads during my own cooking days, I never thought to pair the rich sauce with corn, but it makes so much sense to amplify the sweetness of branzino flesh with a flavor that really showcases the best of summer. A bite of fish with all of those components tastes the way a beam of sunlight can warm a tiny patch of the ocean. Served on a bed of longgrain rice mixed with fried shallots, the fish felt like enough for three people. Deboning the thing yourself can be challenging, since the plate doesn’t have any spare room, but Vu was quick to run over with a tray to catch the bones.
If there was anything disappointing about my meals at Top Hatters, it was the cauliflower and henofthewoods mushroom entree ($15, or $17 with egg), which could have used more seasoning to make it more than just hot vegetables on a plate. Served nestlike with shards of julienned and fried shallot sticking out here and there, it’s a beautiful dish, especially if you get the softboiled egg, which lives smackdab in the middle. The mushrooms just needed more salt and uninterrupted cooking time to develop their flavor — luckily, that’s an easy enough fix.
I also anticipate that the prices and portion sizes, which are fair by San Francisco standards, might make locals used to getting more beef for their buck break out into cold sweats. That’s a perception challenge that Vu is going to have to confront, but for a restaurant this good, it’s a battle worth fighting.
All in all, it seems like Top Hatters’ gamble paid off. On all my visits, the restaurant was busy with locals, who seemed to respond to its level of service and aesthetics. It’s great to see an original spot like this received well by its community. I hope we see more ambitious and genredefying concepts emerge outside of city centers, not only because of how much more affordable such spaces can be, but because folks who live in those places deserve to have cool things, too.
By the end of my review visits, I was already pulling up Trulia to look for housing around there. I can’t say I’m not tempted.