San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Californios achieves a grand vision
Provocative Latin American fine dining shines in new SoMa space
There are very few tasting menu restaurants that make food that I crave even weeks after the meal. I’m talking about breakout dishes like the slowpoached egg yolk in allium puree at Commis in Oakland and a sticky, airdried kiwi at the departed Restaurant at Meadowood — the devilish stuff that has you calculating how much you’d be willing to pay just to have another taste.
After eating at Californios in San Francisco, I’ve mentally retraced the pliant chew of the restaurant’s sourdough flour tortilla taco numerous times, allowing it to circulate through my thoughts like a stray melodic fragment of a pop song. Soft like a makeup pad, with the subtle tang of Indian naan, the tortilla is just one in the parade of exceptional dishes you get at the restaurant. It’s also emblematic of the restaurant’s mission to give Mexican cuisine its due. Freshly ensconced in a bigger location in SoMa, Californios is on the way to becoming an even more distinctive and immersive experience of Latin American fine dining. Chef and owner Val Cantu, whose parents ran a Mexican restaurant and tortilleria in central Texas, gained plenty of acclaim for his cuisine at the first location of Californios in the Mission District. My predecessor, Michael Bauer, ranked it among the city’s finest dining restaurants. During my own visit there, I found a bold statement — a demand to see the full spectrum of Mexican American cuisine.
The new location, inside the warehousesize spot that formerly housed Bar Agricole, accentuates the sense of theatricality that imbued the original. Its seating capacity has doubled, and when the interior, designed by maitre’d and owner Carolyn Cantu, is finished, the team hopes to bring in about 50 diners a night. I can’t help but think of the restaurant like a hermit crab, slowly nestling into bigger and bigger shells as it grows.
As you walk into the restaurant from its entrance on 11th Street, your first steps take you through a sloped passageway of black walls and creamcolor candles. I did not get to eat inside, as the space was still under construction, but the enclosed patio, painted black and decorated with shade plants and pink hydrangeas, is a comfortable oasis in itself.
The food is just as confident as it was in the past. A meal for two at Californios costs $695.27, including tax and gratuity. You might walk over to your local corner store to verify that a pack of 20 tortillas is indeed less than $3; if that fact absolutely sizzles your spirit, you are more than welcome to stop reading at this point.
But those interested in provocation will find delight in Californios’ two tacos, a street food that looks like it’s literally been put on a sleek black pedestal here. Tortillas come filled with juicy slabs of rockfish or pink slices of squab breast; the tacos are then laid on custommade ceramic plates shaped for optimal tortillagrabbing.
Though conventionally diners pay extra to have only the most pristine, composed morsels at a tasting menu restaurant, Californios offers these courses with a buildyourown element. Small dishes of emulsified salsa verde, key lime “cheeks,” limepickled onions and thick slices of fermented carrot accompany the courses as garnishes. The servers do suggest one way of using them, but you’re welcome to go nuts and load up if you want. A beverage pairing of Temescal Brewery’s Mexicanstyle lager makes the vibe even more relaxed.
When I spoke with Cantu for this review, he mentioned that it was difficult to sell a fine dining take on Mexican cuisine. “It just challenges people. They think of cuisine as living in a book, in these 10 recipes that they know from every other Mexican restaurant,” he said. “Mexican cuisine is a living cuisine: changing constantly, and it’s the same here.” The taco courses come off like a thumb on the nose toward that mentality — an argument for the possibility that Mexican ways of eating should have a home at every level of cuisine.
This is fine dining at its peak. You still get the menu in a half pagesize program, chockfull of notes about the provenance of the many corn varietals in the kitchen and the way Montezuma liked his chocolate. The wine list, guided by beverage directorowner Charlotte Randolph, is
available via QR code or a physical copy. Every dinner begins with several spreads of onebite dishes. My visits, in the early summer, reflected the season in its ingredients, along with homegrown garnishes like oxalis and nasturtium.
Service, too, reflects fine dining norms. Dishes come out at an even pace, so you’re not left waiting long after you clean each plate; the expediter in the kitchen has a camera trained on the dining room for that express purpose.
And the rest of the menu uses traditionally haute presentations for familiar flavors. Golden orbs cut from just barely ripe local peaches get the streetfood treatment with sour dabs of chamoy and chilhuacle pepper, much like the flaredcut mangoes you can buy outside of churches in the Mission District. A deboned and confited chicken wing, glazed with a sauce of smoky chile morita and celery, tasted like a Buffalo chicken wing reflected in a funhouse mirror.
There’s also caviar, a ubiquitous item on tasting menus that here is in a dish that recalls techniques used in the Yucatan. A quenelle of buttery golden osetra caviar from Tsar Nicoulai sat atop a piece of grilled banana — about the size of the first piece you might break off into a bowl of granola. The aroma of grilled fruit and briny caviar brought to mind the banana leaf barbecue used for dishes like cochinita pibil.
Not everything will be immediately recognizable; some dishes are specific shoutouts to Mexican regional cooking, something the Bay Area lacks compared to other regions of the country. The infladita, from Veracruz, is a balloon of black masa that’s rolled out thinly, then fried until it puffs like a pani puri. It’s topped with gently charred sea urchin roe and bursts open with a guajillo chile atole, a corn flourbased drink, when you pop it into your mouth. The kitchen also manipulates masa into a delicate rendition of Guerrero’s chilapita, which is treated like a tart shell for smoked sturgeon mousse. A moist, thimblesize arepa, served wrapped in a scarf of squash blossom, departs from the Mexican theme but stands as an indulgent nod to his Venezuelan mother’s cooking.
As I mulled over my meals here, I thought that I had the restaurant figured out: Nostalgia was what guided its menu. I assumed, for instance, that the chocolate and cherry dessert bar named after Bubulubu, the ubiquitous Mexican candy, was an exercise in nostalgic fancy.
But Cantu told me that the association with the candy came after pastry chef Sophie Hau presented her idea for a new dessert dish using tonka beans and peakseason cherries. Much like the way a Rorschach test is said to reveal a person’s inner mind, the dessert looked like a classic Mexican candy bar to the people at Californios. What I thought was nostalgia was actually a matter of assumption — of reframing whose eyes diners were supposed to be seeing through. The restaurant asks, what if we take a Latin American perspective as our baseline, and interpret our ingredients based on that?
In that regard, Californios’ wholehearted embrace of its concept is palpable with each bite that comes out of its kitchen. I don’t sense any hesitation or selfconsciousness about its mission to get diners to see Latin American food in new ways — with no defensive parenthetical explanations to be found on the menu.
The big question a critic must always answer in reviews of fine dining restaurants is whether it’s worth the money. I have no qualms about recommending Californios, both for the singular experience of its 17course tasting menu and its topnotch but personable service style. The restaurant is a place where the flavors of Latin American food are the compass that guides the fine dining aesthetic; where the conventions of French technique are used in service of making arepas and chilapitas extra delicious. You’re not going to get that just anywhere.