San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Bay Area restaurant redef
Oakland’s Pomet is a true collaboration between a chef and a farmer
One thing I love about the Bay Area is that there’s a restaurant practically designed for fruit nerds, the sort of people who get flushed at the thought of the Lucy Glo apple’s rosy flesh and know that the best loquats are sold out of a car trunk in Chinatown. For the fruit nerd, seasonal fruit is as much of a temporal organizing principle as Nike drops are for sneakerheads.
The restaurant Pomet opened in Oakland in March. Inside, visions of plenitude are everywhere: Whole peeled hachiya persimmons hang down a wall like holiday lights, little cakes are crowned with flower petals and plum segments, and fat pomegranates and cherries sit at the counter like an offering to someone’s ancestors.
Many San Francisco farmers’ market shoppers will recognize owner Aomboon Deasy, who is also the secondgeneration owner of K&J Orchards. Few have done so much to advance the mass veneration of fruit in the Bay Area as K&J Orchards, with Deasy known for her ebullient presence at the K&J tent outside the Ferry Building, organizing the flats of pristine fruits reserved by the city’s best restaurants while slicing gorgeous pieces of figs, Asian pears and peaches to sample out to the lingering crowd.
In the Bay Area, the Californian restaurant with a seasonal menu is a given, but it’s a rare treat to see the kind of direct farm-restaurant collaboration modeled by Quince, SingleThread and their contemporaries outside of the realm of fine dining. Restaurants can struggle to make their connections to farms clear without annoying diners with too much preciousness; often, that means you’ll simply see the names of those farms on the back of the menu, like a culinary credits roll.
But at Pomet, where its tie to K&J is a key part of its lore, the obvious relationship is a part of its charm. On the narrative front, servers could describe the trees producing the peaches I was eating, down to the hues of the flowers they sprang from. Diners are already begging the servers for fruits to take home, their appetites inflamed by the ferments, purees and cleanly cut wedges highlighted in many of the dishes.
To put together the menu, chef Alan Hsu and the team have taken ample advantage of K&J’s peak produce, spinning
blemished fruits and vegetables into intense kimchis and butters. They’ve also foraged in the neighborhood (with permission) for pineapple guavas, miner’s lettuce and passion fruit, and forged even closer connections to K&J’s agricultural peers in the Bay Area.
While the restaurant presents itself as a typical place for California cuisine, it differentiates itself by not presuming a Mediterranean starting point. Instead, local produce is hit with Asian cooking techniques and ingredients — think Japanese koji, black garlic, Hodo soy milk, Thai basil and perilla leaves. That’s not entirely new for restaurants here, thanks to groundbreaking institutions like Mister Jiu’s and Benu, Hsu’s former workplace, but it’s rare to see this rigorous CaliforniaAsian American approach at a neighborhood restaurant. There’s a quiet mission here, if you read between the lines.
That said, during my first visit to the restaurant, the execution of the food felt uneven, with seasoning inconsistencies that made some dishes, like a Cantonese-style saltand-pepper quail ($19), nearly inedible. But several months later, the team has clearly found its rhythm. And the appeal of following the restaurant through the seasons makes every subsequent visit exciting and fresh.
Still, from the beginning, pastry and bread chef Sarah J. Cooper’s desserts have been a highlight of the menu. In the winter, she folded tart satsuma mandarin juice into showstopping creamsicle pies ($12), finishing them with fluffy dollops of meringue charred with fruit wood embers. In her hands, bruised fruits were reincarnated as delicate mounds of shaved ice and cheesecakes dripping with jam.
On the current menu, she tucks crisp, raw Bartlett pears and pastry cream into éclairs, loading the tops with hazelnut praline. She lets the natural, lower-pitched sweetness of the
pears dominate here. In Cooper’s hands, the classic French dessert feels deluxe and fun in the way that gold flake-crusted treats try to be.
Of course there’s a crudo ($18), because everyone has crudo now — but Hsu’s takes are strong entries in a sometimes tired subgenre. In the spring, there was trout and its roe, the richness interrupted by a citrus vinaigrette and the season’s first yellow peaches. In the late fall, it’s a superb treatment of seared Fort Bragg rockfish complemented by mouthwatering slices of the farm’s Niitaka pears. The rockfish carcasses are preserved by smoke and left to dry, destined for stock; the sight of them stacked in a windowsill feels like something you’d see in a fishing village.
Rusticity in presentation borders on the delightfully macabre in other meat dishes as well. The Stemple Creek short rib dish ($45) isn’t just a disembodied rectangle of tender meat: the gentle curve of a cleaned rib bone and a chewy string of cartilage remind you of the animal it came from. Pureed koji rice and Chinese fermented black beans contribute saltiness and a faintly alcoholic undertone. The fried quail, which was perfectly seasoned the more recent time I tried it, is always plated with the bird’s taloned foot sticking straight up in a classic “come hither” pose.
Whenever I visit a restaurant for review, I try to order differently from how I did before, but I could never resist the mushroom pasta ($23), with house-made dough filled with a liquified puree of “ugly” fungi that bursts in the mouth. It’s been a constant on the menu since the beginning, though the type of Shared Cultures miso folded into its luxuriantly creamy butter sauce has changed: honeynut squash in the winter, corn in the summer and tomato now.
Order the soft sesame and scallion bun ($6) to go along with this. The accompanying butter is infused with the nutty
and saline flavors of toasted nori, and the combination blends together so elegantly as you swipe pieces of buttered bread through the pasta sauce.
“Being able to highlight the produce from the farm has been amazing,” Deasy told me recently. You’ll see her walking the floor most nights, greeting regulars, delivering woolen blankets to chilly outdoor diners and running dishes to tables. Even after eight months, personally presenting a dish that features something from her farm still gets to her. “When it’s something that I have grown, it feels special. To see our pears presented so beautifully in a dish — it’s a great symbiotic relationship.”
Deasy admitted that when she was a child, she felt ashamed to have come from a farming family. But now, at this place where the connection between her family’s backbreaking labor and the diner is made explicitly and dramatically clear, she can affirm her pride in what they do.
Whenever you dine at Pomet, your check arrives with a small dish of cut fruit. It’s a practice reminiscent of both the juicy navel orange segments you’d get at a Chinese American restaurant and the pieces Deasy hands out at farmers’ markets. It’s a tender gesture — and an irresistible advertisement, as it turns out. For two weeks in July, postmeal strawberry peaches — a hard-to-find variety of stone fruit — inspired numerous diners to flag their servers and ask where they could buy them.
“One customer was like, I’ll buy them from you right now,” Deasy recalled. “We sold six peaches to her at the restaurant!”
Would it be so outrageous to head to a restaurant just for a taste of a single peach varietal? At Pomet, you’d at least be among friends doing the same.