San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Oakland hot spot just keeps getting better
Daytrip takes a clue from its fearless fermentations and spent the past year growing, evolving, surprising
In my first year as a critic, I was tasked with chasing after the most exciting and interesting foods the Bay Area has to offer. Between scouring the region for the Bay Area’s best pizza, sandwiches and other restaurants, it was hard to be a regular anywhere.
Yet Daytrip, the psychedelic hallucination of a restaurant in Oakland, was like a North Star. I kept returning, for its artful, laid-back but fine-dining caliber food; for its expansive, enriching beverage program; and for its general weirdness.
Daytrip has received plenty of adulation, spotlighting its mission to build an equitable place for its workers, its audacious, meticulously curated wine and sake list, and everything in between. But as I returned again and again, I felt like there was something missing from the discussion, and that’s the idea of transformation.
I mean, it’s right there in the restaurant’s penchant for highlighting fermentation. Dishes like fermented fruit vinegars for bread dipping (most recently, a tangy persimmon vinegar) showcase the chemical process of transmuting food with microorganisms over time.
In that way, Daytrip is itself a fizzing jar of fermentation — a place of rebirth and evolution. Over my many visits throughout the year, I’ve been able to witness the restaurant morph into something that’s beautiful to behold. Like a good piece of media — book, film, TV show or music — I think the best way to understand Daytrip is through revisiting it, picking up on nuances and tweaks that improve dishes over time. Some restaurants tend to coast on hits that don’t require further examination, and there’s nothing really wrong with that. But Daytrip is like a living organism.
That’s not to say the restaurant, which married couple chef Finn Stern and Stella Dennig opened in October 2021, doesn’t have hits to play. Some early ones have persisted on the menu: a squat, mushroom-like focaccia ($8) with a crackly crust; a shimmering celery salad ($13) layered with sharp sheep’s cheese, shining acidity and heat; and a momentous miso butter pasta that always takes me into the cosmos.
Though the miso pasta ($29) has earned a long-term spot on the menu, even that’s not fixed. This year it’s shown many faces — sometimes it’s just mild tweaks, other times it’s completely different — as if there were a ripple in time splitting dimensions, producing a multiplicity of one idea. It prominently features far-out misos from fermentation phenom Shared Cultures, like honeynut squash, wild leek or urfa chile. The springy, chewy pasta is then coated in a velvety sauce made of miso and butter, and garnished with kelp pearls and chile flakes, displaying the disruptive dexterity of a Jackson Pollock painting.
My favorite iteration of this multiversal pasta was the sourdough black garlic noodles ($26), pitched by lead line cook Donna Collins. In this dual homage to their Creole heritage and the Bay Area staple, the leavened noodles sparkled with umami and embers of pepper heat — like traversing through a galaxy of flavor.
Those noodles are one of the byproducts of the many systems of collaboration in place at Daytrip, where the team works together to achieve majesty. It’s part of the equitable system that the restaurant has worked to build, paying their employees a liveable wage and considering their efforts in the creative process. Like tending to a ferment, it requires attentive cooperation otherwise it could deteriorate or even explode. This year, that experiment has proved to be working, Stern confirmed; for the first time, the restaurant is starting to break even.
Stern has surrounded himself with many seasoned restaurant veterans, some of whom, like Collins, he admits, have been in kitchens longer than he has. He wants Daytrip to move away from the monarchical genius chef archetype. “It’s just not an environment that I want to hang out in, personally,” he told me by phone. Collins, whose resume included worker collective Cheeseboard, brought better tools for collaborative conversation. Plainly, curiosity is one of the main values Dennig and Stern encourage.
While Daytrip is working to do things differently, there are a few traditional restaurant values, like the focus on glamorous plating. It’s not fussy though; Daytrip’s plating often borders on kitschy and oddball with a healthy dose of charm.
On a recent visit, the nixtamalized yams ($17) rested over acidic clouds of goat cheese, surrounded with a perfect halo of pomegranate-basil reduction. (The nixtamalization, an alkal
ized bath most often used for masa, helped them maintain their exterior shape as well as their custardy smooth interior.) A past dish of jellied tuna and tomato ($16) served in a cocktail glass existed in a nebulous space between avant-garde fine-dining plating and country club chic.
Other dishes defy categorization completely. Ask the waitstaff about the mussels in cider cream ($17), and they’ll tell you it’s best to just experience it. They’re right. This bubbling bowl of mystery is made of aerated cream, plump mussels and cubed bread, all woken up with tart pickled apples and tiny finger lime beads that pop with lime brightness.
Another reason I keep coming back to Daytrip is its snazzy ambiance — fermentation requires just the right vessel, after all. The restaurant’s music blares with intensity; sometimes it’s high energy, bassheavy “Cavern” by Liquid Liquid, other times it’s the sexy, disco-ball vocals of Donna Summer. The main dining room has alluring, light pink walls and a bottle shop full of groovy wine and sake picked by beverage director Jenny Eagleton. (On Tuesdays nights, Daytrip hosts Nite Trip, a drink hang with bites, where Eagleton is in rare form, giddily explaining her new offerings.) A lounge area has a constant projected image of what appears to be iridescent liquid metal. Then there’s the parklet, painted a loud highlighter green, for the al fresco crowd. (Within the last few months, the restaurant opened up its back patio too, which has the same energetic soundtrack as the dining room, but isn’t yet as engaging.)
The most recent endeavor at
Daytrip is a weekend cafe, displaying the talents of pastry chef Aaron Beatty. Stunning pastries like a plushy persimmon chocolate muffin ($5), a more-savory-than-sweet squash and pecorino scone ($5) and a showstopping candy cap mushroom cinnamon roll ($6). This latest effort is the restaurant’s attempt to open up more revenue streams, fully utilizing the space.
That’s the thing about Daytrip: When you think you’ve figured out what it’s about, these crazy kids pivot into uncharted territory. In the coming year, Stern says he wants to include spicier dishes to further challenge its audience as well as add another pasta slot for even funkier versions.
The wild part is that there are ferments and experimentations that have yet to be unjarred, like a promise that change is on the horizon. You just have to wait and see.