Presidio’s Dixie whistling a little off tune
Dixie is an ambitious restaurant that still seems to be searching for an identity.
It starts with the name. It sounds like a place for Southern comfort food, but Joseph Humphrey, who was the chef of Meadowood and Murray Circle before taking over this space in the Presidio, doesn’t really do comfort food.
His version of chicken and dumplings ($24) features a beautifully cooked breast napped in a rich sauce, a gooey square of confit thigh and a half dozen ricottafilled balls of pasta. It’s high-style food, but if you’re longing for the classic version, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
The riffs on California and Southern cuisine don’t jibe with the decor. Dixie takes over the Pres a Vi location, which was empty for two years after that restaurant closed. As Pres a Vi, the space was slick and modern, yet cavernous and awkward. Humphrey and his partner, Khalid Lahlou, have made modest changes to warm up the interior and to enclose the kitchen.
Still, the 110-seat interior and 40-seat bar look impersonal and a bit corporate, saved by the 40-seat patio that affords views of the green space outside the Letterman Digital Arts Center, a lacy network of treetops and the Palace of Fine Arts beyond.
The service can be as impersonal as the decor. When we called for a reservation after we couldn’t get one online, we talked to a man who acted as if he would rather not be answering the telephone. He said the restaurant was full but that we could take our chances at the bar.
Fair enough. If it’s full, it’s full. But during the two hours it took to finish our dinner during that first visit, the restaurant was never full, so it was perplexing that we couldn’t get a reservation.
The reservationist also hadn’t been helpful about parking. When we had asked about it, his response was, “You can park anywhere you like.” When we pressed about whether there was a lot, he blew us off with, “We aren’t responsible for parking.”
It turns out there is a parking garage, and a $6 charge at night, but it’s hard to find on your initial visit. In fact, one of Dixie’s biggest challenges is its hidden location. After parking, you have to walk up a back stairway into a lobby, and you still don’t know exactly where to go.
Once in the restaurant, it doesn’t get much easier because the host stand is in the middle, on the other side of a vast sea of bar seats.
It’s not the best way to start, so Humphrey has some work to do to turn the experience around. The deviled eggs ($7) just might do it. On the top of each creamy yolk, generously dusted with a fine grating of fresh horseradish, is a fried nugget of chicken liver. The tang of the yolk, the mild buzz of horseradish and the creamy meat made an irresistible combination.
Several other items, however, were a letdown. The pea salad ($14) came to the table looking as if it had none of the star ingredient. The hard, end-of-the-season pellets were buried under a mountain of foam, slices of cured salmon and a shaving of bonito. Maybe if the peas had been good, the salad would have worked, but it felt as if none of the ingredients complemented one another.
The halibut ($23) had the texture of baby food, accented with sassafras, sugar snap peas, a bit of orange and fennel, and sea urchin remoulade. It was an interesting combination that would have been good if not for the fish.
The kitchen redeems itself with the fried quail ($15) with changing accompaniments; an equally good king trumpet mushroom salad ($13) with andouille sausage, pecans, Parmesan and cocoa nibs; and roast rabbit ($23) wrapped in bacon and set on a pool of thick pureed smoked dates that strong-armed the meat.
Humphrey’s abundant talent never came into focus for me until my third visit, when I ordered the tasting menu ($72 for five courses plus a few extras; wine pairings additional $54).
Line drawings of the main ingredients are printed on a brown sheet. For the first course, it was sketches of abalone, yams and avocado. The dish turned out to be a rich saute of seafood in a butter lettuce cup set over sauced chunks of avocado and cucumber.
I was curious when I saw a couple walk out of the kitchen with suckers in their mouths, but after our next course I realized it was all part of the tasting menu. Diners are led back to the newly
enclosed kitchen, where plates of paper-thin slices of Virginia ham and glasses of Amontillado sherry are set up on a bar overlooking a glass-fronted cooler. After this saltysweet reprieve, the chef brought the second course on the menu: acorn grits with a poached egg and very thin coins of sea urchin. It was a flawless blending of rustic and refined, of familiar and exotic — a thoroughly modern dish with a classic sensibility.
The waiter then gave us each a frozen citrus-sassafras lollipop and sent us back to the dining room for the remaining courses: fried quail with morels soaked in bourbon encircled by parsley oil; and lamb medallions sprinkled with coffee salt and accented with endive, roasted radishes, a foamy cafe au lait sauce and pesto made with the radish tops. Dessert was a banana souffle with rum ice cream. It was an innovative and nearly flawless meal.
While in the kitchen we got a chance to talk to Humphrey, and I discovered he is a Southern boy who has now spent half his life cooking in the Bay Area. He explained that since this is his first restaurant, he wanted to combine these two influences.
All of a sudden, his menu began to make sense. But that personal statement isn’t evident enough in the service or the decor. While the service improved on each visit, the experience has yet to support the chef’s vision.