Roll into Rollati in downtown San Jose, the newest restaurant from Chef Roland Passot’s Vine Hospitality.
That’s just what I did a couple weeks ago, when I was invited in as a guest to this handsome, bright, and spacious restaurant on the ground floor of the Miro luxury apartment building.
The first Italian-American restaurant from Passot and Vine CEO Obadiah Ostergard, it features both indoor and outdoor dining, plus a small marketplace to buy pantry staples and prepared foods to-go.
If you’re lucky, you might just hit it on a night where there’s a trio of musicians playing in the bar-lounge, too.
The bar.Live music in the lounge.
Ostergard’s nephew, Chef Sam Gimlewicz, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who went on to work at the acclaimed Nina June restaurant in Maine, designed the menu that’s overseen by Chef de Cuisine Christian Luxton, formerly of Berkeley’s Hotel Shattuck Plaza.
If you’ve been wanting to experience a mesmerizing infinity room, you don’t have to trek to a museum. Just head to dinner at San Francisco’s new hot spot restaurant Chotto Matte that opened in October.
Step inside the first floor entrance of what used to be Macy’s Men’s Store and be greeted by floor-to-ceiling glossy walls that reflect colorful pendants hanging from the ceiling, making them appear as if they go on forever.
The entrance, where you’ll find the elevator to take you to the rooftop restaurant.The host stand at the restaurant.
Just exercise caution after taking the elevator up to the restaurant, though, as the same black polished walls are used in the unisex bathrooms, creating such an entrancing effect that my husband, as well as the person walking in behind him, nearly walked into a wall.
Chotto Matte is definitely flash and panache, a fun-house dining experience.
Grilled mackerel with pickled mustard seeds and honey-preserved ramps at Yokai.
Chef Marc Zimmerman was majoring in music engineering in college in Indiana before he decided to scrap that for a career in cooking instead.
Now, however, he’s managed to combine both those passions into one: Yokai, his second San Francisco restaurant, which opened in September, just four blocks away from Gozu, his first that debuted in 2019.
Located in the SOMA neighborhood, Yokai is named for the Japanese word for “ghosts or spirits,” which is appropriate given its extensive bar program that spotlights Japanese and American spirits.
At the host stand.
The music emphasis is apparent right when you step inside to find the host stand outfitted with two turntables and shelves of vinyl records. You can’t miss the large speakers behind the bar, too. But the music, while lively, is not intrusive, as I found when I dined as a guest of the restaurant last week, when jazz was very much the music of choice on that weeknight.
The unexpected truffle pasta dish on the kaiseki menu at N/Naka.
Since learning of it from the first season of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table” in 2015, I have been fascinated by the Los Angeles restaurant, N/Naka.
This Michelin two-starred restaurant opened in 2011 to serve kaiseki, the elegant, multi-course Japanese meal spotlighting ingredients at their seasonal peak in a series of specific cooking techniques.
Back then, it was a type of cuisine that was a rarity in the United States. And even more so when it was crafted by a woman, Chef-Owner Niki Nakayama and her wife, Sous Chef Carole Iida-Nakayama, who dared to put their own thrilling contemporary touches on this classic Japanese haute cuisine.
At all of 26 seats, this restaurant is notoriously difficult to book. While I travel to Los Angeles maybe once a year, I’d never managed to plan the trip in advance enough to even try to snag a table there.
Until two weeks ago. That’s when the stars aligned and Lady Luck was on my side, giving me entree to a dining experience that was nothing short of singularly magical.
You see, N/Naka opens its online reservation bookings once a week at 10 a.m. on Sunday for tables a month later. But sign on right at that second, and you’ll likely find all the reservations gone already and your dreams vanquished — just like that.
After experiencing that disappointment a few times, I started searching online for reservation tips. I came upon a thread that advised staying on the booking site for at least an hour after reservations open, because people will click on a specific reservation that gives a 10-minute window to finalize, only to decide they don’t want it after all. The thread also mentioned that tables of 4 or 6 were easier to come by than for 2.
The unassuming, unmarked entrance of this Michelin two-starred restaurant.
So, for more than half an hour, I kept refreshing the page again and again, growing more apprehensive by the minute. A 9 p.m. reservation for 6 people popped up, tempting me to claim it as I figured I could somehow rope a few more people into trekking to Los Angeles with my husband and me. But I hate dining that late, especially for a tasting menu that lasts 3 hours. So, I bit my tongue, and passed on it, wondering if I had just made a huge mistake.
Grilled chicken in a flavorful marinade gets served with addictive aji sauce.
There’s no denying that Danny Trejo is a big, big presence on the screen.
So, it’s no surprise then that when it comes to cooking, he’s all about flavors as punchy and gutsy as they get.
In the ultimate transformative story, the former drug addict and criminal became not only a Hollywood star, but maverick entrepreneur who launched a record label, as well as five Los Angeles locations of his Trejo’s Tacos, plus his Trejo’s Coffee & Donuts shop, and Trejo’s Cerveza Mexican-style beer.
This year, he also debuted “Trejo’s Cantina” (Clarkson Potter), of which I received a review copy, which is his second cookbook.
While his first cookbook, “Trejo’s Tacos” (Clarkson Potter, 2020), focused on recipes from his restaurants, this one, he writes, is centered on Mexican classics as seen through the lens of Los Angeles.
