Category Archives: Chefs

San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton Goes From Staid to Hip with Parallel 37

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Kampachi sashimi at Parallel 37. One of the prettiest dishes you'll ever eat at a bar.

It used to be a place you’d never venture on a whim.

No, the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, high atop San Francisco’s blue-blood Nob Hill, was reserved for special times, when you got dressed to the nines to celebrate a planned, lofty occasion.

Those times have changed — dramatically.

The prim-and-proper Dining Room, the last of those concept restaurants at any Ritz-Carlton, finally was bid adieu late last year. In its place, the swank Parallel 37 opened, named appropriately enough for the geographic latitude running near the Bay Area.

With cocoa banquettes, bare tables and a focal point wall aglow with the image of a backlit oak forest, the new restaurant has gotten a fresh, contemporary makeover. It has a much larger bar, too, complete with two flat-screens, something unthinkable before. And parking for the restaurant has been dropped to a reasonable flat-rate of $10 to lure more folks to drop in on a regular basis.

Chef Ron Siegel at the bar of Parallel 37, the restaurant formerly known as the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton.

Amid this whirlwind of change, one constant has remained, thankfully. Executive Chef Ron Siegel, who has been at the helm since 2004, is still in charge.

“I like the new look,” he says of the transformation of his restaurant. “The other was a little stuffy. People in San Francisco love to eat out and to them, this has the right feel now. I like the energy it has.”

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Chef Mourad Lahlou’s Prawn-Kumquat Skewers

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How pretty are these shrimp-kumquat skewers? And they taste even better than they look.

If ever food on a stick could be drop-dead glam, this would be it.

I practically felt like lighting candles and artfully arranging silk pillows all over the floor to set the proper mood to enjoy them with.

“Prawn-Kumquat Skewers” will do that to you.

The irony is they couldn’t be easier to make, yet they look as if some fancy restaurant made them for a fortune.

The recipe is from the new cookbook, “Mourad: New Moroccan” Artisan) by Mourad Lahlou, chef-proprietor of the magical Aziza in San Francisco, the only Moroccan restaurant in North America to boast a Michelin star.

Born in Marrakesh, Lahlou left his native land at age 17 to study economics at my old alma mater, San Francisco State University. But the flavors of his homeland beckoned him into the kitchen and it wasn’t long before he was running his own restaurant, Aziza.

Over the years, the food there has morphed from traditional to astoundingly progressive, with flavors that are hauntingly true and clear.

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Parcel 104 Marks a Decade of Deliciousness

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California white sea bass shines at Parcel 104, known for its use of local, sustainable ingredients.

It’s a restaurant named for the original lot number for the Bartlett pear orchard that once thrived there.

It’s only open weekdays for lunch and dinner, not weekends, owing to the fact that it’s in a hotel that caters to the business crowd.

And that crowd is often prominently male, given all the tech companies nearby.

Parcel 104 in the Marriott Hotel in Santa Clara has always been one of my favorite places in the South Bay for its farm-to-table fare served in a warm, inviting, contemporary environment. As a journalist, I’ve also been partial to it as an ideal place to conduct lunch interviews, because you can actually hold a clear conversation with someone without the usual din found at so many of today’s trendoid spots.

The golden glow of the dining room.

I’ve dined at the restaurant many times over the years. On my most recent visit a couple of weeks ago, in which I was invited to dine as a guest, I was happy to find that the restaurant is still going strong after marking a decade last year.

A number of the staff have been at the restaurant since Day One, always a good sign that it’s not only a good place to work, but one that knows what it’s doing.

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San Jose’s Oryza Bistro Already Has a No. 1 (Football) Fan

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The Vietnamese classic of Shaking beef at the new Oryza Bistro.

San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis definitely knows his way around a football field.

But these days, he’s also happily finding his bearings around the menu at his apparently new favorite restaurant — the just-opened Oryza Bistro at the Westfield Valley Fair shopping center in San Jose.

The pan-Asian restaurant, on the ground floor behind the parking structure between the two Macy’s stores, is barely three weeks old. But No. 85 has already eaten there at least three times. The brawny 6-foot-3-inch, 250-pound athlete is partial to the dainty string beans amandine (with toasted almonds, charred cherry tomatoes, soy sauce and shrimp paste; $8.95), which he tweeted excitedly about.

I learned of his fondness for the restaurant from a mention made in the Tablehopper e-newsletter. So, when I was invited to dine as a guest of the restaurant last week, I had my eyes on the alert. As luck would have it, he walked in with a female companion as my husband and I were finishing our dinner. The waitstaff greeted him like an old friend as he took a seat in a booth.

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Braving the Line at Flour + Water, Plus a Sneak Peek of What’s to Come

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A parfait of quince, crema and crunchy walnut crumbles at Flour + Water.

Practically from the first day it opened nearly three years ago, San Francisco’s Flour + Water restaurant has had droves of people lining up nightly to get inside.

Who can resist blistered Margherita pizzas and hand-made pork raviolini with chanterelles and thyme?

Not me, as I joined the throngs in line on this Mission District corner on a recent blustery evening to snag a seat at the bar on my own dime.

After all, it sure beat trying to drive home to the South Bay at the height of the rush-hour commute on a Friday night.

Instead of fighting highway traffic, I parked myself on a bar stool right next to the kitchen. It afforded a bird’s eye view of the cooks stretching pizza dough and assembling pasta dishes all under the scrutiny of a very judicious expediter, who took tweezers to plates to arrange microgreens just so before they were delivered to the dining room with his approval.

The view of the kitchen from my bar stool.

As I perused the menu, I knew I was going to order pasta. After all, I can’t pass up supple noodles of any sort, but especially ones made every day by hand in the restaurant’s famous upstairs “dough room,” which I got to see on an earlier visit.

In the "dough room'' with Chef Thomas McNaughton (right).

Just-made filled pasta dumplings.

Bow ties with bursts of bright color.

I started with a salad of cured steelhead trout ($12) that was a definite spot of brightness on that chilly, dark night. Roasted beets added sweetness, fresh horseradish a hit of fire and paper-thin slices of Persian lime bursts of citrusy refreshment.

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