Ray Tang is back in the house.
After a two-year hiatus, Tang, the opening chef of the Presidio Social Club in San Francisco, is back at the helm of the picturesque restaurant located in the former Army post-turned national park. Indeed, the long, clapboard building, a short drive from the Laurel Inn, was once the barracks for enlisted men.
It’s always been a laid-back restaurant, where you can rock jeans and a T-shirt just fine. Tang has brought back a lot of familiar dishes from when he was first chef there, including crabcake sliders ($12) and island-style ahi poke ($11). He’s also re-instituted the Sunday pig roast, where he cooks a whole pig in a “Caja China” wooden box. A plate of roast pork with fixings is $20 those nights.
Tang also added a Monday night clambake through the summer, where $32 will get you a feast of lobster, clams and mussels, along with potatoes, corn on the cob and dessert. What’s more, Presidio Social Club is now an all-day restaurant, meaning you can walk in anytime from lunch-time to closing to get a meal without being turned away if you’re starving at, say, 3 p.m., when most other places would close the kitchen between shifts.
I was invited to dine as a guest at dinner recently to check out the new menu. We ordered a few dishes, and the kitchen brought out even more to make sure we tried enough items.
First to arrive was a sampler of three of the day’s antipasti ($10), which included corn kernels spiked with a little chile, an assortment of tender-crisp summer beans, and lovely roasted carrots drizzled with pesto, which made me think I’ve got to replicate this at home with my backyard basil.
Next, those adorable crab cake sliders ($12). With a topping of aioli and tangy slaw on soft, airy tiny buns, they almost had an Asian flair to them.
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