Category Archives: Restaurants

Sneak Peek: Mayfield Bakery & Cafe

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Flaky, buttery croissants at the new Mayfield Bakery & Cafe.

When restaurateur Tim Stannard was just a kid and his father a professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, he remembers riding his bike through the campus and across El Camino Real to buy candy bars at the drugstore that once stood on this spot.

Now, Stannard and his Bacchus Management Group have transformed that icon of his childhood into his newest restaurant venture, Mayfield Bakery & Cafe.

It opens for dinner on Monday, Feb. 9, and will add lunch, breakfast, and brunch service in the weeks to come. I got a sneak peek on Saturday night of the newest restaurant to open in the Palo Alto Town & Country Village, which will serve up wood-fired American cuisine.

Mini versions of the restaurant's Niman Ranch chuck burgers with fried onions and remoulade were served at Saturday's invitation-only, opening party.

On the opening menu, find burrata bruschetta ($12); griddled artic char with cracked wheat, herbs, olive oil and dates ($22.50); braised lamb cheeks with gremolata and parsley paparadelle ($19.75); and spit-roasted Fulton Ranch chicken with rosemary polenta and green olive-melted tomato sauce ($19).

Diners also will get a choice of sparkling or still filtered water served in carafes gratis — a nice, and environmentally-sound touch. All the coffee served will be organic, fair-trade, and roasted by Bacchus’ ROAST coffee company in Oakland. The beans will be ground and brewed to order.

The bakery.

The bakery, overseen by Pastry Chef Nancy Pitta, formerly of San Francisco’s Boulevard restaurant, will supply fresh-baked bread twice a day to all Bacchus Management restaurants, including the Village Pub in Woodside, and Spruce in San Francisco.

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Restaurant Specials and Food From the Heart

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Enjoy stuffed squash for half price, if you eat late and in a big party. (Photo courtesy of John Benson)

If you’re a night owl, gather your nocturnal friends for a dining deal at Zare at Fly Trap restaurant in San Francisco.

Its new “Ten After Ten” promotion lets parties of 10 or more who make a dinner reservation for 10 p.m. or later get 50 percent off the cost of food. It’s good Monday through Saturday. Just mention what special occasion you’re celebrating — birthday, anniversary, bachelorette party or something else — when you book.

Meatballs with harissa at Zare at Fly Trap. (Photo courtesy of the National Honey Board)

If you prefer eating earlier, Chez Papa Resto in San Francisco has introduced a monthly changing themed four-course prix fixe dinner menu (with amuse bouche) nightly for $50. Wine pairing is available for an additional $35.

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Meaty Times at Poggio in Sausalito

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Tuscan porchetta every Monday through March. (Photo courtesy of Poggio)

Carnivores will want to head to picturesque Poggio for two marvelous meaty events.

First up, every Monday through March 30, the Italian restaurant will feature a Porchetta Dinner for $16 per person.

Executive Chef Peter McNee learned the Tuscan technique in Italy, in which a small pig is deboned and stuffed with herb sausage. Then, it is roasted in a wood-burning rotisserie until the skin is super crispy and the meat tender as can be.

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Dim Sum for the New Year

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Clockwise from top: Sweet potato puff, durian puff, siu mai, har gau, and (center) sweet green tea dumpling -- all from Dynasty Seafood Restaurant in Cupertino.

Dim sum may mean “touch the heart” in Chinese.

But we all know these precious morsels tantalize the tummy, too.

Read the definitive guide to dim sum restaurants in the Bay Area in today’s San Francisco Chronicle Food section, which yours truly contributed to.

While helping to research this story, I picked up some helpful tips along the way:

1) To really judge the quality of your dim sum, refrain from using soy sauce, chile paste, hot mustard and the like. At least with your first bite. Just as we are so often guilty of drowning pristine sushi in soy sauce and wasabi, we unthinkingly do the same with dim sum. When it’s au naturale, though, you can really judge whether a filling has real flavor, and whether a wrapper is well made.

2) Bigger is not always better. As my friend Andrea Nguyen says, there’s a reason they’re made small. Nguyen, whose newest cookbook “Asian Dumplings” comes out in September, notes they should be bite-size. Once they start to get too large, the quality of the wrappers suffer.

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