Now is the perfect time to try some new restaurants or return to favorites because Restaurant Week is happening in full force in so many Bay Area cities.
You’ll find specially priced lunch and dinner menus at participating restaurants.
Here are some of the most popular Restaurant Week celebrations in local cities:
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Downtown Los Gatos has never been a stronghold of ethnic cuisines, so it was a welcome sight to see North open its doors last summer.
Named for its location on North Santa Cruz Avenue, this lovely restaurant serves contemporary Vietnamese cuisine with California influences. It’s a collaboration between two veteran restaurateurs: Hanna Pham, who for years had 19 Market in downtown San Jose; and John Le, who had the popular Three Seasons in downtown Palo Alto.
From all appearances, it’s already a hit in the community. The warm dining room, done up with a mural of a Vietnamese woman in a traditional ao dai, antique mirrors, reclaimed wood, and a wall of living plants, was packed the night my friends and I dined in December, paying our own tab at the end.
Start with one of the fun cocktails, such as the Non La ($15), a play on a gin sour. The chic coupe is a study in green from the house-infused matcha gin blended with yellow chartreuse, orgeat, and lemon. Its frothy top is made of foaming bitters. A gold-hued turmeric-ginger tincture is poured atop through a stencil to recreate the restaurant’s logo, which on the drink almost looks like a pair of puckery lips. It’s an elegant drink that/s tangy, grassy, citrusy and delicious.
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LAS VEGAS, NV — In the city that never sleeps, one can do major damage even if it’s only a 48-hour trip, and ostensibly to take in a Lady Gaga show. But one still has to eat, right? And boy, did my husband and I do just that.
If you’ve never ventured beyond The Strip, you owe it to yourself to take a trek downtown. It’s arguably the city’s hippest neighborhood, with bold murals spanning two to three stories high on the sides of buildings, tongue-in-cheek sayings adorning old motel marquees, and a range of show-stopping public arts pieces.
Case in point, the Big Rig Jig at the Fergusons Downtown, an old motel that has been transformed into a venue of small local boutiques and eateries. The Big Rig Jig looks like something straight out of a “Transformers” movie. Composed of two massive tanker trucks bent and curved into an inexplicable “S,” it’s confounding, perplexing, and just plain amazing.
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So many places opened in 2019; and so many places closed. Be it astronomical housing costs to an extremely tight labor pool and the rising price of ingredients, the Bay Area remains a challenging landscape for restaurants.
Still, they somehow manage to put their best forward day in and day out. Here are my favorite eats of the year (in no particular order) — the ones I still dream about, and the ones I’d race back for in a heartbeat. Enjoy! And cheers to even more delicious morsels in 2020.
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At his Sushi Nagai on Union Square in San Francisco, Chef Tomonori Nagai may specialize in Edomae-style, considered the purest and one of the oldest forms of sushi, developed hundreds of years ago as a way to preserve fish in salt, vinegar or seaweed.
But he is not above putting his own spin on it with flair, wit and technique, as I found out when I was invited in as a guest of the restaurant earlier this month. After all, where else can you get a play on a hot dog that’s fashioned from uni? But more on that later.
The restaurant, which is across the street from Macy’s, opened quietly in spring but is now having its grand opening.
San Francisco has seen a number of high-end omakase restaurants of late. Sushi Nagai joins that roster with menus priced at $200, $250, and $350-plus. Each comprises about 18 courses, with the more expensive menus featuring more premium ingredients and intricate dishes. At the media dinner I attended, we were treated to the $350 menu.
Growing up in the small coastal town of Iwaki, Nagai had wanderlust and thought the best opportunity to explore more of the world was to become a French cuisine chef. But after a stint at a hotel in Tokyo, where he ended up working the sushi bar because they were short-handed, he found his voice in his native Japanese cuisine.
After working at Morimoto in Honolulu, where he ended up serving sushi to then-President Barack Obama, and the Michelin-starred Shinji by Kanesaka in Singapore, he was recruited to head the new sushi restaurant in San Francisco.
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