Lunch with Steven and David at Arquet in the Ferry Building in the former location of Slanted Door. This restaurant was from the people who run Sorrel which I was pretty impressed even during a vendor event there by the quality of food and service despite it basically being a banquet meal. I was definitely interested in eating here.
We were busy chatting, but service did seem to forget about us before we even ordered. It wasn’t a problem and they really seemed to try to make up for that starting with some complimentary glasses of wine. We ordered the ‘chips & dip’ and and the liberty duck liver brûlée to start and David and I each ordered the porchetta sandwich and Steven ordered the fried chicken sandwich. The ‘chips & dip’ came out first. The chips were made with Zuckerman sweet potato, decently crisp and the dip was made of fava bean on top of a zhug (had to look that up) and melted leek cream which made for an interesting take on this. Then the Liberty duck pate with the bruleéd sugar on top along with some toast and some blueberry jam. Classic and as delicious as it all sounds.
I think they felt bad about us (not that we felt bad), so they kept giving us more starters, 3 more in total…they gave us the dry-aged brandt beef tartare, the burrata & melted leeks, and also the bluefin tuna starters. Wow! The beef tartare was very tasty, made with smoked soy and a beautifully colored egg yolk. Very nice. The burrata and leek was different, but also very good. The tuna was fine, perhaps a bit boring by comparison and it would have probably fared better as one of the first starters and not the last.
We were all thinking, we don’t really need our main courses at this point, but they did deliver them of course. I don’t think I’ve had a porchetta sandwich before which is why I wanted to try it. It was quite tasty. Grilled a bit and topped with some chimichurri and some pickled onion on some decent bread which was tasty just by itself (have to have good bread here in SF), but all of us resigned to eat only half our sandwiches and take the rest to go.
And then they brought out a burger for us, which I did look great on the menu, but I didn’t want to order a burger since we often make very tasty burgers at home. They did cut the burger into quarters for us so it was almost like having a slider each. Burger was cooked and not overcooked with still a bit of pink in it. It was surprisingly sweet which came from the bacon-onion jam. Steven commented that it would be hard to eat a whole burger that was that sweet, but just have the quarter we each ate made for an interesting bite.
So we’re stuffed twice over now and then they brought out another main dish, this time the littleneck clams. This was served with some toast that was covered with some garlic confit…a different take on garlic bread.
We took our leftover sandwiches and burger to go. They give you a little claim check, like when you check in a coat or bag and you claim up at the front desk where the coat check is also located. Cute little touch. All in all, we were pretty impressed with their generosity and ate ourselves silly for lunch
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