For tonight’s dinner, we went to Dalida. We’ve been meaning to eat here for a few months, but I’ve had to keep pushing out the reservation, but we finally made it. Chef Laura is also in the current season of Top Chef, although we haven’t yet watched the latest episode (the infamous restaurant wars), so no spoilers anyone! The restaurant is located where we remember Traci de Jardin’s restaurant Commissary used to be in the Presidio. it’s a bit out of the way, but in such a beautiful location and building. The interior was very airy and open and we had seats at the Chef’s counter for our 5:30pm reservation (again, we prefer to eat early).
It did not start off well since our server was MIA for the first 20+ minutes while we just sat there. The cuisine is a mix of Mediterranean and Mexican as is the nationalities of the husband and wife executive chefs. Once we were finally able to order, we went with the chef’s tasting menu with the caviar supplement as we are wont to do since we expect we will get a very good variety of dishes. We started with some cocktails, both of which were delicious.
For the first course, there was a trio of bites – the most notable bite was the Midye Dolma which was a mussel with the stuffing of a dolma. We were also served the caviar supplement which was a healthy portion of kaluga caviar atop oysters which were very tasty, but quite pricey at $38 each.
Next course was the Zeytingyagli Enginar and Kereviz (yes I had to look that up) which was artichoke hearts with feta and an orange-dill dressing. The dish was meh. They also gave us a pita with a bit of olive oil and zatar (wish there had been more) on top. We made it almost halfway through this course when our server came by and asked if we had received the dips that went with the pita, which we obviously hadn’t. So he did bring those out which made all the difference because the trio of dips (yogurt, hummus and muhammara along with some olives and pickled items. All the dips were delicious with the muammara being the most flavorful and not something we see as often as the fairly ubiquitous hummus and yogurt (which again, were both quite good).
Next came the meat courses, both of which were quite tasty. The first was a beef kebab on top of a baba ganoush type sauce and the second was the lamb chop which was basically a seasoned ground lamb wrapped around the lamb rib with a tasty lamb jus. Again, with both, the meat was very well seasoned and flavorful as were the accompanying sauces.
For dessert, we had a kaymak (Turkish milk) style ice cream topped with some olive oil which was quite nice and also a tres leches cake which we thought was fine, but nothing special (kind made me want to go back that episode of Top Chef where Chef Laura made a quatro leches dessert course).
Lastly, after our server dropped of the check, we waited for quite a long time again. it was an odd service experience with moments being painfully slow and moments being very rushed. So we enjoyed the food, the location, ambiance, but the service was below average, at least for us.
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