This week’s dinner was at Acquerello. This is IMO the best Italian restaurant in SF (although I certainly haven’t tried them all). I know I’ve been going here since as far back at least as 2001 (have pictures) when I lived on Franklin St. just a few blocks away. Even though it’s had 2-Michelin stars, It doesn’t really seem to be on the top of mind for many because it’s been around for 30+ years and perhaps because of it’s location off of Polk. Trisha was in town and restaurants are doing white truffle menus so she booked us dinner. We’re suckers for truffles and esp. white truffles esp. after having gone to Alba for the white truffle festival and dining with Trisha in 2017. That being said, the last time Andrea and I ate here for a truffle dinner, we weren’t entirely happy since the truffles we were served were pretty dry (i.e. no longer fresh) and not very aromatic or tasty, so we we curious to see if they would redeem themselves.

Tasting menu was 9 courses with 2 supplements, one was caviar and the other cheese, which of course we went for, but only one serving of each shared between the 3 of us. Andrea and I went for the wine pairing and Trisha went for wines a la carte. Overall, the food was excellent – great ingredients, preparation and presentation, and flavor. The unfortunate thing was that the truffle was not. The truffle wasn’t even sourced from Alba according to one of the servers and was dry and not aromatic. They did do a nice presentation of the truffle storing it in a humidor that they brought out. For the next course with truffle, we asked to have a different truffly used and it was the same – dry and not very aromatic or flavorful. For the 3rd course with shaved truffle, they used the largest truffle, and sadly, it was slightly better, but still dry.

Again, the food otherwise was delicious. Trisha’s favorite was the tajarin, which was what she substituted for the scallop course because she doesn’t eat shellfish; it was delicious (Trisha also subbed in the lamb dish from the seasonal tasting menu instead of the quali…very tasty. flavros made me think of a very fancy kofte with great additional flavors). Andrea liked the oxtail raviolini best. i loved that dish too and you can’t go wrong with their “faux gras” (since foie gras has been outlawed again in California, they blend duck liver and duck fat) rigatoni, one of their signature dishes, is always decadent (rich flavor from the faux gras and some sweetness too) and enjoyable.

Wine pairings were very interesting as we found in previous visits, although nothing was significantly aged (a 2018 barolo is quite young…).

Service started out very quickly, but stalled a bit as they appeared to sync us up with a couple other tables and also just seemed to slow down as the restaurant filled up. All in all, it was a 3.5+ hour meal (and we started at 5:30), so a tad long, but we did have quite a few courses. I was very full from the meal and would have felt even more so if we had eaten at a faster pace (contrast this to our meal at Boulevard where we took almost as long and only had 4 courses…)

I’m a bit torn because food and wine were quite enjoyable except for the fact that the truffle was a complete fail. It didn’t detract from the food at all (just didn’t add anything), but the truffle tasting menu costs $200 more per person (and 20% mandatory service fee) than the regular seasonal tasting menu. If the truffle had been excellent, we would have been ok with it and accepted that as the price of truffle. Or if we had only been paying for the seasonal tasting menu price, we would have been fine with it. But paying for the truffles as they were was absolutely not worth it. I mentioned that we’re “suckers” for truffle, but so many of our dining experiences with truffle tasting menus have been poor and not worth it at all (for less than $200, we get 200g of perigord truffles overnighted to us from France directly from Les Pastras truffle farm). I don’t think any of the other diners seemed to care or know what fresh truffles are like (also, it is very early on the season (for perigords, we find later winter season truffles to be much better, but for some reason this is when all the restaurants serve white truffles) so it all starts to feel like a bit of a scam at this point (Andrea also had not good white truffles at Cotogna, sister restaurant to Quince (. who has white truffle menus for the next 2 weeks) at lunch on Friday). So if we eat here again (and again, the food, wine, service were otherwise excellent), won’t do a truffle tasting menu. Fool me once…