One of my all-time best restaurant experiences was in early 2015, when I visited Saison in San Francisco. I was admittedly not as experienced in fine dining as I am now with my wife Jun, but the tasting menu based on California cuisine with emphasis on seasonality and freshness of ingredients from the chef at the time, Josh Skenes, was truly a revelation. Since my visit, Skenes shocked the culinary world by leaving the restaurant, and Saison went through a transitional period, losing its coveted three Michelin star status as well. The restaurant has since been taken over by chef Richard Lee and rebranded as an open wood fire restaurant while maintaining the similar California ethos. On our Bay Area trip last month, I wanted to take Jun with me this time to see how Season 2.0 has evolved. It was a major stepdown from the magical experience of the first visit, especially considering the astronomical prices of food and wine.
The restaurant’s tasting menu started with an assortment of first bites. Maybe we became even more spoiled after a very good dinner at Enclos in Sonoma a few days earlier, but none of the snacks, while all delicious in their own ways, didn’t quite hit the mark. The first dish after the amuse bouche, the chef’s take on corn chowder, also didn’t inspire much anticipation for looking very predictable, but it turned out to be one of the better dishes of the night, as the combination of caviar, corn and geoduck and Manila clams worked together quite well. The next course consisted of dry aged amberjack with fermented kohlrabi and citrus gelee to wrap in lettuces and herbs, similar to Korea’s ssam dishes, followed by the same amberjack’s collar. They were all solid but nothing we had not tasted before; Jun remarked that the gelee actually worked better to put on top of the collar. Dry aged black cod, which came with celtuce and amber ginger butter, was expertly cooked but again nothing remarkable.
The mid-course palate cleanser of fermented and pickled melon in melon broth was actually one of my favorite dishes of the night. The puzzling mediocrity continued with the rest of the savory course, from the rabbit with garleek (a garlic and leek hybrid grown by the chef Dan Barber) with chanterelle to the lamb with Early Girl tomato. If the strength of the restaurant’s dishes was supposed to be the power of wood fire, it wasn’t fully showcased in these meat dishes. The desserts were slightly better. I was a fan of Albion strawberry with embered honey pavlova and elderflower ice cream for the first dessert, and the final dessert of honeynut squash and toasted buckwheat ice cream also brought a nice complex flavor of savory and sweet.
Getting a reservation at Saison is not overly challenging as long as you plan in advance. We seat near the same area where I dined last time, overlooking the open kitchen. Jun remarked that for a restaurant with a modest number of dishes (by a fine dining tasting menu standard), the kitchen seemed rather over-crowded from staffing perspective. Maybe because we weren’t as impressed with the food but the overall dining space also seemed to lack the same vitality that I distinctly remember from the previous visit. The biggest pet peeve from our dinner experience was the wine pairing. As we were heading home from the restaurant, I promised to shell-shocked Jun that I wouldn’t rush to sign up for a wine pairing before learning more about how many glasses will be provided and what kind of wines will be served. We paid a small fortune for the reserve wine pairing (close to $300 per person), only to learn that the pairing had only six glasses, and featured mostly wines that, while from well-known terroir-driven producers around the world, were seriously marked up compared to the retail prices of the same bottles. A painful but necessary lesson, I guess. For us, Saison was a solid one-Michelin star experience that was charging for three-star experience. I probably shouldn’t have let my first impression cloud my judgment, and am sad that I probably won’t be able to re-live the same magical experience from my visit 11 years ago ever again.
Address: 178 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
KenScale: 8.0/10 (Jun’s Score: 8.0/10)
Website: http://saisonsf.com/
Reservation via Tock
