San Francisco: Circolo

Circolo had every chance of success with us. It had cool lights and an, um, water feature outside and it’s in our neighborhood. “What more could you want?” we thought and off we tripped in our Saturday finest to drop $140 on dinner and 2 drinks each. What we want is a decent chef and Circolo’s not the place to find one. Before we get to the sad food though, let’s discuss the ambience. They’re doing a club/restaurant thing that is only moderately successful, although I’ll admit that my frustration with the surroundings was likely enhanced by the dismal food. The dining area clearly converts to a dancefloor and while they’ve done a tasteful job of masking this fact and separating it from a lounge area in the forward part of the room, the space is not intimate.

We started with the dumplings, a predictable but almost inevitable choice for me. They were crispy and yummy, as were the mojito and a specialty margerita that accompanied them. So far so good. R. had the most expensive item on the menu, Kobe beef and foie gras, because he loves the combination and is willing to risk his arteries for it. I had the special, a whole, semi-pre-cracked crab, with parsley and lemon marinade. It was awful, awful, awful. It was a strange, offputting temperature, not chilled, not warm. It turns out that “marinade” means absolutely sodden. The crab was overwhelmed with an ultra-sweet broth that seemed to be made up of liquid nastiness and masses of diced parsley which wholly obscured any flavor the crab would have brought to the table and almost obscured the crab itself. The helpful idea of pre-cracking it was also poorly executed and saved no trouble. It was accompanied by “garlic toasts” which were equally cheaply over-flavored and half of which were inedible, having become saturated with the crab’s unfortunate parsley soak. R. fared slightly better with his dish but only because it wasn’t entirely unacceptable. The pairing of the interesting texture of Kobe beef and foie gras is a mistake. Foie gras smooth, rich density should be reserved for pairing with only the finest meat of like nature. That is clearly not Kobe beef, which has a unique, masculine flavor all its own which was ill-matched to the liver. To round out the meal, our second round of mojitos was overloaded with mint, one of them to the point of being almost undrinkable. Must have been the same guy who came up the parsley marinade.

Circolo: full of promise but very disappointing and expensively so.