Dinner @ The Progress in San Francisco, CA

About 4 years ago I was able to try The Progress, the newly minted sister restaurant to State Bird Provisions.  The restaurant hadn't yet found its way, initially serving a 6 course, price-fixe, family style meal.

Nowadays, the restaurant serves a general a la carte menu, with almost everything to be served family style.  The updates eventually earned the restaurant a Michelin Star in 2017.

So we decided we wanted to check out the restaurant again.   The menu features several large platters that can be shared between 2-6 people, but we opted for more of the smaller dishes to try more food.  Here's what we got.

1) sturgeon caviar potato cloud

First up we got this tiny appetizer.  It's sized at about the size of an oyster course, so you'd want to order one per person.  There's potato foam on top, some crunchy fried potato bits below, and ultimately caviar on the bottom, which you can tell in the second picture.  My first taste reminded me a lot of french fries.  This dish was ok, not my favorite caviar course I've ever had.  I think the recollection of french fries didn't mix well with the caviar.

2) pig's head charcuterie - mandarin, fish sauce & serranos

Second up, we had what might have been my favorite course of the night.  While you mostly see the charcuterie on top, beneath was (what I believed to be) shaved fennel, mint, cilantro, and slices of serrano peppers (and possibly other herbs that I missed).  On top was a sprinkling of puffed rice.  Overall, just a wonderful mix of flavors, textures, and that occasional hit of heat from the peppers.  A part of me wondered if this could be made bigger, like in to a entree salad, but I think this was about the right size.  You couldn't really do more than this.

3) radishes from our farm - smoked paprika, green garlic umami sauce

To be honest, for $8 I felt this was sort of a rip off given the amount of food.  It's around maybe 7-8 small radishes.  The garlic aioli-ish sauce was good, but it just seemed like so little and I'm not sure the texture of the radishes really went well with the sauce.  Something crunchy in addition, perhaps some potato crisps or even deep fried radish, I think would have been much better.

4) half dozen little wing farm quail egg roti, salad greens & wagon wheel fondue

This roti dish is a pretty popular dish in the restaurant.  We saw tons of tables order it.  This may have been the other challenger for best course of the night.  In some ways it's really simple.  It's roti, with greens, eggs, and cheese.  The combo of flavors and textures was just delicious.  Like a much better version of a breakfast burrito (crispy/buttery roti instead of plain burrito wrap, soft cooked quail eggs instead of scrambled eggs, and mixed greens for contrast).  I told my +1, they should try and turn this into some upscale breakfast burrito to be served out of a food truck.  They'd sell out everyday.

5) squid ink noodles - oyster mushroom, tomato-kale dashi, & toasted sesame

I don't remember too much about this dish, other than the fact it was delicious.  The sauce was really good.

6) grilled monterey bay abalone - crushed prince of orange potatoes, ramps, and yuzu-seaweed butter

It may be hard to see the bits of abalone nestled in between chunks of potato in the above photo, but they're there.  There were 3 "biggish" chunks of abalone nestled in there.  The abalone was perhaps the most tender abalone I've ever had in my life, just delicious along with the citrus sauce.  I actually would have loved some bread to soak up the sauce from this dish, sort of like with clam juice from a clam bake.

7) wild alaskan halibut - green garlic, clams, and guanciale

So I actually didn't order this dish.  Some friends at another table did.  They were stuffed and told me they couldn't finish, so I went off to their table to try this dish as well.  You can see the halibut buried a bit beneath the beans and clams.  It was topped with a green garlic salsa-like spread, which may be hard to see in the photo as well.  Overall, pretty good dish, but not my favorite, as I'm not particularly a fan of "meatier" fishes.  I think I may have missed out on some of the salsa as the dish was being divided up amongst us.  I will say that I loved the beans in this dish.  They were fried and had a good crisp on the outside of them.

8) ricotta cake - blueberry-rose petal compote, black tea cream, candied almonds

So we had enough room to spare to grab some desserts and I had went with this ricotta cake.  I had never had ricotta cake and didn't know what to assume, I had wondered if it was going to be very "cheese-cake" like.  It wasn't, but it definitely was a bit "denser" than normal cake, which I liked.  I couldn't really taste too much of the ricotta though.  The blueberry compote was delicious and the candied almonds give some good crunch in each bite.  I really liked this dish.

9) josey baker quinoa doughnuts - ginger sugar, honey-creme fraiche ice cream, rhubarb

Similar to the ricotta cake above, I didn't know what to assume of quinoa doughnuts.  Once we got them, there was definitely a flavor difference, which I would describe as not-as-plain.  Overall good, but not the kind of the dessert I would order again.  I loved the ice cream in this dish, I think it was a great flavor and matched well with the rhubarb beneath it.

10) state bird peanut milk, muscovado syrup

Finally, we got some of this peanut milk complimentary b/c there was a slowdown in the orders earlier in the evening.  It's something that's normally $3 per shot but they gave us two of them.  I'm not a huge fan of peanut flavor, so this wasn't my favorite, but it wasn't too bad either.  It is quite rich, so I wouldn't order one for myself in the future.  Perhaps one to share would be doable.

Overall I felt it was a good meal at The Progress.  Similar to other dining experiences at "gourmet casual" restaurants, there are some hits and misses.  I'm hoping sometime in the future I can go with a bigger group and get one of the family style platters to share.

Dinner @ The Progress in San Francisco, CA

The Progress is a relatively new restaurant from the people from the famed State Bird Provisions.  State Bird Provisions is often cited as the most difficult restaurant to get into in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Unlike restaurants like French Laundry, the price does not make it prohibitively scary to much of the public.  Lines begin forming around 90 minutes before they open and reservations are nearly impossible to get.  In fact, the restaurant even got written up in several tech websites about how Silicon Valley engineers were writing bots to fight for reservations there online.

Anyways, given how impossible it is to goto State Bird Provisions, I thought checking out The Progress was about as good as I could do.  From what I've been told, the food is very similar there and the lines are presently non-existent.

So The Progress is a little interesting, as it's a price fixe menu and everything is shared family style.  The more people in your party, presumably the larger the portions.  So take into account that all servings below are made for two people.  I would assume with larger parties everything would simply be larger.  The time we visited, there were 6 courses for $65 a person.  You can pay more for more courses, but the 6 courses were more than enough to feel stuffed by the end.

1) amuse bouche/appetizer plate.

This wasn't on the menu so I don't remember everything on this plate.  From the left going clockwise, turnips w/ some green sauce, house made cheese, broccoli with some pickled stuff, chips with a pate, beef jerky with peanuts, croquette with some sauce, and pomelo with something on it.  My favorite was the house cheese, followed by the beef jerkey, and the croquette.  Overall, all the little snacks were tasty.

Because things are served family style, the "courses" don't really come out one at a time.  They brought the six dishes out in two "waves".  There were 3 plates brought out and then the other three plates.  So when I say the "first course", it's somewhat random how things came out.

2) raw Japanese snapper with turnips and cream fraiche - with squid ink chips

This first course was probably the best of the night.  It's hard to see in the picture, but basically beneath the mound of turnips was the fish and a sauce.  Just delicious.

3) shaved cauliflower-herbs and pig fries (pork belly and ears) - with chili dressing

We selected this dish almost solely based on curiosity of what "pig fries" were.  It was basically deep friend pork belly and pig ears.  It was maybe my second favorite of the night and my date's top of the night.  The chili dressing with this was great.

4) polpette of rabbit & pork with blood orange & castelvetranos - with potatoes underneath

I didn't know what polpettes were, but they are effectively meatballs.  This dish was fine, but I wasn't particularly a fan of it.  It was both our least favorite of the night.

5) aromatic spiced squab with salted chili paste - with lettuce wrap

When this dish came out, I couldn't help but notice it was cooked a little rare.  I worried if it was going to be like the duck we had a Cotogna that was a tad chewy.  It was not.  It was tender and delicious.

We humorously tried to eat the meat off the leg and wing that was also served, however that proved fruitless as it was mostly skin and without much meat.  So don't bother if you get this.

6) grilled Five Dot Ranch beef with mustard-miso oyster sauce

A solid dish.  The beef was tender and the sauce was tasty.

7) lamb merguez with yellow eye beans, octopus & crispy squid

I didn't know what merguez was but it's basically sausage.  I was a little disappointed by this, as I felt putting something into sausage form takes away from the actual ingredient.  The rest of the dish was great though.  My second least favorite of the night.

At this point in the night my date and I were stuffed.  I think my date and I regretted selecting 4 dishes from the "heavy" section of the price fixe and only 2 dishes from the "light" section.  The last four meat dishes were quite heavy.  If we had to do it again, I think we would have picked one more from the "light" section and maybe selected a dessert instead of another heavy meat dish.  In addition, by selecting a dessert it would have made the meal a little longer and we probably wouldn't have been quite as stuffed by the end.  I'll take this as a lesson learned if I ever end up visiting Gary Danko, La Folie, or Terra or other similar price fixe menus.  Loading up on the heavier dishes, no matter how delicious it looks, is a bad idea.

Overall, a good set of dishes with (from what I've been told) the essence of State Bird Provisions.  If you're too lazy to wait in line like me, check this out of an easier alternative.