Dinner @ Sons & Daughters in San Francisco, CA

Over four years ago I was able to hit up Sons & Daughters in San Francisco.  Some friends wanted to hit up the restaurant (partially based on my recommendation :-) and wanted to see if I wanted to come along.  I couldn't say no.

When I first went, the restaurant was amongst the cheapeast tasting menus in San Francisco, I believe $105 per person.  It's a bit more expensive now, clocking in at $145 a person.  However, the menu is a few additional courses with the ability to pay for an extra supplemental course.

So here's what we had tonight.

1) Ratatouille with grilled focaccia and basil

First up was this amuse bouche of foccacia bread toasted with some basil cream kid of sauce.  It was pretty good.  My friend joked if the above had edible rocks.  They were not edible :-)

2) Multigrain sourdough with cultured butter

Not much to say here, good.

3) Caviar d'Aquitaine Perlita with chicken stewed in chase-peanut milk and crispy chicken skin

So this caviar course was the supplemental course.  It's probably the most interesting caviar course I've ever had.  So the caviar is on the left, on top of stewed chicken, surrounded by chicken skin "crackers".  To the right is some nuts/herbs.  I can't remember the sauce though.

Overall, the course was delicious, the flavors were really good, but I think it drowned out the caviar a bit.  I did find the chicken skin "crackers" really interesting.

4) Chilled melon soup with horseradish cracker and sea urchin

When the staff first mentioned this first, my thought was "melon and uni?".  It didn't seem to match, until I thought of melon and prosciutto, which somehow matches.  Overall, not a bad dish, but not my favorite. I think it was hard for me to process the combination.

5) Halibut crudo with August Glo yellow nectarines, poppy seed and almond

This was delicious, loved the poppy seed sauce on top of the crudo.

6) Deconstructed samosa with warm potates and nepitella

This wasn't considered an official course, but a random snack.  It tasted just like a samosa.  I enjoyed the texture of the fried dough ribbons on the bottom.

7) Summer squash with raspberry relish, Brokaw avocado and tamarind

I think this was sort of like a fancy plated squash salad, with squash on the bottom, then some raspberry sauce, then avocado on top, and some fried squash blossoms to boot.  Overall pretty good, but I felt the raspberry drowned the other flavors a little bit.  I would love to see these flavors together in a bigger entree-ish salad somewhere.

8) Octopus katsu with tomato-bean puree and borlotti lomi-lomi

I wasn't sure what lomi-lomi was, but it's apparently a Hawaiian salad made with salmon and tomatoes.  Overall pretty good, although I might be biased because I recently had some incredible octopus at Mourad and Roister.  Any octopus dish right now would have had a hard time matching those dishes.

9) Tamal of king salmon with smoked trout roe and corn succotash

This was possibly my favorite course of the night.  Perfectly cooked salmon in a sauce of corn, trout roe, and (IIRC) clams.  I loved the crisped salmon skin on top.

10) Egg salad toast

So instead of butter, they presented us this egg salad made with quail eggs to be used on top of our next bread course.  Surprisingly simple, yet delicious and a nice contrast to the typical bread & butter.

11) Hibachi-grilled quail with 'cang ying tou', five spice seeds and fermented soy bean

Another contender for best course of the night.  The quail was stuffed with rissoto and had an incredible rub on the outside.  I didn't pick up what the greens were, but I think it could have been lightly fried (or baked) kale.  It sat on a bed of "cang ying tou", which is a pork and (I think) chive Chinese dish.  Overall, delicious.

12) Huckleberry sorbet with spiced granola and buckwheat custard
 

I love sorbet, and as far as palette cleansers go, this was delicious.

13) Peaches and lavender cream with blackberry oolong tea

The last time I was at Sons & Daughters, their dessert was amongst my favorite of all time.  This one missed the mark for me, but it may be due to my personal tastes.  You see the compressed peaches on top and the white is the lavendar cream. The bottom layer (which I assume was the blackberry oolong tea) was an icy popsicle like layer.  I would have much preferred a cake-like layer, as the lavender cream and icy cold of the bottom layer just wasn't to my taste.

14) Financier with strawberries and white chocolate

Finally, our mignardise was this cake with white chocolate and strawberries on top (I assume macerated and cut up).  Tasty, although I thought it was interesting they offered only this one mignardise.  It ends up it was because ...

16) Duo of chocolate truffles

We were given this box of chocolates to go.  The one on the left was caramel, but can't remember what the one on the right was.

Overall a good second meal at Sons & Daughters.  I think it's interesting to compare and contrast this meal with the one I had in 2015.

In 2015, I think that Sons & Daughters presented a very good meal that was a bit more traditional American in its ingredients and flavors.

This meal, perhaps as a sign of the times, was clearly aiming to be more experimental and international.  The experimental was clear in the chicken skin crackers, egg salad on toast, and popsicle in the dessert.  The international flavors were clearly there: samosa -> Indian, katsu -> Japanese, cang ying tou -> Chinese, tamal -> Mexican.  I think it leads to a meal that had a few non-hits along the way (I wouldn't call them misses), but overall makes the meal more interesting along the way.  With those changes, I can see myself coming back to see what they come up with in a few years.

Dinner at Sons & Daughters in San Francisco, CA

I recently went to check out Sons & Daughters, a one Michelin star restaurant in San Francisco.  It offers a 7 course nightly menu and that's it.  They are closely tied to a farm, Dark Hill Farm, in which they get all their produce and some of their protein products.  Here's what the tasting went like.

Before the meal we got two amuse bouche dishes.

1) pickled white strawberry, almond, and ???

First we got some snacks from the farm.  Overall, all light and refreshing.  The one thing that hit me was that the almond "wasn't crunchy".  I don't think I've ever had fresh almonds before that had never been roasted.  I can't remember what the green stuff was but it was very "cactus/succulent-ish".

2) goats milk, buckwheat, herbs

I'm pretty sure this was goats milk, although I didn't write any notes down on what the waitress said.  Again, tasty and refreshing.

3) hamachi, asparagus and asian pear (w/ american caviar, pickle)

Our first course was some sashimi with various accompaniments.  I'm not 100% sure what the green sauce was, but everything as delicious together.  Probably my favorite savory dish of the night.  I did gasp a bit when eating the pickle.  I'm not a big fan of pickles and it was a bit on the vinegary side and shocked my palate a bit.

4) toast and butter

Then came the first of three bread tastings.  This one was my favorite.  The butter is housemade and the waitress said some yogurt was mixed in.  It was really creamy and tasty.

I will admit, when I first saw pictures of the bread courses from Sons & Daughters online, I assumed the bread was much larger and I was concerned about how much bread I'd eat.  Perhaps I just assumed the toast was the size of normal bread and all the rolls were normal sized.  However, all the bread courses are actually mini-sized.  I'd take a look at the butter and think about how much butter one might normally get at a restaurant.  You'll notice the bread isn't that much bigger than it.

5) beet, celtuce and almond (w/ rhubarb, almond dashi)

Then came the "salad" course.  This was also really tasty.  There were more fresh almonds and the sauce at the bottom was apparently an almond dashi.

6) multigrain bread

The next bread was a multigrain variety.  My least favorite bread of the night, as multigrain isn't my favorite.

7) clam, green tomato and smoked butter (w/ trout, clam broth)

Next came our soup course.  There's not too much soup, but this course was still really good.  The clam sitting on top of the trout (with foam over it) was particularly delicious.

8) quail, artichoke and green garlic (w/ potato & mustard seeds)

The quail on the left was a quail roulade.  The artichoke and potato in this dish was really good.  I assume picked from the farm relatively recently.

9) pretzel bread roll

I'm not a big fan of pretzel bread, because it's normally too "pretzely" in the middle.  It just seems more like a snack or dessert than something that goes with dinner.  However, this wasn't quite as "pretzely" as others I've had (such as the one at French Laundry).  It was much softer and lighter overall.  I really liked it.

10) beef, morel mushroom and english pea (w/ fava bean, carrot)

This was probably my least favorite dish of the night.  Not that there was anything wrong with it, but rather it was very "normal".  Nothing particularly interesting about the dish.  For anyone that has read my blog before, you know I hate mushrooms.  However, the morel mushrooms weren't too bad.  They don't have the normal mushroom-texture that I normally hate.

11) fromage blanc, meyer lemon and calendula

I had to look up what calendula is, I guess it's in the marigolds family.  This dish was delicious.  It was lemony and cheesy.  I'm not sure what the cheese/cracker thing on the upper right was, but that was delicious too.  It was very light and airy.

12) alpine strawberry, mint and salad burnet

Holy cow this dessert was delicious, my favorite course of the night.  I love berries and everything was just perfect with this.  I'm not even sure what flavors were in the mousse-like thing to the upper right, but it was delicious.  I wasn't sure what salad burnet but it appears to be an herb of some sort.  Alpine strawberries are a strawberry variant that all I can say is delicious given my love of berries.  Holy cow, delicious.

13) marshmallow, peanut brittle, chocolate w/ thyme

Lastly we got some mignardise and a candle b/c it was close to my birthday.  The peanut brittle was very light, not like most peanut brittle I've tried.  The chocolate was pretty interesting, as they put some herbs (I remember the waitress said atleast thyme) in the middle.

Overall the meal took about two hours and fifteen minutes.  Portions overall are pretty small.  I was probably full at a comparable level to Commis.  Not still hungry, but I definitely could have munched on something more afterwards.  Compared to other restaurants, I'd say that this is a solid 1 Michelin star restaurant, completely what you would expect from a 1 Michelin star restaurant.  Not any more, not any less.

I'll also mention we got some complimentary soda b/c it was around my birthday.  Very kind of them.  They originally offered champagne, but we got soda instead b/c I don't drink alcohol.