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Do you have $35 burning a hole in your pocket, begging to be spent on a three-course dinner? Before you drive to Modesto to cruise around for a subpar steakhouse, know that here in the land of $40 entrees, this fantasy is now reality at
Trestle, opening this evening near Jackson Square.
That’s right, trestles are no longer for railroad hobos to eat under, unwrapping their bindles and opening some cans. They’re for broke-asses of all income strata to seize the most out of life and have a solid meal. It sounds like an impossible gimmick, a Columbia House CD club of dining, but a team of Michael Mina alumni has found a way to marry taste with value.
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Every course has two options, from appetizers (little gem salad with bacon and a sunny side up egg or marinated calamari with roasted fingerling potatoes) to mains (pan-roasted salmon with asparagus and faro or short rib “pot roast”). You can also add on a fourth pasta course, such as garganelli Bolognese with burrata, for an additional $10. Molecular gastronomy it isn’t, but home cooking never goes out of style, and San Francisco is really short on places for non-coders under 30 to have a nice sit-down date night.
OK, there’s a slight gimmick, as Trestle not only steering people towards splurging on a decent bottle of wine, but grabbing the wheel and flooring the gas, too. They’ve thoughtfully capped the vino markup at $40 over retail, which is a wonderful inducement, although it makes it that much harder to keep dinner for two under $100. Still, it beats the early bird at that Modesto steakhouse by a light-year.
Knowing the importance Michael Mina
places on precision in the kitchen as well as the unforgiving margins the industry skates by on, this entire concept feels like it was measured again and again to ensure profitability and customer satisfaction. As wild speculation on our part, Trestle feels like the kind of place that restaurant workers might flock to en masse. Either way, we’re overjoyed that someone’s thinking of regular people from time to time.
Trestle,
531 Jackson, 772-0922.
