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Jennifer Seliga/Fish and Farm
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A hint of cocktails to come, from a restaurant with a liquor cage bigger than your house.
When
Fish & Farm was located in the Tenderloin’s Mark Twain Hotel at Taylor and O’Farrell, it was dinner-only. Having closed in March to move to fancier digs in the Financial District, it’s moving into breakky-and-lunch territory.
For now, that’s actually all that F&F is doing (along with happy hour). Open as of this morning, the New American restaurant that drew Union Square hotel occupants a few blocks west for Dungeness crab cakes, Niman Ranch pork chops, and Don Draper’s rye Manhattans is now doing lemon ricotta hot cakes with bruleed banana and honeycomb butter, a “‘drunken crumpet’ house-made with a smile” as well as strawberry-ginger jam and blackberry butter, and an open-faced country omelet with sweet and spicy peppers, green onions, chorizo, fingerling potatoes, cilantro and crème fraîche. Coffee is by Illy, tea are from Dammann Freres.
For lunch, everything hovers at or below the $30 threshold, with skirt steak frites, an ahi tartare (with pine nuts, Asian pear, jalapeño-Fresno chilies, mint, garlic and habanero-infused sesame oil) and a tempura basket containing Spanish octopus, Pacific stone crab claws, chorizo, jumbo asparagus, trumpet mushrooms, and both Meyer lemon aioli and romesco sauce.
While Fish & Farm’s Facebook page teased followers last month with the possibility that the name might change, it seems as though they’ve stuck with the tried and true. Both the food and cocktail menus have gotten refreshed, there's a beer tap system, and George Morrone (who’s done stints at Aqua, Fifth Floor, and elsewhere) is helming the kitchen. Softly-open for now, we can expect full service to kick in in a fortnight or so, and
possibly a huge bash for Frank Sinatra's centennial later this year.
Fish & Farm,
424 Clay, 415-474-3474.