"Did I ever tell you about the little red rooster in the back yard?" asked Pat, a Weekly photographer and our dinner companion at the Rooster. "We were living in this sprawling house in the Inner Richmond, and one of my housemates decided we should raise chickens in the back yard. We weren't allowed to have pets, but the landlord hadn't said anything about poultry. So Lynne built a coop and we bought a dozen little hatchlings. Well, after a while one of them started to crow, and we realized we had a male. We named him Skippy.
"Then Skippy began to crow all the time, and we knew we had to do something -- the neighbors might start complaining and we'd get busted. So Lynne, who grew up somewhere out in the country, took him into the garage and ..." (Pat gestured.) "We decided we'd have to eat him, make him into chicken soup. But he was still very young; it was so sad to look at those little bones in our soup bowls. Poor Skippy, such a short life."
The Rooster on Valencia Street's new "restaurant row," far from sharing Skippy's fate, is crowing lustily and dishing up large portions. With its bohemian decor and fashionable "fusion cooking" it's a natural for the neighborhood. And if fusion cooking is the latest fad, this is one restaurant that comes by it naturally, via owners Shaw-Na Lee and her husband, Jean-Paul Billault. The wine list is a U.N. of bottlings (with most at a fair markup to the $20 to $35 range), and the eclectic menu mingles Asian-influenced dishes with such French bourgeois classics as beef bourguignon. Italian and Latin American cuisines get to strut this stage, too, along with a revival of that near-obsolete bowl of Americana, Waldorf salad, updated with blue cheese and a walnut-oil vinaigrette. Many of us routinely cook like this at home (minus the Waldorf), but so multinational a restaurant menu raises the question: Is it fusion -- or confusion?
The restaurant's look indicates deliberate confusion. In an endearing evocation of hippie-era interior design, some hanging light fixtures are lacy, others sketch flowers in tin, and a huge, old metal chandelier is furbished with (it appears) shards of plastic. A sinuous art nouveau twig design is painted on the bar wall, and ornate Chinese fabrics or Victorian-style lace curtains veil large sliding windows. A dozen-odd well-spaced tables made of beautiful scarred wood afford comfortable room for both food and elbows. Atop the walls, gigantic mirrors with ornate hand-painted frames hang atilt, reflecting other tables and transforming them into French impressionist bistro scenes. It's some of the sweetest decor in town, but loud, lively ambient music plus a large, lively crowd trying to outshout it once again puts the "din" in "dinner."
At our initial scouting expedition, TJ and I started inauspiciously with "Papa Lee's vegetable dumplings" ($5.95), consisting of five potstickers filled with a very bland mince of tofu, black mushrooms, and rice vermicelli. A pair of dips consisted of sweet-hot Chinese chili-garlic sauce, and undoctored Kikkoman soy. "Red Earth Salad" ($5.95) was more fun, with a tangy lemon vinaigrette coating roasted red beets, pecans, and soft goat cheese over spring greens. Returning some days later with Pat, we dutifully ordered the inescapable Caesar salad ($5.95) and were glad we did. This vibrant version had a lemony eggless "mayonnaise" balanced by the nutty sweetness of a rich, freshly shredded Parmesan. Our only complaint was that there were three of us, but merely two anchovies. (Sheesh, one extra anchovy would bankrupt them?)
We also had ginger and lemongrass mussels ($6.50), consisting of 12 small black mollusks in an understated Thai-style broth. We ate just eight, finding them acceptable but not exquisite; the other four were clenched shut, dead before cooking. (When you expose live mussels to cooking heat, they open their shells to breathe their last gasps. If they don't open, you don't eat them if you know what's good for you.) When the waitress noticed the leftovers, and we obituarized the four bivalves, she asked if we'd like some others and we declined. The bill wasn't itemized, but apparently she subtracted the charge for the dish, an honorable move.
At our first dinner we had a risotto with shiitakes, sun-dried tomatoes, and white truffles ($13.75) as a separate pasta course to avoid overwhelming other flavors with the pungent truffle aroma. Oddly, what used to be a rare, pricey ingredient has been showing up all over town -- the funky fungi are becoming nearly as ubiquitous as Caesar salad. Fat and firm-grained, the rice tasted more like the sushi variety than the standard risotto-type, arborio. As we dug into the brothy, rather sour mixture, we found strings of melted cheese, which unnecessarily weighed down the already-heavy mixture.
An appealing "Fruity Chicken" ($13.95) was a giant skinless breast with the first joint of the wing as a handle. It had been rapidly roasted (like a pheasant breast), turning the outside a lovely brown while the interior, totally tender, still bore a faint blush. The sauce had carrots, prunes, and dried apricots plumped in a liquid touched with garlic and tarragon -- a classic French formula that's usually applied to goose or duck, but proved very pleasant adorning one of Skippy's plebeian kin. Alongside came a heap of normal mashed potatoes. But we found the braised lamb shank ($14.50) actively unpleasant, beautifully bronzed but tasting a step past muttonish. "I've had mutton before, and liked it," said TJ, an ex-rancher who has raised sheep himself. "But I don't like this. It doesn't taste like somebody killed it, it tastes like it died of old age." The meat wore a few timid streaks of aioli, and came with a red wine sauce that apparently included caramelized sugar that had been allowed to burn, lending a bitter, scorched undertone. Alas, this unfortunate sauce spread to and infected the bright fresh green beans and the good, subtle garlic mashed potatoes sharing the plate.
At our second meal, I felt obliged to try "New World paella" ($14.50), a dish so badly overcooked by so many local restaurants. The Rooster's rendition was based on sofrito, a seasoning mixture (garlic, onions, and fresh semihot chiles sauteed in oil colored golden with annatto seeds) that's a fixture in the cuisine of Puerto Rico. The rice -- moist, slightly spicy, and harshly salty -- mingled with the survey of fauna orders that's typical of our hemisphere's paellas: tender chicken, rock shrimp, mussels, clams, and clumps of sweet, coarse chorizo sausage. The chicken thigh rising from the center like Gibraltar was deliciously permeated with cilantro. "I'd give this 6 on a scale of 10," TJ told Pat. "The last three restaurant paellas we had rated 1 or 2," I added. Pat opted for "Mama Lee's Chinese braised salmon" ($13.95), which had very tender, mild-flavored salmon braised in an ethereal soy-touched chardonnay sauce. It came with a lightly crusted cake of sushi rice (quite nice) and sauteed baby bok choy. TJ lucked out with a special of pork tenderloin, coarse-peppered and quick-seared so the interior reached a perfect pink. The subtly spicy medallions, interspersed with fresh roasted tomatillos, surrounded a tasty Krusteaz-type pancake laden with corn kernels. The minuscule list of heavyweight brews disappointed TJ, but we enjoyed a crisp, fruity French bottling of viognier ($21), the suddenly chic challenger to chardonnay.
The espresso was ooh-la-la, but our desserts were blah. Pavlova is Australia's favorite sweet, a thick base of crumbly, sugar-stiff meringue baked very slowly to keep it pure white. The traditional version is topped with fresh berries and swathed in whipped cream to convey a solidified image of "The Dying Swan." The Rooster's rendition replaced the whipped cream topping with a thin layer of walnut-cream frosting under the berries. The chopped nuts tasted distinctly rancid, so we cleansed our palates with orange-chocolate roulade. "I didn't expect a Hostess Ding Dong!" Pat exclaimed. This dessert consisted of two rounds of a chocolate cake so ordinary, it tasted like a boxed cake-mix product. The thin swirls of chocolate cream and center of white pastry cream were equally insipid, conveying no hint of orange flavor.
Driving home suffering some sticker shock at the final bill, TJ and I chewed over whether the Rooster's prices are higher than the cooking really merits. A certain carelessness was manifested by serving subpar mussels, lamb, and nuts, and not serving an extra anchovy. Some dishes were delicious, but others were pallid or awkward reworkings of ethnic specialties done better (and often for lower prices) at local ethnic restaurants. Fusion cuisine means more than an international menu; it calls for more finely tuned, imaginative recombinations than most we'd had at the Rooster.
After the first meal, laden with kitty bags, we found Punky the Feline Food Critic (Maine coon, 14 years, 18 pounds) still hunkered in the kitchen, glaring with loathing at his untouched bowlful of Friskies "Flaked, With Tuna." (Cat food labels may contain pulverized linguistic byproducts). "This wasn't what I ordered," he mimed. But Punky's culinary creed is "When in Doubt, I'll Check It Out" (or "De Felicibus Non Disputandum" not to mention "Chaque Chat a Son G™ut.") We placed a bite of the lamb shank before him. He sniffed the meat and decided that "flaked, with tuna" wasn't so bad after all. When he finished his "flaked," we gave him a piece of fruited chicken, and he joyously demanded at least two more chunks as payment for his review of the lamb. If Punky gets the last bite, he also gets the last word on birds.
