When Peregrine opened a couple of months ago, reviewers swiftly swooped down on it. It's one of a gaggle of ambitious new restaurants lately alighting in the Inner Sunset; its youthful chef is John Christian Fink, making his solo flight after serving in the exalted kitchens of Postrio and Aqua. Given all the in-print crowing displayed in the restaurant's windows, I felt compelled to join the flock, although it's not really fair to review any eatery until it's been open for three or four months. A restaurant, like a comedy troupe, needs time to work out its act -- creating a repertoire, building teamwork, dropping any dishes that don't fly. (Perhaps that was the crash we heard during dinner.)
In keeping with the neighborhood, Peregrine's decor is cool and simple. Its tall front windows look out on a bustling cityscape, but the interior evokes a seaside inn, with half-wooden gray walls, a high ceiling (with utilitarian lights swaying in the breeze from the ceiling fans), and a couple of fake windows at mezzanine height on the inner wall. Everywhere there are flowers, or rather, their representations -- watercolor flower-paintings in heavy gold-painted frames, numerous identical dried bouquets in bulbous vases lined up like fat falcons on the ledges. The kitchen (bedecked by a fierce-looking painting of The Bird) runs along one wall, fronted by counter seating, and about 20 tables are arranged on a low platform opposite.
Arriving on a weeknight, we were seated at a window table, one of only four tables that were occupied during the lengthy course of our dinner. The menu revealed that despite the dining habits of its namesake, Peregrine doesn't serve squab. Other fowls and some meats are available, but seafood is the dominant theme, and "California-Mediterranean" the main culinary mode. In addition to the printed menu there were six "specials." Rather than the chef listing these on a chalkboard or a xeroxed addendum, the servers (and then the patrons) had to memorize them. Reciting their names and ingredients by rote, the waitress evinced enthusiasm for all and firsthand knowledge of none. "How are 'Australian lamb chops' different from American lamb chops?" TJ asked. "They're -- more tender, I think. They come from Australia," she answered.
Deciding to go with the menu's flow and order seafood, I checked the wine list and found it rich in reds but impoverished (five selections plus one bubbly) in whites. Despite misgivings I ordered the only chardonnay available by the glass, from Jekel, a winery I've never much liked. It was as I feared, sour, spineless, and lacking legs. The waitress returned some minutes later with a bowlful of unwarmed bread
(soft French and good hard-wheat Italian) and a ramekin of butter that had the intense saltiness typical of lower-priced brands. I had her take away the Jekel. I'd like to say I replaced it with a Hyde, but in fact I ordered the less expensive of the two other chards, the reliable Edna Valley ($24, about double retail price). Although this is an obvious choice to accompany complex seafood dishes, there were no chilled bottles on hand, so ours arrived tepid in an ice bucket after a long, thirsty wait.
The appetizers, though, were excellent. Despite its trendy ubiquity, TJ was in the mood for a Caesar salad ($6.50). This version had a delicious, easygoing vinaigrette with a hint of anchovy. The promised "house croutons and anchovy aioli" proved to be a single toasted oval of French bread lightly spread with an aioli (garlic mayonnaise) in which the anchovy flavor was also merely a hint, to anchovy-lover TJ's disappointment. The elaborate "special" ($11.50) I ordered was spectacular. A substantial heap of polenta, creamy with melted mild cheese (I'd guess mascarpone), was flecked with pungent fresh herbs, layered with wonderfully smoky slices of grilled portobello mushroom, and liberally sprinkled with aromatic white truffle oil, which is slightly fetid in a divine way, like heaven's compost heap. I was in raptors (sorry) over the three splendidly tender grilled sea scallops with their crunchy, thin, seasoned coating. A few spriglets of frisee were dressed in an orangy-tasting citrus vinaigrette that left no trace on the plate -- they'd evidently been dipped lightly in dressing and shaken off neatly. In concept and execution, this exceptional dish showed that Fink's cooking can really sing.
But our main courses were less melodious. I'd perversely ordered seared ahi ($16.50), another omnipresent fad food. I first encountered it at the dawn of the '90s at Kabuto Sushi, where I spotted two famous chefs also noshing it. Within months it was showing up at Zola's, Garden Court, Fleur de Lys, and then spreading pandemically like the common cold. Still, when perfectly executed with sashimi-grade ahi (a red Hawaiian tuna) it's like scrumptious semiraw filet mignon, with a thin, hot, ebony coating around cool, succulent dark-red meat. Here, it arrived disguised as a birthday cake -- rosy tuna slices were arrayed on a great mound of snow-white mashed potatoes surrounded by festive red-and-yellow dots of beet vinaigrette. The look was better than the taste: Supermarket-grade ahi (from too near the tuna's tail) was sliced a little too thin and cooked a bit too slowly. The edges were grayish, the interiors dark pink rather than burgundy, the texture flaccid, the flavor dull. Even the black-pepper coating was too finely ground. The horseradish mashed potatoes, skimpy on milk and butter, were grainy-textured and their horseradish component proved more intriguing as a concept than pleasing as a flavor.
TJ ordered a special, salmon over corn pudding with succotash ($14.95). The corn pudding was yummy. The succotash had fava beans in place of limas, but while local favas are just now coming into bean, those on the plate were dry and mealy, picked too late, too long ago and far away. The salmon was cooked dead dry. My spoiled Maine coon cat, Punky, subsequently got the lion's share, but he, too, ate only the very center, scorning the sere wastes surrounding it. As at so many other restaurants, Peregrine's appetizers outshine its entrees. If I ever return for dinner I'll order two starters and no main dish, and Punky will get Friskies.
Dessert was worse. At the first bite of the "D'anjou pear tart with vanilla bean ice cream and Zinfandel apricot caramel sauce" ($5.95), TJ, who doesn't know a Tarte Tatin from a tin can, observed, "This sauce needs cinnamon." Indeed, the concoction proved to be a tarted up Tatin, with mushy crust, soggy fruit, and a cinnamon-impaired baby-sweet sauce. "Aagh, why muck with a classic unless you can improve it?" I muttered.
A few days later we returned for the weekend brunch. As at dinner, only a few tables were occupied, although a creperie down the street was spilling brunchers all over the sidewalk. As a server filled my coffee cup, our table canted sharply, dancing under the java's weight. Nobody had gotten around yet to adjusting the little doohickeys on the feet to equalize the legs. Preferring still tables to wobbly ones, we moved, but awhile later, I noticed that a busser was laying the places at another tipsy table, exhibiting the indifferent stoicism of an old ranch hand saddling a restless mare.
The OJ ($1.50), pulpy but sour, tasted like a second-rate commercial brand. The coffee ($1.50 including refills) was OK. An appetizer was again brilliant and generous: About a dozen banana fritters ($4.50), afloat in luxurious waves of heavy cream and orange syrup, sported a crisp, thin coating, surrounding very ripe, sweet fruit. But once more, the entrees looked better than they tasted. Eggs Benedict ($7.50), with a light, pleasant chive beurre blanc instead of hollandaise, had decent Canadian bacon, but one poached egg was too runny, the other nearly solid. Corned beef hash ($7.25) really laid an egg -- two of them on top, poached nearly hard-boiled -- with dried-out shredded meat, which a harsh-tasting red-bell-pepper sauce didn't repair. As though to confirm the restaurant's timing problem, when we were well into our entrees we smelled something burning, and soon the waitress delivered a bowlful of singed whole-grain toast. I glanced at the kitchen and saw the chef too entranced with sauce-tasting and plate-decorating to notice the odor from the peanut gallery. "Stop playing with your food, Johnny," I thought. "Shake off your hood, look around, and smell the toast."
When we got home, I phoned my neighbor Mary Ann, a restaurant-school graduate and avid restaurantgoer, and we compared notes -- alternating chorus and verse, each confirming the other's impressions about the inconsistent ingredient-quality, the random timing of both cooking and service, the overattention to "plating" (which carries little currency in a neighborhood like the Inner Sunset) at the expense of more vital aspects of the customers' pleasure. Yes, it's unfair to review so new a restaurant, especially one with a novice head chef, but somebody's got to say that running a kitchen is much more complex than running a kitchen station. Cooking well is not enough. Lacking a house manager, a chef is responsible for supervising sous-chefs, training servers, buying good ingredients, tending to the tedious details from the legs on the wines to the legs on the tables. At Peregrine, the individual staffers (from line cooks to bussers) seem to be fluttering in separate little circles, waiting for a leader to unite and direct their flight. Given the hawkish neighborhood competition, Peregrine's chef will have to tend his flock more closely if his fledgling is going to soar.
