If one thing about dining culture in 2015 is just damn difficult, it's locating the border between highbrow and lowbrow, upscale and casual. A burger might cost $20, but you'll get a numbered card in an 18-inch metal stand to carry back to your communal table after you've ordered it at an iPad. Octogenarian former mayors who insist that good eating means restaurants with tablecloths notwithstanding, it's common enough to get high-quality food served with compostable corn-ware utensils and nary a maître d' nearby. Fine by me — this is a dressed-down, food-obsessed city, and starchy fine dining standards can wither away as long as things taste good.
But when a British (but only vaguely so), 40-seat restaurant run by two chefs with highfalutin pedigrees opens in an increasingly affluent neighborhood, things can get inverted even further. Enter Lord Stanley, which is helping transform the last vestiges of Polk Gulch into an upscale Polkstrasse — which is to say, the restaurant's emphasis on culinary technique and presentation comes at the expense of nearly everything else.
Lord Stanley lacks gratuities (they're already included), and it lacks a full liquor license (although there are several vermouth cocktails), but what it had in abundance when I visited was balance. Married chefs Rupert and Carrie Blease met at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxford, U.K., and spent time at New York's Per Se and Blue Hill (respectively) before moving to Commonwealth and Central Kitchen here in San Francisco. Virtually every one of their dishes saw its ingredients knitted together — often subtly, sometimes quite cleverly — into a smart composite. And almost all showed up with some form of flower buds, the equivalent of that trend-let where dudes were weaving purty blossoms in their beards.
Starting off, the onion petals with sherry vinegar (six pieces for $5) each came served in a single layer of pearl onion, the way you might poach eggs in silicone cups. I'm not sure I've ever had onions that I would call "refreshing" before these, but their fine milky filling was a delicate way to kick off dinner. The other starter snack, pickled shellfish ($8) with dill and kelp-like strips of fennel, looked far more like Oslo than Oxfordshire, and whatever bracing qualities that vinegar and brine bring balanced out nicely. Still, saying "shellfish" implies at least some variety, so the fact that we got only mussels was disappointing. You can't help but wonder if it was false advertising or if the law of averages just didn't work in your favor when it all got ladled out.
Similarly, a dish of English peas ($15) was advertised as having "fresh curds," but it was indistinguishable from plain old ricotta — albeit fresh and almost certainly housemade. Thin strips of carrot, cooked in barely noticeable whey, accompanied the peas. It was subtle but everything harmonized, and the cold broth gave the peas body.
One of the bigger surprises was the marinated heirloom tomatoes ($16), piled high on durable pain d'epices, like a haphazardly diced bruschetta. But since pain d'epices is made with rye flour and honey, it was sweeter and less salty than the standard garlic-rubbed antipasto. There were shavings of pantaleo (a rare, raw goat's milk cheese from Sardinia) that may or may not have been placed with tweezers, plus a dab of black garlic tapenade sitting opposite, in the shape of a garlic clove. It was as beautiful as it was tasty, again inverting the already convoluted casual-upscale dynamic.
For the mains, a plate of black cod, yellow wax beans, avocado, and curry ($30) may have signified the end of the "lardcore" era, as the fish's bacon-heavy flavor — in spite of there being no trace of bacon — was magical. Searing an avocado so that it chars a little on one end while remaining rich and creamy was exactly the right balance to the cod without relying on fat to get it through. But the lamb shoulder ($29) was the true winner. Slow-cooked and grilled, and served with alliums — the pretentious way of saying "onions plus spring onions" — plus a bit of greens, it pulled itself back from being too wintry to land right where it should. My dinner date and I found the addition of lemon to be incongruous and cloying, but it didn't matter because both the lamb and the alliums were so fantastic. (Mopping up the jus with Lord Stanley's bread until the plate is clean is mandatory.)
Occasional eye-rolling word choices aside, the food is stellar. The décor, though, is not. Here I want to tread carefully, because I'm aware of the pitfalls of enforcing one's own aesthetic on the world. But Lord Stanley looks like an art gallery without any art. There's cold, and then there's barren, and if the only adornments on the stark, white walls are squiggly lamps and a cathode tube in the shape of an arrow pointing to the restroom — which, incidentally, is warm, and has a pile of fresh towels — something's amiss. The lack of decoration extends to a lack of sound dampeners, and I don't imagine that Frederick Stanley — 16th Earl of Derby, Governor General of Canada, bestower of hockey's Stanley Cup, and the restaurant's namesake — would much approve of shouting himself hoarse at the dinner table. So the casual atmosphere might be better served if the interior matched the kitchen's own upscale quality. Still, if you focus with laser-like concentration on the plate in front of you, you're sure to overlook it.
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