Dresses and Wild Dinners

BC and I headed over to the Legion of Honor with Dean this weekend to see Pulp Fashion: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave. What is it with San Francisco and dresses? A few weeks ago we went to the Balenciaga show at the deYoung. Cristóbal Balenciaga created dresses inspired by Spanish culture and history, elegantly reducing the trills and elaborations into simple beautifully flowing lines and curves. Using only paper, Borchgrave recreates dresses made by famous designers or found in historical and allegorical paintings. While Balenciaga mined the rich history of Spanish couture to create something new and elegant, for me Borchgrave’s creations fall short of being transformed into something really new, just time-consuming reproductions that make me long for the real thing.

ForageSF is a local group attempting to connect San Franciscans with the wild food around them. Saturday night they sponsored a dinner for about 80 of us, structured around the theme of the morel mushroom. The menu contained a beautiful etching of morels, erroneously identified as “le morilles,” improper in gender and quantity, which pretty much set the tone of the meal. While most dishes were carefully crafted, and did contain many interesting ingredients, the foraged components functioned more or less as garnishes, sometimes completely lost. There were 8 courses. The first course was a crostino brushed with fresh bay laurel leaf infused butter, a really wonderfully vibrant flavor. The last course was a serving of perfectly ripe strawberries, dusted with fennel pollen, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and garnished with crème fraiche, each ingredient vivid and distinct. The dishes in between included: a galette of nettles on soggy puff pastry; a wild onion soup with not enough morel flavor to register on my palate; fried smelt; musty duck and mushy risotto; a salad of delicate wild flowers completely obliterated by delicious vinegared beets and a tangy champagne vinaigrette; and yet another rice dish, but this one quite good, with mackerel, sea beans, a quail egg and ponzu. I applaud the ambitiousness of their venture, and it was amazing that they were able to feed us all in a South-of-Market warehouse space, but I think the dishes would have been more successful if the subtle flavors of the foraged ingredients were allowed to shine through.

Last night I dined at La Ciccia with Big Chris, Su-Chen, Emily and Dean, a Sardinian restaurant on 30th Street, spending about half what I spent with the foragers, and for a meal that was twice as good, simply perfection.  Every dish was loaded with flavor, the stewed octopus and calamari impossibly tender, the clams tasting of garlic and the sea, the different textures in the gnocchetti and pork ragu a delight on the tongue. Foragers, take note: let the ingredients do the talking.

One Reply to “Dresses and Wild Dinners”

  1. Thanks for the little tidbit about the dresses. I receive email from the museums, and wondered to myself about how interesting that show might be. Actually, I get more emails from more museums, galleries, and non-profits than I probably should, but I requested them to add my email to their lists. It does provide me with a kind of flow of what’s happening across the US and Europe that I like, however.

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