Go to this new Bay Area restaurant for a devastating cake
Each week, critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan shares some of her favorite recent bites, the dishes and snacks and baked goods that didn't find their way into a full review. Want the list a few days earlier? Sign up for her free newsletter, Bite Curious.
The morning after eating at Amara, a Mediterranean restaurant from the owners of Rasa that opened earlier this year, I messaged my colleague and fellow person-with-a-sweet-tooth Elena Kadvany. 'There's a dessert you should know about,' I Slacked. The dessert in question is Amara's praline pistachio opera cake, a nutty, chocolatey, salty layered confection that checks all my boxes. I loved the textural contrasts of the tahini pistachio and chocolate caramel mousses with the crunchy feuilletine and candied nuts. I would drive down to Belmont and make a light, pistachio-heavy dinner of Amara's green hummus (so hued because of ramps and herbs, in addition to pistachios) and that opera cake.
The liminal zone around Memorial Day is one of my favorite times of the year to eat. Summer fruits and veg are tiptoeing their way out of the wings while spring produce is on stage, belting out its swan song. Case in point: the halibut crudo recently on the menu at Nopa. Yes there are the season's first cherries, roughly smashed and perked up with finely minced shallots, but there are also peas. It's a colorful composition, very Abstract Expressionist, with the fish, cherries and pea pistou sprinkled with poppy seeds and drizzled with herb oil.
Nopa. 560 Divisadero St., San Francisco. nopasf.com
Delfina served me another blisteringly good spring-summer mashup in the form of a fried soft shell crab dish, smoky with chile oil. There was also a puddle of what the menu described as 'granturfo' aioli — a term that I am now finding to be unGooglable (perhaps a typo for 'granturco'), but which our lovely server described as the Italian version of huitlacoche. On the side? The first corn I've had this season tangled together with the cultiest of spring cult vegetables, ramps.
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