I traveled into San Mateo County, California last week for Open Sauce, a science and technology convention that ended this past Sunday. While I’m already in the area, I decided to extend my stay for a few days to try out some nice restaurants in San Francisco. My convention blog post is going to be fairly large and I’m still waiting on some friends to send me photos of me that I might use, but until then, I decided to do some food reviews.

Last night, a friend and I went to Nopa, a New American restaurant focused on using fresh, seasonal ingredients sourced from local farms. We applied my typical strategy for restaurants like this—instead of ordering a main entrée, we ordered a lot of smaller plates to build our own meal and try out a wider variety of available dishes.

For our appetizer, we got Little Gems, made from Star Route Farm lettuce, K&J Orchards Bing cherries, caramel walnuts, and Matos St. Jorge cheese.

This was a very refreshing salad. Each piece of lettuce was the perfect size—not too big and not too small—and each bite had a nice crunch to it. The cherries had a great balance of sweetness while still being subtle as to not overpower any other flavors. The caramel walnuts expanded the breadth of texture in the dish, which I liked. I am usually not a fan of cheese, but the flavor of this cheese was smooth and not excessively cheesy.

For my drink, I ordered a non-alcoholic beverage off their zero-proof cocktail menu called the Influencer, made with Vibrante vermouth, smoked black tea, pomegranate, and peppercorn, topped with an orange peel.

Of course, the reason I picked it was because it was named “Influencer,” and it wouldn’t be a normal day in the world of Adam Parkzer without joking and memeing about influencers. The drink itself was passable, but not that great; it had a flavor profile that I had never tasted before in any other drink, but it was a little bit too bitter for my preference.

Next up was local halibut crudo with Dapple Dandy pluot, pickled G&S Farm sweet corn, basil, and urfa chili.

The halibut was fresh and had a satisfying texture. This was the first time I had ever tried pluot, and I think I like it—I couldn’t really isolate and pick up on its core flavor because it was just an ingredient in a broader dish, but I could still tell that had a good amount of sweetness. The sweet corn was a bit overpickled for my preference, but when added together with the other ingredients in each big bite, it served its role well.

Because of a minor mix-up, my friend didn’t get her drink for a little while, but it eventually came out—she got a pomegranate hibiscus soda. I tried a few sips of her drink, and it was sort of like a sweeter and “purer”-tasting variant of my own drink.

For our first savory dish, we got house-smoked trout with marinated cucumbers, Brokaw avocado, tzatziki, purslane, and crispy quinoa.

This was a bit more cooked than I expected for a dish that was supposed to be smoked, but it was still very tender. I took care to add each ingredient into every bite, and it had a very refreshing flavor with no unexpected aftertastes. The quinoa added a fun crunch, and the very lightly fried oily taste added great balance to the richness of the fish.

Our second “main” entrée was saffron rigatoni with Shasta morels, porcini, Genovese basil, and herbed house ricotta.

We mixed in all the ricotta with the pasta. Usually, I’ve found Italian dishes to come with too much sauce such that the cheesiness and saltiness over­pow­ers the pasta, but this dish had great balance of sauce and pasta. The ricotta had a deep, rich flavor, and the pasta was cooked to be soft and chewy.

Our final entrée of the night was flatbread with Nopa bacon, Rojas Farm white nectarine, Point Reyes Toma cheese, and arugula.

I’m usually not a big fan of bacon, but this Nopa bacon was not too greasy and it was cooked to the perfect firmness where it’s not too hard and not too rubbery. The nectarine added an amazing refreshing flavor to the flatbread—it’s like it took what people like about pineapple on Hawaiian pizza, but toned it down enough that it maintained the crispness and sweetness without being way too watery and tangy on pizza like pineapple is. I couldn’t really taste the arugula, but it added some color and was nice for presentation.

For dessert, we got a blueberry apricot cobbler with a hot sugar crust and topped with frosted almonds and crème fraîche ice cream.

Like the main courses, the cobbler also had a very clean and refreshing taste. The cobbler had a great consistency to it, the almonds had a very deep nut­ty flavor, the ice cream was smooth and rich, and even the edible flowers added a nice touch without being too fragrant.

This is a bit silly, but I decided to include this picture anyway—instead of regular salt shakers, Nopa has a small wooden bowl with rock salt in it. All the dishes were well-seasoned so we didn’t need any salt, but I still thought this was a nice touch to make the restaurant feel higher-end and classier.

Here is a view of the interior of the restaurant. My friend works remotely for an East coast company and operates on Eastern time zone, so we booked our reservation for 5:30 PM PDT right when the restaurant opened, which is why it looks so empty. However, by the time we were done with our dinner two hours later, the restaurant was packed and bustling.

Our table was up on the mezzanine, and you can actually see my chair in the top-right corner of this following photograph. It meant I had a nice view of the restaurant throughout my meal, but the downside was that I overheated halfway through my meal because I was directly above the kitchen and the heat of their cooking rose directly up to me.

A recurring theme across the dishes was that the ingredients spoke for themselves. I don’t think there was any extra seasoning added beyond salt and pepper, and the amount of salt used was small enough that it didn’t overwhelm the dish or make it too salty. Any additional supplemental flavors were added with herbs and other premium ingredients that synergized well with the dish, which made all the food taste pure, clean, and refreshing.

Overall, I was very satisfied with my dining experience. We got a lot of dishes and the bill added up pret­ty quickly, but with all factors considered—supporting local farmers, California’s cost of living, San Francisco’s even higher cost of living, and just the overall quality of the dishes—I don’t think the price was unreasonable.

The dining experience was also very pleasant. This was the first time I had seen this friend in-person in almost an entire year so I was fairly distracted with conversation, but when I did notice the waiter come around, he was available when we needed him and he was attentive to our needs. I also think I got some of the most prime seating in the restaurant, as we were in an elevated and quieter area of the res­tau­rant, and we were able to look down on everyone else, almost as if we could people-watch as en­ter­tain­ment.

If you live near San Francisco or are in town visiting and want a nice meal that is light and healthy but still filling and tasty, I’d definitely recommend checking out Nopa. They have some large plates that may be more cost-effective than what we did, but if you want to experience a build-your-own multi-course tasting menu, their small plates are fantastic.

I took an unexpected one-month break from blogging. It’s not because something bad happened or anything—I just got a bit busy with work, got pretty involved with helping one of my friends with one of her business projects, and also ended up spending more time with friends than I usually do.

The funny part, though, is the timing of my one-month blogging break. I disappeared immediately after posting my April Fool’s blog post where I did a re­view of McDonald’s in the same format of my other fine dining reviews. It was probably very obviously a joke for people who read it on the 1st of April, but people who saw it at the top of my website at the end of April and didn’t see the April 1 timestamp were probably a bit confused and thought I just really like McDonald’s.

I don’t have too many photos from April that I’m able to share publicly, but I do have a bunch of food pictures.

Here is a meat pie, chocolate cake, mango smoothie, and steak sandwich from Porto’s Bakery & Café.

Here is a cup of clam chowder being lovingly embraced by hand model Billie-Rae.

On an auspicious night when I was visiting one of my friends in Los Angeles County, he asked me whether I would be willing to join him on an adventure to get Dave’s Hot Chicken. I agreed, and we set off on our journey.

We showed up to the address listed on Google Maps and found out that apparently the restaurant was a ghost kitchen, and the entrance to the building was nowhere in sight, so we couldn’t just go up and order. We called the restaurant a few times, and each time, the phone just kept ringing, and we basically just waited on the line for several minutes for no reason. There was an option to order online, but that wasn’t really helpful for us because we literally could not find the entrance anyway to pick up the food. In frustration, we ate at a different chicken spot.

A few days later, I ordered delivery from Dave’s Hot Chicken out of the sheer curiosity of whether or not my delivery driver would be able to find the pick-up location. Apparently he did, because these two spicy chicken sandwiches arrived at my doorstep half an hour later.

The food was passable at best.

In mid-April, I joined a friend to try out Intercrew.

For her drink, she got a Pink Lemonade, which wasn’t actually pink lemonade, but rather, a mixture of Tito’s vodka, pamplemousse, pineapple, and cran­berry. I did not try any of it, but apparently the drink was extremely strong.

Our first appetizer was naan with ssamjang butter. The naan was very soft with a delicate texture, and the ssamjang butter had a great balance of but­ter­i­ness and spice.

Next was hamachi crudo with blood oranges, amaranth puff, caper, kizami wasabi, cilantro, and yuzu ponzu. The garnish was a little intense and over­whelmed the flavor of the yellowtail a bit, but it was still good.

For my main entrée, I got an uni garlic rice with sea urchin and salmon roe. This was my favorite dish of the restaurant. I am a big fan of all the in­gre­di­ents—uni is my favorite type of sushi, I like caviar and other fish eggs, and garlic is one of my favorite vegetables—so it was reasonable that I liked a dish that had all of it combined.

We also got a pasta dish which, if I remember correctly, was a special that wasn’t regularly available on the menu. It was insanely spicy for some reason; I ended up taking the rest of this with me in a to-go box, and when I went to eat the leftovers, I lightly rinsed the pasta in water before reheating it to try and get rid of the intensity.

My friend decided we need more protein for the meal, so we also got Creekstone beef tartare with singha pears, pine nuts, fresh horseradish, garlic, sesame, and sea beans, topped with raw egg and with a side of crispy rice paper. This was very typical of high-quality beef tartare, and I enjoyed it.

Near the end of the month, I joined some friends at the Jade Court Café. We had some chicken lettuce cups made with sesame soy-marinated ground chicken and with a side of water chestnuts, crispy rice noodles, shaved cabbage, butter lettuce, shredded carrots, and spiced peanuts. We also got two bowls of red bean sesame balls.

After seeing how tragically poor of an experience I had at Donna’s, one of my foodie friends tried to make me not lose all hope in Italian restaurants by taking me to Bestia in Los Angeles, California last week, a spot that she had been to in the past and liked.

For our first appetizer, we ordered beef tartare crostino with dry aged beef, tonnato, egg yolk jam, dill, cured peppercorns, and radish. (The slices of toasted bread are not pic­tured.) This was a well-rounded beef tartare with flavor that was strong, but not gamey. The tonnato sauce added a nice u­nique­ness to the beef tartare, but was prepared mildly enough that it did not compete with the umami of the beef.

Our second appetizer was roasted bone marrow with spinach gnocchetti and smoked breadcrumbs, tossed in aged balsamic. This was my favorite dish of the night.

The bone marrow was exactly what you’d expect from high-quality bone marrow, but the gnocchetti was what truly made the dish—the texture was un­like pasta I’ve ever had, in that it had the perfect amount of push-back against every chew without at all being firm or hard. I usually don’t prefer vin­ai­grette because I don’t like the sourness of it, but this balsamic had the perfect intensity such that it wasn’t sour, but it also had enough kick to pierce through the deep richness of the bone marrow.

Our third and final appetizer was mussels with spicy ‘nduja, garlic, lemon, tomato, and fennel pollen with a side of grilled bread. My friend wanted to take this photo, but it turned out blurry because my camera decided to troll her and focus on the menu under the plate instead.

I’m usually not the biggest fan of ordering mussels or other seafood at Italian restaurants because it usually comes out drenched in ma­ri­na­ra sauce and I don’t think seafood really goes that well with marinara sauce. So, when these mussels came out, I was very pleased that the sauce wasn’t just straight ma­ri­na­ra, but rather, a house-made mixture that wasn’t tomatoey or acidic. We ran out of bread at the end, but the ‘nduja was good enough that I was just scooping and eating straight sauce to clean up the dish.

Our first entrée was spinach ravioli with venison osso bucco, celery root purée, apple balsamic, gorgonzola, and grana.

This tasted great and had a well-balanced flavor profile of meaty, earthy, and cheesy. I usually don’t like strong cheeses, but the cheese on this ravioli was very unique—you could distinctly smell the cheese if you held a piece of ravioli up to your nose, but while I was eating it, I couldn’t really detect any of the moldy flavor that usually makes me averse to cheese.

Our second entrée was cavatelli alla Norcina with ricotta dumplings, black truffles, pork sausage, and fresh thyme.

Although it was still delicious, this was my least favorite dish of the night. Out of all the dishes, this one tasted the most “normal” (while all the other ones had a more premium feel to it). The sausage was a bit high on salt, and they went a little overboard with the truffle such that I think even just a quar­ter of the truffle would’ve sufficed for a well-rounded pasta dish.

For dessert, we had crème fraîche panna cotta with winter citrus, topped with wildflower honey and blood orange syrup and a side of Meyer lemon cook­ies. The sweetness was very subtle and it was clear that it came from the fruits instead of from excessive added sugar. This was a nice, clean dessert to round out the rich, umami meal.

I feel like I need to give a disclaimer first. The person I went with, who picked this restaurant, also picked all the dishes. She and I have very similar taste, so in essence, this meal was curated and catered spe­cif­i­cal­ly to my liking. As a result, the positive things I say about this restaurant may have a degree of bi­as in it.

With that being said, on the basis of the dishes I tried, I think this is my favorite Italian restaurant I’ve ever been to. Italian restaurants are a big hit-or-miss for me because Italian cuisine tends to just be egre­gious­ly excessive in salt and fat, but Bestia focused more on ingredients rather than seasonings. Just to be clear, there are many other restaurants in general that I like better, but specifically for Italian food, Bestia was fantastic.

If you know me, you know that I hate hidden fees and charges. There have been times in the past when I would not recommend a restaurant on the sole basis of them charging an undisclosed fee. Bestia had a service charge, but theirs was more transparently presented, and it was also optional and could be o­mit­ted from the bill. The service charge was described as a means for the restaurant to “ensure com­pet­i­tive industry compensation [and] health and medical benefits for all our valued full-time team mem­bers.”

Our reservation was after 9 PM and it was already getting really late by the time we were done, so I didn’t want to spend more time waiting for the serv­ice fee to be removed from the bill and instead accommodated by tipping less. If you are a restaurant owner and are reading this, I highly discourage you from adding in extra fees like this. There is no problem with just increasing the price of your menu items. The only people who are going to fall for the service charge are ones who are not paying attention, and if they find out about it later, it will just make them feel bad. Those who are paying at­ten­tion will just tip less.

Overall, I had a good time at Bestia and would recommend it for anyone looking for a nice Italian restaurant.