Gourmet de l'Ouest: Lotus
SFist has decided to take Dr. Phil's advice and to go out on "dates" with our long-standing sweetheart. Living in the Outer Sunset as we do, our desire to keep the relationship alive is tempered by a desire not to go to far from home. And thus a new, intermittent SFist feature is born, in which we review restaurants in the oft-overlooked Richmond and Sunset. We hope your inspired to try new some new places, and we'd love to hear and recommendations of Westside joints you'd like to see reviewed, so please send them our way.
As usual, we sat in bed and talked about going to dinner. Our usual haunts were brought up and discarded. Eventually, we hauled out the aging PowerBook and pulled up Citysearch, and started searching restaurants in the Sunset. We noticed that every page was topped by "featured listings" for two restaurants: Cajun Pacific and Lotus. Since Cajun Pacific closed their doors as a full-serve restaurant in September of last year, they were out of the question, so Lotus became an intriguing possibility (because Internet advertising works, damnit). They describe themselves as "Modern California Cuisine in the Sunset," and a look at their menu (look out, it's a text download to actually see the menu, for some strange reason) showed an impressive, but not disturbingly ambitious breadth of Asian-influenced dishes.
Read on after the jump to hear what happened after we got out of bed and headed up to Noriega and 21st Avenue...
Photo by Mark Jordan, from the Lotus Citysearch entry
It was about 7:30 on a Saturday night as we drove around like dorks looking for the restaurant, because it has a weirdly backlit sign. It's right on the southeast corner of Noriega and 21st, so don't make the mistake we did and keep cruising past like you're psyching yourself up for a drive-by. Once we got into the place we felt a lot better. It's very modern-yet-cozy, and reminded us a little bit of Francie's restaurant, so we felt immediately at home.
We turned down a table right next to the door (why do restaurants even put tables there? No one wants to sit there!) for one right by the openish kitchen, which our formerly-restaurant-employed paramour noted was clean and well-organized -- always a good sign.
A basket of herb-crusted bread was brought to our table with the requisite dipping sauce. This one was an oil and sun-dried tomato mixture that was just OK, and the bread, other than the herbs (which were yummy) was fine. But we didn't hit the carbs too hard beause we had our eye on the main dishes, and we didn't want to fill up.
We began with the asparagus tempura appetizer (6 bucks!), mainly becaue we like fried things and everyone else in the restaurant had it on their table. Now know why, because it's been five days and we're still thinking about it. It comes with a mustard sauce that was pretty good, but it was the tempuraed asparagus that really had us, with the perfect ratio of grease and salt and crunchiness. We've had a lot of s**tty tempura in our time, so please trust us when we say that this was some of the best we've ever had.
For our main course, our companion had the crab ravioli (15 dollars), and we gorged ourselves on the garlic roasted crab (21 smackers). Our beau loved his entree, which is described in the menu as "Roma tomatoes and fresh crab meat with black truffle-porcini ravioli". From across the table, we saw ravioli in a white sauce with some flecks of red, and then there was nothing, as he inhaled it like it was feeding time at the zoo. He reported "usually when you see a white sauce, you expect it to be a pretty standard Alfredo-type thing, but this has something extra. Maybe crab juice? I don't know. It was REALLY good."
We were surprised when our crab came to the table (which is an interesting visual image -- don't worry, he was already dead) because it was served "dry", with no sauce, juice, or butter. Other than the bits of garlic and herbs adhering to the shell, we were basically eating an unadulterated crustacean. This put us off at first, because we're used to covering everything we eat in butter (we wish this was an exaggeration) and we felt sort of lost. About 5 minutes after that it was a Splash-type situation, and our thoughts on condiments were forgotten. The crab stood splendidly on its own, thankfully only in the figurative sense.
Our crab arrived with a plate of garlic noodles which were a great counterpoint to the seafood, and provided us with much-needed carbohydrate energy when we tired of the cracking and snapping of our little pal's exoskeleton.
Though we were stuffed at this point, we bravely sacrificed ourselves for SFist's readership and ordered dessert. Our better half went with the Banana Ecstasy which is "fresh mangos and bananas over a mound of vanilla ice cream". He wouldn't let us have any, so we're thinking it was pretty good. We got the warm chocolate cake, which was actually this cakey crust over hot chocolate goo that made all of our teeth fall out, but in a good way.
Neither of us eat land animals, but we couldn't help noticing the great looking steaks, duck, and pork being devoured by other patrons in the completely full restaurant. If the creatures of the sea aren't your thing, there are pleant of other good-looking options for you at Lotus, never fear.
So, with one shared beer (for beer is our wine), a shared appetizer, two generous main courses, and two desserts, and a pretty good tip, we dropped about 72 dollars, which struck us as more than reasonable given the quality of the food, atmosphere, and experience.
A woman who was sitting behind us loudly proclaimed that she "like(s) this place way more than Thanh Long", a restaurant widely considered to be the industry standard for the crab/noodle crowd. Her server responded "give us five years, but we're not there quite yet." While we agree that they're not quite at Thanh Long's level quite yet, we suspect that it will take them far less time than that to get there. We recommend that you hit 'em now, so you can say "I ate there when..."
Lotus
For reservations: 415 661 0303
Address: 1395 Noriega Street at 21st Ave.
Price: Moderate
Parking: Super easy (less than a block away)