Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Another recently opened restaurant, this one in the new Academy of Sciences museum in Golden Gate Park. The restaurant itself is in the south wing (to the right when facing the main entrance), it is a bit tricky to find as they don’t have proper signage yet. You need to purchase admission if you are having lunch, but not for dinner. You can easily find parking around in the evening, just keep in mind parking is forbidden after 10PM, making reservations after 8PM more costly because parking in the museum garage.

The restaurant itself is in the basement floor and the decor is lackluster, just a wall covered in moss that gave the room its name. The overhead lights in the handblown glass are incandescent bulbs, a bit disappointing as you would expect a place that makes a big deal of sustainability to use CFL or LED lighting.

I had the smoked trout salad with fingerling potatoes, quail egg and horseradish as a starter. A variant on the classic French bistro dish hareng pommes à l’huile, it is competently executed but that dish mostly emphasises the ingredients and does not showcase the chef’s style. The main course was cavatini with wine-braised duck sugo, which was superb, the duck moist and tangy, the cavatini (small rolled tube-like pasta filled with ricotta and parmesan) complemented the sugo perfectly. It reminded me of a similar dish made with lamb I had at Zaré in Napa. The dessert was a chocolate torte with walnut-cocoa nib sablés. The shortbread were delicate and crumbly, and the torte itself a welcome change from the ubiquitous flourless chocolate cakes, with its two alternating textures of cake and ganache.

The service was good, friendly and attentionate, yet inobtrusive. Sadly, it seems this restaurant did not get the memo about the tanking economy and how menu prices should trend downwards. At $57 for three courses, this is definitely on the high end. It needs to go down at least $15 before I can unreservedly recommend it.

When you design remote controls, make them rubberized. The extra revenue you make from selling replacements (when the hard brittle plastic kind inevitably break) does not come close to compensating for the loss of goodwill and the sheer inventory management costs of keeping all those back models in stock.

Home automation units based on X10/Insteon or proprietary systems like Control4 or Savant start at $100-200. At a time when you can buy a fully functional WiFi router with a 200+MHz processor, a minimum 8M of RAM, 16MB of flash for under $50, why is there not a home automation system that costs $50 and uses standard TCP/IP and WiFi for connectivity?

This restaurant recently opened in Cow Hollow. Their sense of timing is less than fortunate, what with a predictable restaurant bloodbath just over the horizon, but they claim to offer simple crab shack fare prepared with fresh ingredients. I had a crab roll with shoestring potatoes there today.

The crab was OK, not outstanding. The shoestring potatoes were indeed cut very fine, slimmer even than Zuni’s, not the mere frites that some places try to pass as pommes allumettes or shoestring fries, but they were not served hot and really should have been put in the oven prior to serving.

It’s not bad food, but the price is too high, before we even consider the coming recession. If you’re hankering for a crab or lobster roll, the Woodhouse Fish Company on Market and Church is a better choice.

As I was browsing through Google News, I saw some particularly acrid editorials in the WSJ. Their Op-Ed pages have been the preserve of lunatics long before Rupert Murdoch acquired them, but you would think the markets’ fiasco and the general opprobrium of discredit raining upon Wall Street would lead them to some well deserved humility.