Commis
3859 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, CA
Sample menu: http://www.commisrestaurant.com/menu.php 
Review date: September 2012

"At Commis we offer a cuisine driven by ingredients that are grown, harvested, and foraged wild from the land that surrounds us.  In our kitchen we are cooking by way of conjoining modern and classic culinary traditions to compose and reflect the seasons of Northern California."

Chef/owner James Syhabout is Oakland's only Michelin-starred restaurant, which has driven press releases and reviews ever since he received his one star in 2010 (and was a repeat in 2011 and 2012). Syhabout has achieved what most chefs only dream of: he has only a seven-course pre-fixe tasting menu that changes daily. There are no options other than a choice of cheese or dessert to end the meal, and you need to tell the waiter at the beginning which one you want. If you are allergic to anything, you should tell the reservationist ahead of time, because they might need a little notice to produce something different than what everyone else is having.

I met three of my friends – Ilkay and her sister Tulay, my niece Suko – at Commis. I've often remarked there is no way I'd ever get Carlos in here, any more than I'll get him to agree to Plum/Oakland (neither one being his type of restaurant). So this was an opportunity to try a full Modernist tasting menu, as opposed to the more traditional menu with a few Modernist touches (e.g., Fleur de Lys, Madrona Manor, Meritage, etc.).

The Food:
Commis gives out the menus after the meal is finished, presumably because they want you to approach the food with an open mind. We had the following:

Amuse-bouche: The obligatory "nature" presentation, all the rage now with the Nordic cuisine fad. A shallow bowl of washed but not polished stones held four 'fake rocks' – crunchy round cheese crackers completely covered in gray vegetable ash. Each was topped with a leaf of mini-parsley to ensure diners only ate the crackers and not the real rocks. The cracker was made from a local artisanal cheddar, nice and sharp. But in the end, it's still a cracker, albeit with a faint vegetative flavor from the powdered ash.  

Suko's review: This was my first experience with the rampant ash-covered food trend and found it to be way less bitter and unpleasant than I'd been fearing.  But that also meant that it tasted like a cold dry cheese biscuit!

First course: Pacific oyster in sea foam, young ginger and kohlrabi. A medium raw oyster, provenance unknown, in salty white foam – probably the oyster juices turned into foam. There were very tiny dice of ginger in it. If there was any non-foam kohlrabi it went unnoticed. I have no idea whether the foam had any kohlrabi or not; I just don't remember tasting any of this root vegetable. The oyster was excellent. I did find the ginger a little strong for the oyster, and I felt the accompaniments didn't do anything to enhance the bivalve. 

Tulay, who is allergic to oysters, received a lovely creation based on squash, which unfortunately I forgot to ask her about. 

Second course: Squash soup, fresh milk curds with peach and basil. The squash was potimarron, a small French winter squash with a flavor between chestnuts and pumpkin, in a smooth puree. The peaches were diced and not quite ripe so they would add just the right touch of acidity. The fresh milk curds were soft and sweet, very similar to burrata. The basil was infused into an intense, bright green oil. 

This was a beautiful dish, with the kind of precise balance that only a great chef who tightly oversees his staff can produce – witness the abrupt decline of both Boulevard and Prospect less than two months after ExecChef Ravi Kapur left. Syhabout's combination was inspired and executed perfectly. All the flavors were distinct, but no matter how you combined any of them, in any proportion, every spoonful blended together into something delectable and exciting. Here was the creativity and flair we were expecting, although in the end overall it only showed in flashes.

Third course: Albacore tuna with lemon and red perilla, cucumber and samphire. This was a poke or sashimi-type dish. The tuna was chopped, mixed with seasonings, then used as a filling for thinly sliced cucumbers that were folded over. Red perilla is also known as Japanese basil, and has an anise flavor. This was an attractive dish, but although the taste was good I didn't find it remarkable.

Suko's review: The waitress said it was sea beans and it had a crunchy salty flavor so I don’t think it was rock samphire, which has flatter, fleshier leaves.  I think it might have been the more common marsh samphire http://allthingsconsidered.co.uk/2007/06/marsh_samphire.html. The red perilla was such a tiny little leaf it was practically a microgreen but you still got a strong funky mintiness.

Fourth course: Poached farm egg yolk with alliums (onions), smoked dates and malt. The egg is in a subtly flavored cream of puréed onions, and sits atop a small amount of smoked dates. Crunchy dried toasted onions and malt partially encircle the egg. All of us agreed this tied with the soup for the best dish of the evening. It had wonderful flavors, the egg yolk giving it a creamy richness without greasiness. My egg came out a little overcooked, but was still soft in the very middle.

Fifth course: Grilled cod with dried black olives and cauliflower, soft garlic. The cod, an ultra-fresh, perfectly cooked, miniature filet about 2 inches square, had a delicious crispy golden skin. One problem with Modernist cuisine is that one spends a lot of time guessing which ingredients are to be found where. The dried black olives were a salty crumble on the side, with a sauce of cauliflower and garlic. I found the sauce uninteresting, and although the fish was beautiful there was something in the dish that just didn't seem to come together to make the food better than the sum of its ingredients

Suko's review: I’m pretty sure the sauce was cauliflower. At home we prepare it somewhat like that (minus the cream and butter) several times a month so I know that flavor and texture well.  My cod was nicely cooked but almost entirely devoid of flavor.  It wasn’t fishy but it didn’t taste like anything else either.  It needed to have the dried black olives maybe incorporated in the crispy skin or something to give it a pop of salt or umami.  The cauliflower tasted more interesting than my fish.

Sixth course: Beef loin with cracked green farro and buttermilk, marrow juices. I don't think I've ever seen a tenderloin quite so small, and why it was sliced with the heavy indigestible fat cap on top, I have no idea. Approximately 1" thick and less than three inches long, it was cooked to a nice rare with a delicious au jus. There were a couple of short lengths of what tasted like cooked crunchy anise stems. The farro, unfortunately, was a little heavy on the sea salt crystals. Commis is not the only high end restaurant that has difficulty controlling the size of a pinch of salt when they are seasoning an amount of food that's not much larger than your thumbnail. Once more, pleasant but overall unremarkable, and not much for the price.

Seventh course: a palate cleanser shot glass holding a pluot-berry puree, topped with snowy-white anise-hyssop foam. Licorice lovers would love this; non-licorice lovers, maybe not so much. Tulay and Ilkay enjoyed this; I thought it was a little too sweet.  Suko doesn’t like licorice but found the combination interesting and the level of anise tolerable, if not delicious. 

Dessert course (not counted; this is similar to how La Toque/Napa handles their course count): Bee pollen nougat and marigold petal ice cream separate two slices of black fig, each one topped with a honeydew melon ball, with black pepper that (at least on my plate) seemed concentrated on the nougat. I found this dessert an odd assortment of flavors, none of which merged into anything interesting. 

A last amuse bouche was another set of shot glasses, this time with a sweet dark chocolate mousse flavored with wild mint but weighted down with a big dose of sea salt crystals. Suko and Tulay liked this; Ilkay doesn't care for dark chocolate, and I thought this was the least successful of the evening. Suko thought it tasted like a salty Girl Scout thin mint cookie.  Syhabout's creativity seems to falter when it comes to desserts, at least on this evening.

Suko's review: I think mine had less salt than yours because it was salted but not so much to make it unpleasant.  Definitely a bit of uneven salting since I think Ilkay’s was even less salty than mine or perhaps my tongue was more salt-numb after eating mine.

The Service: 
I assume Syhabout has given up pretending that he wants a "casual" place – one of his stated aims when Commis first opened (although he has achieved that casualness with Hawker Fare, his second Oakland restaurant). Commis is as casual as General Otto von Bismarck, father of the German nation. Service is efficient and precise. When one of the tiny melon balls rolled off a fig slice on my dessert plate as it was put down in front of me, the waiter picked the plate back up and returned it to the kitchen so they could carefully place the two together again. Then the plate was brought back and placed down extra carefully, so the faux pas would not be repeated. 

It should be noted, however, that two of us had a few serious food allergies, and Ilkay and Tulay are Muslim so they don't eat pork. Commis was advised of this well in advance, so it was a slip for the waiter to ask if there were any allergies. She might have possibly misspoken, as what she should have asked was who had the allergies.

Suko's review: The person I spoke to on the phone said that we should repeat the allergy information to the waiter to make sure there were no confusions or that they missed anything.  So perhaps the kitchen was informed so they could plan, but the waitress was not. Also you saw we got a second waitress halfway through so perhaps she was covering a table that wasn’t normally hers and didn’t get the full briefing.  Of course at this level, these shouldn’t have been problems that affected the service on our end.

The Summary: 
This is certainly food with passion, but the intent is to unsettle your taste buds, not comfort them. The quest for perfection at times becomes uncomfortably obsessive. Almost forgotten amongst all the plaudits tossed at Syhabout is SF Chronicle's food critic Michael Bauer's original review from 2009 (http://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Commis-might-be-too-minimalist-2300055.php) where he sums up Commis: spare, expensive, Modernist food with skill and creativity, but also a certain remoteness.

The minimalism of Modernist cuisine is both its strength and weakness. There is little room for error here; ingredients must be of the highest quality and as fresh as possible. But it also reduces every ingredient to little more than an object, with no one food being more important than the others it’s paired with. I don’t think it was an accident that all four of us thought the two most successful dishes were the ones that were creamy and ‘comforting’ – the egg cream and the squash soup.

A diner at Commis must be willing to give up the idea of having any control over what one will be eating for dinner. The combinations are occasionally brilliant, usually good, but sometimes they're just odd and disconnected. Bauer makes a good point when he ends his review with, "Syhabout deserves credit for creating a restaurant with such a dramatic point of view, but at times it seems like he's cooking only for himself, not for the customer." 

Take, for example, one of the most memorable dishes we have had over the past year – the lobster salad at Bouchee/Carmel. Lightly kissed by black truffle oil that added a deep earthy note, it lifted the shellfish into the ephemeral. This despite the fact that neither Carlos nor I like truffles – yet a few drops created that magic of 1+1 = a flawless 3. 

In contrast, at Commis, whatever you enjoyed about tonight's meal is old news by tomorrow. Syhabout is focused on ever-changing, increasingly manipulative flavors. The concept of a lobster perfectly poached and exquisitely seasoned by something identifiable isn't enough to satisfy him. And he certainly doesn't want to repeat it tomorrow or the week after. His cooking is undeniably brilliant, but it's haute cuisine with a severe case of ADHD. Try to ask for that squash soup again and he'll likely brush you off faster than your grandmother's grungy cardigan.

Like the equally lauded nouvelle cuisine of Le Petit Chaya/Los Angeles in the 1980's, it was pretty much unnecessary to have any teeth to chew with. There were only a few ingredients in our Commis dinner that needed more than a cursory gumming, such as the anise stems. Modernist cuisine must be a godsend for the elderly who've lost all their teeth.

Commis is best approached not as a restaurant, but as if you were eating at someone else's home (admittedly paying dearly for this privilege, especially in view of the minute size of the food). You have no control over what's being served or how much food there will be. You might like it, or you might not. At the very least, it will be interesting. You might not have any desire to live there, but it promises to be different than any other house on the block.

Tulay and Ilkay both had wine with their dinner, with Ilkay taking the recommendation of the waiter for a Gruner Veltliner. Tulay started with a sparkling wine and then switched to the Gruner as well. They both enjoyed the Gruner.  There was no problem with the restaurant about the four of us putting our credit cards down to split the bill. 

Four people, dinner: Three  glasses of wine, four tasting menus, with tip was approximately $450 (I contributed an OpenTable $50 certificate that I got for redeeming points and we split the remainder proportionately).