Oliveto – Oceanic Dinner, in Oakland, CA – update, dinner
Special menu: http://www.oliveto.com/ourcommunity/events/12th-annual-oceanic-dinners-the-menu 
Review date: July 2013

In January 2013 we returned to Oliveto for one of our usual weekly dinners, after a long absence of several years. We had not enjoyed former chef Paul Canales' cooking, and it took a while before we got a good recommendation on the new chef. 

There were slight flaws during that dinner, but overall it was good enough that I signed up for Oliveto's mailing list. They do a lot of "special" dinners during the year, and being on the mailing list is the easiest way to be alerted to these. 

In March 2013 we attended the Whole Hog dinner with a couple of friends. Everyone was wowed. The dinner was creative and beautifully executed, start to finish. Our third visit, the Hen Dinner on May 2013, wasn't quite up that level – we are not especially fond of guinea hen, which is the latest poultry fad and was heavily featured. But Chef Jonah Rhodehamel did offer a duck liver preparation that came so close to foie gras as to be virtually indistinguishable from The Real Thing, making that one dish alone worth the entire meal.

Inez came with us to the Oceanic dinner. The menu had come out almost two weeks in advance, and surprisingly didn't change much from the final menu offered to us by the hostess. The only thing unexpected was that the evening's menu was much shorter than the preliminary menu. The dishes were the same, but unlike the Whole Hog and Hen dinners, Oliveto is alternating availability for half the dishes, over the four nights of the Oceanic menu.

Although Carlos loves raw fish, he likes it in simple preparations, so he wasn't tempted by any of the overly-elaborate crudo dishes. Unfortunately, most of the starters sounded interesting to him, but I wasn't tempted by anything except the octopus. 

We compromised by sharing the cioppino entrée as a starter. This provided yet another example of Oliveto's distressingly pedestrian service, which seldom if ever matches the food when the latter is at its best. The waitress gave us three spoons, but a few moments later, we got one soupbowl from a busboy. I immediately asked for a second bowl, but although I received a blank stare and he had to echo my request as if it were something unusual, he brought an empty bowl over quickly. 

The failure to split the cioppino in the kitchen is, alas, a not uncommon occurrence these days. But at Oliveto's price levels, it's yet another ding against their dislocation where the front of the house never seems to communicate with the kitchen. I can't imagine this happening at Perbacco or Artisan or Fifth Floor, all of which are within Oliveto's price range.

The cioppino was a touch on the salty side, but the taste of the broth (what there was of it, which wasn't much) was yummy. Some of those Maine lobster shells had definitely stayed a while in that fish broth, and the saffron flavor was wonderful. We mopped up every bit with the bread, for it was just too good to waste. There wasn't much seafood either, but what there was – mussels, a shrimp, a clam, baby squid, white fish – was fresh and succulent. 

This was a small plate for an entrée, but split as a starter was actually just right. There was a lot of butter emulsifying that sauce, so the modest amount was perfect. Had there been more sauce, we would have filled ourselves up with a couple of baskets of bread to mop up all that buttery seafood goodness!

Carlos ordered the black cod, with tomatoes and eggplant. The cod skin was beautifully crisped, the flesh meltingly tender....but it was also extremely salty. Not just the outside, but the flesh itself was salty. Eaten with the vegetables it was tolerable, but it would have been better without the excessive sodium.

Still, his salt levels were moderate compared to my and Inez's entrées. They were snowed under a level of salt to the point where it was the dominating flavor. I ordered the gnocchi with smoked trout. The trout was salty, which is unnecessary – the Ritz Carlton in SF makes a fabulous housemade smoked trout without making it taste like a salt lick.

But it was the gnocchi that was over the top in my dish. I've never encountered such salty gnocchi, ever. They were tender, pillowy, perfect in every respect, except for that ridiculous saltiness. The cream sauce and baby green beans were delightful, but I had to use a couple of slices of fresh bread to break up the sodium overload. It was tragic to ruin such lovely light-textured gnocchi this way.

Even worse was Inez's entrée, the Dungeness crab tajarin. A hand-cut pasta similar to angel hair, Carlos had ordered this same dish in January from the regular menu. He and I thought it was very good, coming up to our salt tolerance but not going over it. 

This time, however, it was hideously over-salted. Inez mentioned at the first bite it was salty but continued to eat it. It wasn't until she was finished eating that she handed me the last spoonful and asked if I agreed it was too salty. One taste was enough; I told her she should have sent it back immediately. 

I had ordered a side dish of broccolini for her, but neither the menu nor waitress mentioned it was grilled, not sautéed. Although all baby stalks, it was too tough for her to eat, so I gave her the green beans from my dish and took the broccolini for myself. It was a little salty (surprise, surprise) but not so much that it was inedible.

Clearly the line cook who has been busy oversalting just about every vegetable dish we've gotten at Oliveto's has now moved on to the pasta cookery. The Hog dinner turns out to be the lone exception in our four 2013 dinners, where everything was salted just enough but not overly so.

We ordered a couple of desserts. The new pastry chef as of May is Kam Golightly. The biscotti is still good but unlike our first two dinners, where it was twice-baked but unusually light and tender, it's now coming out somewhat coarser in texture and slightly harder. It's still good, but not as exceptional as it was before. 

We chose the strawberry tart for Inez, since her pasta was not only lousy but small. She loves fruit, and the strawberries were ripe and sweet. They were on a sweetened ricotta filling, which she ate, and a rather thick and heavy shortbread shell, which she didn't. A spoonful of housemade peach gelato was a nice accompaniment. 

My decaf cappuccino came with more foam than I remembered but was still properly dry, and Carlos' regular coffee was fine if somewhat weak.

We were disturbed enough by the excessive saltiness to ask for the manager, Shane. As is usual these days he comped us generously on the bill. It's a nice gesture, but this oversalting issue (and comping) also happened during the Hen dinner. 

What Oliveto doesn't seem to comprehend is that I don't want a discount on bad food. Instead, I want them to stop ruining some very fine food. What's the point of having salt cellars on every table if some maniac is going to oversalt food before it ever gets to the customers?

We love Chef Rhodehamel's flavors and conception. But the execution is being undermined by some unknown line cook's carelessness. We're getting tired of playing Russian Roulette at these prices. Encountering one oversalted dish at Stella Nonna is excusable, but paying Oliveto almost twice as much for the dubious privilege of receiving four oversalted dishes is insulting.

With these increasing flaws and at these prices, Oliveto is trying hard to get dropped from our return list unless the kitchen improves. We'll give them one more chance at some future date, but right now none of us are eager to return here.

It's very discouraging. The Whole Hog dinner was so wonderful...but this? This was a travesty. The kitchen should be embarrassed, although they probably aren't.

Three people, dinner: four entrées (one shared as a starter), one side, two desserts, three beverages, with tip but not including the discount, would have been approximately $185.

Oliveto / Hen Dinner; Oakland, CA – update, dinner
Review date: May 2013

We had an excellent time at Oliveto's Whole Hog dinner in February 2013. When I received the mailing about their "Hen Dinner", with interesting-sounding dishes like cappelletti of duck with sage or seared duck liver with blackened strawberries, we were intrigued. I made reservations for Carlos and I to attend on a Friday evening.

As long as you're eating early, parking along College Avenue within a block of the restaurant is possible. It gets progressively more difficult as people get off work, however, so we try to reserve no later than 6 p.m.

We were seated at a table by the windows, in the back where it's much quieter (the bar for the upstairs is located in the larger dining room in the front). We wanted to try a couple of the starters, so we shared the torchon of goose liver, served with brioche toast and a spiced peach compote. 

The torchon was cold but not icy-cold. Goose liver is so rich, it begins to soft at room temperatures almost immediately. It was smooth and creamy, delightful with the thick-cut toast and a tiny dab of the fruit. This isn't large, but it's enough for two to share. It's too much richness for one person. 

Next, Carlos went for that seared duck liver with blackened strawberries and old aceto balsamico. This was an exquisite five-star creation, so beautifully soft and delicate it was as close to foie gras as we Californians are likely to get, at least until that stupid legislation is repealed. The strawberries were softened in the cooking and were very sweet, with the terrific balsamic adding just the right touch of subtle acidity. 

I ordered the hen and lobster boudin blanc with English peas, fava beans, and morel mushrooms. This had a lovely balance between the poultry and seafood flavors, something that isn't easy to do. The accompaniments were outstanding, in a light creamy sauce which allowed all the various flavors to shine.

Although I was tempted by the gnocchi, I ended up with the roasted squab. We know that Oliveto makes fabulous gnocchi, which is always on the regular menu. This dish offered an artichoke-potato gratin alongside a partially boned squab, complete with claws. The squab was good, but one half was slightly oversalted on the skin. Squabs aren't very large, and somebody's pinch was a little too much. The gratin was flavorful, but I have to fault them on the cutting of the vegetables. The technique was very sloppy, with big thick pieces of both vegetables that promptly slid apart as soon as touched with a fork. The celeriac puree underneath was divine; I wished there had been more of it.

Carlos chose the roasted sausage-stuffed Guinea hen. There was a drumstick that was a bit too chewy to be pleasing. The breast meat and thigh meat were formed into a roulade, with the liver used in a sausage stuffing in the middle. The liver sausage was seasoned with the classic quatre épices, giving it that sweet herbal flavor. It came with roasted fingerling potatoes, and a heap of creamed spinach that was grossly oversalted.

He liked this dish, but would have liked a crispier crust on the skin that formed the roulade. The spinach was very disappointing; he left most of it. We mentioned to the waitress that this is the second time we have gotten dishes where the vegetable sides were too salty (it happened on all three entrees on our January 2013 visit, a month prior to the Whole Hog dinner).

We were well satisfied and returned to our usual ending here, an order of housemade biscotti and cappuccinos. Once more the espresso drinks were on-point, although the biscotti, oddly, seemed the merest bit overbaked by Oliveto's own standards. They were still soft enough to be eaten on their own, with tonight's yummy version being pistachios and sultana raisins.

Outside of needing to remember from now on to specify that we don't want any additional salting on our dishes, we have to say we're very pleased overall with Chef Rhodehamel. Oliveto is still on the high end considering their occasional lapses on execution, but the creativity and imagination here is truly exciting these days. 

It is once more a fun splurge to come here and see what new dishes Oliveto is doing. And we really hope that seared duck liver makes it onto the menu on a regular basis – it's an amazing dish!

Two people, dinner: three starters, two entrees, two desserts, three beverages, with tip was $176. The bill was adjusted by the manager to reflect our mention of the oversalting. Without the adjustment, the bill would have been $191.

Oliveto in Oakland, CA: Whole Hog Dinner
Full Whole Hog Menu at: http://www.oliveto.com/ourcommunity/events/menu-for-2013-whole-hog-dinners-at-oliveto
Review date: February 2013
(previous reviews appended below)

Five years ago it felt as if everyone in California was going to end up vegetarian. Restaurants such as Roxanne Klein's revolutionary Roxanne and the health-food chain Cafe Gratitude served not just vegetarian but raw vegan food to huge acclaim, proselytizing the mantra of "eating low on the food chain."

But you just can't keep a good mac'n' cheese down...or for that matter a gourmet cheeseburger, LOL. The recession of 2009/2010 accelerated the trend reversal from cashew nut cheese and live-grain sprouts, to locavore produce. From local produce, it was a quick step to local and heritage meats, as diners swung back to comfort foods and meat-eating. 

Roxanne's is long-gone. Cafe Gratitude fights for air against the new, upscale, tail-to-snout specialty butchers such as Belcampo Meats and Restaurant in Tiburon, The Local Butcher Shop in Berkeley, and 4505 Meats in San Francisco. Carlos and I have seen fewer vegetarian options on almost all menus, with an abundance of meat and fish appearing again.

From Zazu's comparison of identical cuts from two different heritage breeds, to Chop Bar's whole pig BBQ in partnership with Linden St. Brewery, to Oliveto's use of all parts of the pig for some unusual dishes, it seems as if "whole hog" dinners are springing up everywhere these days.

Our recent dinner at Oliveto (January 2013) was generally good, although the consistent oversalting of the vegetables, along with a high bill, led us to downgrade them to a "B+" instead of an "A-". Still, we had felt the new (to us) Chef Rhodehamel was doing a good job, more to our taste than his predecessor Paul Duende. So when news of the Whole Hog dinner came out, I made a reservation for a Friday night for four people. We invited our good friends Mel and Christie to join us.

The menu was published a few days before we were scheduled to go, giving all of us a chance to read it and get excited about what dishes to choose. This was Mel's and Christie's first time dining at Oliveto. We arrived a bit early, so we walked around the Rockridge Marketplace to check out the various vendors: coffee, bakery, pasta, cheese, specialty grocers, and massive deli/take-out cases.

The Whole Hog menu is creatively printed on a single 11x17" sheet. A drawing of a hog is marked into seven sections: Leg, Loin, Boston Butt, Head, Picnic, Belly, and Mixed Cuts. Each section offers two to six dishes, which might be antipasto, pasta, or entree – whatever the chef has dreamed up that evening. It makes it a little hard to decide what to choose at first, but it's a fun idea and ends up working well.

We ordered the following starters:

(Head) Minestra of pork with hominy, cabbage, radishes and oregano. I ordered this soup, and was very pleased with it. The broth was very tasty, and the cabbage and radishes, which were still a little crunchy, added a good savory pepper flavor which was accentuated by a gentle herbal accent. There was a generous amount of pork shreds in it. This was an excellent starter: satisfying without being heavy or too filling.

(Belly) Crispy braised pork belly with celeriac, apple and frisée. Mel and Christie shared this, and it was excellent. A thin even layer of fat remained between the pork layers, but not too much of it, and the flavors were wonderful together. The accompaniments went well with the pork belly. Normally Mel and Christie don't care for frisée, but they said it was perfect in this dish.

(Belly) Pancetta-wrapped sardine with fregola all'arrabbiata. Carlos received a good-sized sardine (with head) that had been boned, seasoned, wrapped in a mild, unsalty pancetta, lightly floured, and beautifully fried. Our friends aren't fond of strong-flavored fish so they passed on tasting it, but I snagged one piece and agreed with Carlos that this was well handled. The fregola, aka Israeli couscous, was good although it was very mild for an arrabbiatta sauce, which is normally given a gentle kick with red chile pepper flakes.

(Mixed Cuts) Potato gnocchi with ciccioli di Mangalitsa (cracklings from a Mangalitsa hog, a traditional Hungarian breed). Carlos ordered this extra starter. It's sized as a half-order, and was probably the best dish of the evening. The potato gnocchi were ethereally light, the sauce was rich yet also light, and the cracklings were more like crisped fine pancetta dice. 

(Mixed Cuts) Charcoal-grilled pork heart with horseradish, spring onion and arugula. I ordered this, the second of the three starters I chose for this meal. I love the Peruvian corazon anticuchos, grilled beef heart, and thought it would be interesting to try pork heart. Sadly, what I received was a whole heart neatly sliced, but although seared on the outside it was completely raw inside. 

I like offal such as heart and liver, but I don't like them raw under any circumstances. I prefer them cooked medium to medium-well. I tried one small piece, but then summoned the waitress and asked that she take the dish away. I requested the potato gnocchi in its stead, and the kitchen obliged by sending it out within just a few minutes. I wasn't charged for the pig heart, which I appreciated.

Everyone picked different mains:

(Loin) Charcoal-grilled porterhouse with creamed spinach, fingerlings, and pork sugo. Mel got the best entrée of the evening (in my and Carlos' opinion). The porterhouse is the T-bone cut. The tenderloin is very small and tender, but the loin side tends to be chewier in pork than in beef. But it has good flavor, and this was lightly brined before grilling, so it remained juicy. 

(Loin) Spit-roasted porchetta with radicchio, hazelnuts and aged aceto balsamico. Christie received a generous slice of porchetta, with the outside fat well crisped (the interior fat keeps the rolled-up pork meat juicy but Christie, as many people do, cut most of it off and left it to one side). The flavor was sweet and rich but quite different from the porterhouse cut. At Mel's suggestion, Christie tried eating the pork and radicchio together and was surprised how well they went together. The balsamic was a very light drizzle, precisely how it should be, its sweetness offsetting the radicchio bitterness and its acidity cutting the richness of the roasted pork. I like balsamic, but all too often it is used with a ridiculously heavy hand in California kitchens. Oliveto's balance on this dish was well executed.

(Leg) Spit-roasted pork leg with molasses-braised beans, kale and pork brodo. Carlos chose this dish, being a lover of baked beans. The thin slices of pork were perfectly rare all the way through: a little chewy which is only to be expected from a free-range heirloom hog. The flavor was startlingly different than Mel's chop and Christie's roast, with a taste that was almost like liver. The beans were a fine accompaniment to the pork. 

(Leg) Terrina of trotter and sweetbreads with soffrito, dandelion greens, and sherry vinaigrette. I ordered this starter as my main. It was good, but would have been better with a more balanced sauce. If there was a sherry vinaigrette anywhere, it was overwhelmed by an unthickened sauce underneath tasting mostly of Coleman's mustard. Good with a pig's foot, disastrous with sweetbreads. There's no comparison between this dish and La Folie's outstanding oxtail-and-sweetbread terrine.

So far this had been the best meal we'd ever had at Oliveto – interesting, creative food matched with consistent good service. We happily checked out the dessert menu, and made the following choices:

Mel ordered the winter strudel of apples and brandied fruits with vin santo (white wine) ice cream. Just a few sheets of crisp brown filo pastry enclosed a fine, not-too-sweet fruit filling. So often pastry chefs add so much sugar to a strudel filling that one can barely taste the fruit! I don't know who their pastry chef is at the moment (long-time pastry chef Jenny Raven seems to have left, since Oliveto posted the job opening on January 23, 2013!) but the unknown did an excellent job on this.

Even better was Christie's cherry amaretto ricotta tart. Preserved Bing cherries in a fresh whole-milk ricotta tart filling were topped with a spoonful of crème fraiche ice cream on top. The tart itself sat in a pool of amaretto custard sauce that held a light drizzle of chocolate. This was a wonderful dessert – nothing too rich or too sweet, just gentle clean flavors that went together beautifully.

Carlos and I finished with cappuccinos and the amazing housemade biscotti that Oliveto offers. Tonight's biscotti were walnut-dried fig, and they were perfect with the espresso drinks. Mel and Christie had never had anything other than the rock-hard, oversized commercial biscotti, and were amazed at the difference.

Much as we love summer fruit, these desserts were a stellar example of how beautifully winter and preserved fruits can work when handled with skill and creativity.

All of us really enjoyed this dinner. In comparison to our previous meal in January when Inez, Carlos and I ran up a surprisingly large bill, this meal for four felt more reasonable. The food wasn't perfect but it was creative and delightfully different from the usual Cal-Italian standbys. Along with having a truly competent waitress, all four of us counted the Whole Hog Dinner a success. 

Carlos and I are actually looking forward to returning again, the first time we've said that in six visits to Oliveto. Chef Rhodehamel has gotten our attention, and that unnamed pastry chef knows what s/he is doing with the Hobart.

Four people, dinner: six starters, three entrees, four desserts, two beverages, with tip was $308.

Oliveto in Oakland, CA  - update, dinner
web: http://oliveto.com/menus.html 
Review date: January 2013
(previous review appended below)

We have not been to Oliveto since April 2008, when we came to the reluctant conclusion after several tries that our palates simply did not match up with then-ExecChef Paul Canales. Oliveto's food style has remained consistent throughout three different chefs: rich, salty, a little heavy. It's cooking that was intended, and really needs, to be matched with wines. The dishes reward a gutsy Rhone or full-bodied Valpolicella, or a white made with depth like a good-quality Sauvignon or a Verdicchio. 

Since we don't drink, Paul Canales' food never quite came together for us. It was fingertip-close, but just missing that magic where the whole is greater than the sum of the ingredients.

But in late 2010 Paul Canales moved on (and will soon open the jazz club/restaurant Duende in Oakland's Uptown area). The current ExecChef is 28-year-old Jonah Rhodehamel, a veteran of the San Francisco restaurants La Folie, Quince, Zinnia and Americano. He recently got a good review from my niece and fellow foodie Suko, who also doesn't drink. So Oliveto moved up on our "retry" list for one of our weekly dinners.

Oliveto is in the restaurant-heavy Rockridge neighborhood, on the corner right by the BART station. The new A16 Oakland will be just up the street, while Michelin-starred chef James Syhabout is opening his third restaurant a few blocks down. Street parking can be easy or hard, depending on the day of the week and time you're dining. 

Despite the odd triangular shape of the building, it's a handsome dining room upstairs, with a high beamed ceiling, restful colors, and big picture windows overlooking colorful College Avenue storefronts with their neon signs. The windows actually crank open on those rare warm days, a nice touch that illustrates the thoughtful design that goes into Oliveto. Upstairs has a good number of tables with reasonably comfortable chairs. It's nice that diners are not crammed in like sardines – people are nearby, but not on top of one another. We chose the upstairs restaurant, which is open for lunch (Mon-Fri only) and dinner. The Oliveto Café is downstairs, open from breakfast through dinner with a casual, less expensive menu. The Café is noticeably tighter on space.

We didn't find the menu very interesting that evening, so it took us a while to decide. Finally we settled on sharing the fritto misto, which had some unusual components to it: sardines, scallops, razorback clams, and shirako. This last is not something one often encounters in the U.S. – it's considered an acquired taste even by the Japanese. Also called kiku or tachi, shirako is the milt, or sperm sacs, of male cod. The Japanese serve it in both raw and cooked form. Oliveto cuts it into 1" pieces. Battered and deep-fried, it has a mild fishy taste and a soft, almost creamy texture. Carlos and I weren't sure what it was when we were eating it, but I liked it. He was okay with it, not especially enthused.

Carlos also ordered one of the pastas as a primi course, then confirmed with the waitress that he wanted it brought separately from the fritto misto. When it arrived, the fritto misto also contained a couple of thin batter-fried slices of Meyer lemon. It was a very modest serving, a little too heavily salted on the top items. The batter was a medium-weight flour batter which tends to obscure flavors a little. If there were any scallops in the mix, we both missed them. The saffron aioli underneath was redolent of garlic and utterly superb. We would have loved to have had twice as much of it as there was! The aioli brought this dish up to a B+ level; by itself the fritto misto wasn't more than a C due to the thicker flour batter.

Carlos's pasta was tajarin, an angel hair-like pasta of irregular lengths. Angel hair is a round pasta; tajarin is a flat pasta, which he prefers. It had a rich lemon-flavored cream sauce with Dungeness crab and tarragon. The portion was modest, just as it should be. I found this a touch salty, but Carlos loved it, and particularly enjoyed the type of pasta. 

The entree he chose was the steelhead trout. It must have been a Hercules of the trout world, because it was a narrow but very long cross-cut filet, about two inches wide and at least seven inches in length. It had very tasty pink flesh, which some attribute to a wild diet of crayfish as opposed to the white-fleshed trout raised on fish farms. The skin was crisped, although even Carlos admitted it was slightly oversalted. But the cooking was perfect, with the fish just slightly underdone as we prefer it. The fish itself wasn't salty, just the skin. It was lovely, very fresh and sweet.

It came with a parsnip puree, halved Brussels sprouts sautéed with diced pancetta, and an extremely odd sauce that tasted just like the McDonald's honey mustard dip that accompanies McNuggets (don't ask how we know this, LOL). Carlos ignored the honey mustard sauce as it overwhelmed the taste of everything else, but he loved all the other accompaniments. He did comment that the vegetables were rather salty, which he attributed to the pancetta. 

Inez has more and more trouble reading menus these days, so we directed her to the roasted duck breast. It was served with salsify, a carrot puree, and a ginger sugo. The duck was beautifully cooked, rare but not raw, and very tender. Carlos prefers a stronger, gamier taste, but most duck, goat, and lamb are being bred for increasingly milder flavor aimed at pleasing mainstream Americans.

She loved the taste of the duck, but wasn't impressed by the sides. I tried one of the very thin, young salsify stalks and found it grossly oversalted, to the point where it overwhelmed the sweetness of the baby vegetable. The salsify was so young it tasted more like a white carrot, too immature to develop the oyster-like flavor which makes this underutilized vegetable so unique.

I chose the rib-eye, with Yellow Finn fingerlings, creamed spinach, and au jus (described on the menu as "beef sugo"). I received five good-sized slices of steak, beautifully cooked to a medium-rare, with a great crust, and like the duck breast, a very tender texture. The Finn slices were shockingly sweet, and Carlos thought they had been glazed, although nothing was mentioned on the menu.

However, my spinach was way oversalted, almost to the point of bitterness. That all three plates had oversalted vegetable sides showed it was no accident, and we mentioned to the waitress that whoever was responsible for the vegetables was over the top with the salt shaker.

For his final course, Carlos opted to try the blood orange Napoleon, known in Italian as a millefoglie. I have no idea why he is so fond of this dessert, but neither does he! Also famed as a classic French dessert, the gâteau de mille-feuilles, where it dates from at least the 1600's and was codified into French haute cuisine under the great chef to royalty, Marie-Antoine Carême. Although beautiful when properly executed, I've honestly never had a one that tasted as good as it looks. 

This version wasn't going to change my mind. Thin puff pastry layers – a scant total of six or eight, at most – made up the top and bottom of a square that barely corralled a tasty pastry cream. The blood orange slices and sauce were drizzled around the edges. It was more like a tart with a crust top, not a multi-layered display of the baker's art. The puff pastry was an excellent quality, howeve. It was super thin, flaky, rich with good butter taste and toasted to a medium brown without any burnt edges. Carlos liked it, but didn't love it.

I chose to finish with a decaf cappuccino and the chocolate-hazelnut biscotti, which are housemade and excellent. If you've only had commercial biscotti, house- or homemade can be a revelation: crisp yet tender, softening with even a quick dunk in the espresso foam, instead of needing to be soaked in hot coffee for a four-second count before risking your teeth. The only strike against them was my bias for bittersweet chocolate instead of the sweet dark chips Oliveto used, but that's a U.S. preference.

Carlos' coffee was very good, dripped to order (the waitress warned us it would take about six minutes). But the winner was my cappuccino, which was everything a great cappuccino should be: dark, rich, the right amount of grounds, bitter but not unpleasantly so, with the barest minimum of foamed milk and a thin "cap". 

When I talked to the waitress about the oversalted vegetable sides, I also told her to congratulate the barista on making one of the finest cappuccinos I've ever had the pleasure of drinking. She said he had been with the restaurant for twenty-five years, which means he was one of the original Oliveto employees. 

You wouldn't think it would take that much skill to mix ground beans and water, much less add a little milk. But it undeniably does; otherwise, we wouldn't be encountering so many mediocre coffee and espresso drinks.

Overall, our feeling about Oliveto is that the food is half a level above where it was when Canales was cooking. It isn't perfect – getting past the overdose of sodium on the vegetables, the pasta, and fritto misto, all three sauces on the entrees were minimal and even a little boring. But the meats were handled beautifully and the combinations were generally pleasing, even if the balance was off somewhat.

Price is a serious issue here. The ingredients are high-quality, but they are not anywhere near luxury level, and like the service, the food is erratic in execution. Food commodity prices have jumped enormously in the last four years (not that there's ever been a time when they've gone down, LOL), but Oliveto costs $10-20/pp more than its competition. 

This is San Francisco pricing, but Oliveto is not Perbacco or La Folie or Fifth Floor. It ranks considerably down from those levels, although for the East Bay it is a very good restaurant. That said, Oliveto is back on our list as an B+. They'd be an A- if it weren't for the cost value factor. 

Our service was very good, but uncoordinated. The fact that this restaurant has always exhibited somewhat disorganized service is a serious flaw when you are charging this much for a meal. It was as if everyone had memorized a list of "what do to for the customers" but no one was actually coordinating what was done, who was doing it, and when. 

Waterglasses were refilled promptly, yet Carlos noted that several times the busboys and waitress came over to do identical tasks, such as de-crumbing the table. All of us left the table at least once during the meal; the napkins were never refolded. Yes, that sounds like nitpicking, and it is – but when Oliveto costs as much as Meritage/Berkeley or Artisan/Lafayette, this is the type of service provided by their competitors. A more serious error was that the waitress failed to tell us all of the pastas are available as a full entree portion for a $5 upcharge – I had forgotten this, until I overheard her giving the introductory spiel to the table next to us, about halfway through our meal.

We dine early, so at the start of our meal there were very few other diners. People didn't begin arriving in a steady steam until after 6:30 p.m., so they can't use the press of business as an excuse. The waitstaff is attentive and courteous, even well-trained in some areas. But it lacks the seamless professionalism it should have at these price levels. 

We'd like to think they will improve so that the service will match the food and these little niggling errors corrected, so that both will be worth the premium Oliveto charges. The problem is, we've never seen any improvement on the front end despite two decades of occasional visits. It has remained as it has always been: the food good enough but a bit too inconsistent, the service a little better than the [mediocre] average, but never really reaching that level of relaxed coordination and skillful unobtrusiveness that marks the best staff. That means Oliveto's owners, the Kleins, either don't see it or don't care. 

Neither option is worthy of a top-class restaurant regardless of location. Oliveto comes closer to the top than most...but those small consistent errors are magnified when you're having dig deeper than usual into your wallet.

Three people, dinner: two starters, three entrees, two desserts, two beverages, with tip was $190.

Oliveto
5655 College Ave @Shafter, Oakland
www.oliveto.com
Review date:  April 2008

Oliveto gets raves from the critics. I have friends who adore this place. Carlos and I have been here four times and yet remain unimpressed. I keep trying to pinpoint why I’m never bowled over their food, which is undeniably high quality and cooked by a chef who clearly has both creativity and technique (Paul Canales, since 2005 – Paul Bertolli, ExecChef for Oliveto prior to Canales, is long gone).

The food is very rich – heavy on the fat and likewise on the salt. Oliveto is, after all, famous for their theme dinners, centered around pork or truffles or tomatoes or seafood. I’ve decided the problem is, I don’t drink wine any longer and of course, Carlos never did. Oliveto’s food is made for wine: if you don’t drink, you’re missing a whole part of what makes the dishes work for the tastebuds.

They’re also famed for their hand-made salumi antipasto platter, one of the two appetizers we ordered. If you’ve ever watched the Anthony Bourdain DVD on Barcelona’s El Bulli, where he goes into a butcher shop and literally lusts over a wafer-thin slice of raw ham dripping with liquid pork fat, you can have a similar local experience here. 

For $16 you get two thin long grissini, their tops wrapped in pure pork fat. The menu said the platter also has coppa and coppa di testa. Ours didn’t – coppa di testa is the Italian version of head cheese, which was conspicuously absent. What we got was two half-slices of overtoasted bread, fresh coppa thinly sliced and lightly layered atop. Three more short slices of coppa took the place of the head cheese.

The Polpettini fritti was much better. Six very tiny fried crusty meatballs, atop a sensational dried fava bean puree with sun-dried tomatoes and garnished with finely minced mint and thin shavings of an outrageously delicious Parmesan. Lots of good olive oil and roasted garlic in the beans – it was delicious with the bread!

Inez had the cannelloni with crab. Three rolls in a cream sauce and a bit of that great Parmesan crusted on top – certainly hard to go wrong, and it didn’t. The side of spinach with olive oil and currants was extremely good. I would never have thought of using currants with spinach, but combined with a fruity olive oil in a light saute, it was a wonderful combination that added interest to the entrees without a jarring contrast.

I had the halibut, sauced with a Movia Tokaj Friulano reduction with a ton of European butter and wilted lettuces. The fish was perfectly cooked, but Carlos commented that it had no taste. One reason was that it was clearly a frozen fish; the other was that they didn’t salt it. The sauce, OTOH, had sufficient salt for both itself and the fish, so as long as you got both in the same mouthful, it was fine.

Carlos wasn’t that hungry, so he opted for the penne with sea scallops and Maine lobster sauce. Where the actual lobster went is unknown; the sauce was brilliantly orange and definitely tasted of lobster base. There was certainly no lobster meat to be found in the dish, although we estimated that at least 2-1/2 small scallops had been browned and then neatly quartered. The high cost of flour must definitely be hurting the restaurants; the portion of penne was decidedly modest.

We chose two desserts – the warm bittersweet chocolate cake and the almond paste-apricot tart. I was tempted by the ice cream sandwiches – blood orange crema and pistachio ice cream sounded yummy, but I wasn’t in the mood to imagine them squished between florentines and trying to eat them neatly, so I passed. The chocolate cake was good, not as good as Mezze’s version, but better than many. The almond paste makes for a crispy but tender-chewy crust, around stewed dried apricots and served a la mode. 

The service at Oliveto’s is good, but….I don’t know if they were training people or what. They had a lot of staff wandering around and yet the waiter did most of the work. There were three busboys on duty who weren’t doing very much considering the full house. And do they always have three women working the reception kiosk? Somehow it had the feeling of overkill, without the attentiveness a top-flight staff gives.

We are intrigued by the Seafood theme dinner Oliveto’s is planning in June, but I have to admit this place just doesn’t cut it for us. I rate it below Mezze, Rivoli and Sea Salt. Carlos went even further; he rates it below Lalime’s. But again – we weren’t drinking wine with dinner. I think for most customers, they’ll find Oliveto’s more satisfying than we did. It has that exuberant lustiness to it which is unique to Oliveto’s; a continuation of Paul Bertolli’s original vision.

Cost: Three entrees, two appetizers, one side, two desserts, two drinks (okay, I should be calling them beverages!), with tip: $165