Title: Sidebar
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Sidebar in Oakland, CA  - update, lunch
Review date: January 2013
(previous review appended below)

Lunch in Oakland is always a toss-up, especially when we have my MIL Inez with us. She has a class every Friday that doesn't get out until noon, and afterwards we go to lunch together. 

But it isn't near anything within a 15-minute drive. She doesn't like spicy food, so Mexican, Cuban, and Korean are out. She won't eat with her fingers, so Ethiopian makes her unhappy on both counts. Many of the good restaurants near us are only open for dinner, not for lunch. We prefer to avoid going to Jack London Square or downtown Oakland if at all possible, especially on a Friday when it's impossible for us to get there early enough to avoid the lunchtime rush. 

I checked around the websites, and we decided to go back to Sidebar. We liked our dinner in September 2012, although we think Zza's nearby is just a teensy bit better. But Zza's is only open for dinner, so Sidebar's claim of a "real Reuben" intrigued us.

Sidebar doesn't have a lot of tables, but many people like to sit at the square center bar counters, so we were able to snag one of the last four-tops. Carlos decided to order the stuffed portobello mushroom appetizer. Described as a spinach-Gruyere stuffing, we were surprised when a platter was put in front of him containing two big portobello mushroom caps layered with stuffing, along with a generous side salad. The spinach-Gruyere stuffing was an amazing amount of wilted fresh spinach leaves mixed with a good quality Gruyere and topped with some browned bread crumbs. There was a small green salad alongside as well. For a $6.50 price, this could easily have been a full-size vegetarian entrée any bargain lover would be happy with. 

Inez dithered between the fish sandwich and the bacon-watercress, finally choosing the latter. Although we asked that the bread be lightly toasted, Sidebar uses whole-wheat baguette slices, so the crusts were too hard for her – with her long-term osteoporosis, her teeth are becoming increasingly fragile. She ate the filling separately and nibbled at the center of the bread slices where it was softer. The bacon was crisp and generously portioned, the watercress fresh. A nice touch was the housemade mayo they used, and the little cup of housemade sweet curry pickles – onions and cucumbers. She loves pickles and adored these.

Carlos got the Reuben, which was on two slices of toasted rye baguette. It was so heavily buttered you couldn't taste the Thousand Island dressing. The pastrami was generous and very good quality but as usual, the sauerkraut was minimal. Frankly, a Reuben is better on the usual commercial bread, and Sidebar used too much butter in toasting both Carlos' and Inez's sandwiches. The Reuben also came with a salad – we noted during our previous dinner that Sidebar adds salad greens to many dishes without mentioning it, and it seems this is as true at lunch as it is at dinner. You are forewarned and hopefully we will remember it the next time we visit!

I got the burger, which was a disappointment. The Cheddar was tasteless, although the fried egg (both options at 75 cents each) had a nice runny yolk. But the beef patty was only average in size and quality. Worse, it was unsalted, making it rather flavorless. Even worst was the bun. After the upscale baguette slices used on Carlos' and Inez's sandwiches, it was surprising to receive a fluffy white sponge, one of those mediocre Wonder Bread-type buns that falls apart before you're finished eating. 

It didn't make any sense, since there was a lovely heap of housemade pink pickled onions on the side to add. Additional 'upscale' touches were that all three sandwiches came with fries, and all the fries were different. I got big ranch-style wedge fries. Inez got standard fries. Carlos unfortunately got super-crisp shoestring style fries, which he despises. We asked for ketchup, and Sidebar provides cups of a lovely, slightly spicy ketchup.

So why go to all the trouble to make elaborately different fries, different housemade pickles and spreads, use expensive butter to toast hand-sliced baguettes – but pick a 10-cent mediocrity on the one sandwich the majority of your clientele will order? It's a puzzle to us; utterly illogical.

We packed up half the stuffed mushroom, half of Carlos' Reuben, and half of Inez's and Carlos' fries. The dessert menu didn't impress us, and once again we missed checking the chalkboard for their specials which the waitstaff apparently never bothers to mention to customers. Sidebar was offering a root beer float as a special dessert, which bummed Carlos out because he would have ordered it, had he known about it before we were walking out of the restaurant.

Lunch wasn't bad, but the inconsistency of Sidebar bothers us. We're never quite sure what we're getting, despite the menu descriptions, because they're always incomplete. There are quality inconsistencies so we can't rely on them 'across the board'. The waitstaff never mentions the specials and the small chalkboard is located on an inconspicuous side wall. It's all just a little odd and uneven, making it hard to decide whether the pluses outweigh the minuses here.

You might get a really nice meal...or you might get a very average one. That's sad, because at dinner the duck liver crostini and the housemade gravlox are two of the most fabulous starters at any restaurant in the entire Bay Area. That's something we don't say lightly, eating out as often as we do. 

But man does not live by bread alone, even if it's topped with hand-chopped liver. We like Sidebar, but they could do better if they tried – not only for the customers, but for their own bottom line. This would be an easy restaurant to love, if they'd make some relatively minor changes. As it is, they stand equal with their competition, but don't rise above it.

Three people, lunch: one starter, three sandwiches, one beverage, with tip was $61.

Sidebar
542 Grand Ave., Oakland, CA
(warning: extremely hard to read!) http://sidebar-oaktown.com/sidebar-oaktown.com/dinner_menu.html 
Review date: September 2012

This is one of the favorite restaurants of our friends and neighbors Karen and Kevin, but it's taken us a while to schedule it for one of our weekly dinners. Street parking is always tight at this end of Grand Avenue, but the parking lot underneath 580 is only one block away. It's a modest, nicely laid-out space. There's a large square bar with counter seating in the middle and windows that open to the Lake Merritt view.

Sidebar has a fairly short menu, but they cover all the bases nicely. It's hearty bistro food, with cheerful efficient service. Carlos and I picked three starters: the butter lettuce salad for me, the duck liver crostini for him (which wins consistent raves on Yelp), and the gravlox to share.

The salad was an example of American supersizing. I love butter lettuce, but this had to be an entire head of whole leaves stacked on a plate. Sidebar tossed the leaves in the kitchen with a liberal amount of dressing, then plated them. The dressing was made from buttermilk, blue cheese, and nicely crisp bacon bits. Buttermilk is rapidly becoming The Next Hot Ingredient, which dismays Carlos and Inez because they can't stand the stuff. I don't mind it, but although this salad was good, the size means it's best shared, and next time I'd ask them to use a little less dressing.

We can understand why people love the duck liver crostini – it's outstanding by itself. Rather than processed into a pate, the liver is gently cooked and minced. Mincing is a classic technique that should be used more often; also called hand-chopping, it produces a far superior texture than a manual meat grinder or food processor (it's often used for artisanal sausages or gourmet hamburgers – you can see the texture from the excellent photos at http://www.wishfulchef.com/2011/09/cheeseburger-with-hand-chopped-meat/).  

It's spread generously on an excellent crostini: a large slice of good levain with a lavish application of olive oil, toasted crisp but still soft inside. It comes with a too-tart mixed green salad that was also generously sized, almost as big as my butter lettuce salad. Getting your daily greens allowances here at Sidebar doesn't seem to be a problem.

Good as the duck liver was, however, the winner was the gravlox. Although we seldom buy it, we love gravlox, starting from when my mother worked as the cook/housekeeper for a wealthy family in Woodside CA. One day when the family was away, they gave her permission to have her family come over for lunch, and my mother made one of her usual stunning meals (that family loved her; they said that in the five years she worked for them, she never made the same thing twice). 

What Carlos and I remember most clearly about that meal is the gravlox she made: an entire side of King salmon, starting three days prior with the usual sugar, salt, pepper, and vodka, seasoned with fresh dill. Gravlox is raw, and thus has a different texture and taste from lox, which is either cold- or hot-smoked. We prefer it cut slightly thicker than lox, which is how Sidebar presented it. Three good-sized slices on a plate (the salmon season has been exceptional this year) with a lovely little side arrangement of thinly sliced pickled radishes and two long ribbons of cucumber. 

Only one slice of toasted buttered rye accompanied it (they will bring more fresh bread upon request), but this gravlox was delicious with or without bread. Sidebar used lemon vodka but no dill. We loved this dish. Carlos declared that when we return, he's getting a plate of the duck liver and a plate of the gravlox all for himself – no sharing next time!

Inez tried a little bit of everything, but she preferred the duck liver. She's not fond of raw fish, preferring it cooked. She was fine with a small portion of my butter lettuce salad.

The starters had come out quickly. The kitchen and waitstaff showed good timing with our entrees brought out only a few minutes after our starters were finished. We didn't feel rushed, which was good. Unfortunately, as often happens, the starters turned out to be more successful than the mains.

Inez picked the 'char siu' – a beer-brined, 1"-thick rib pork chop, bone-in and nicely grilled. It was served with so-so accompaniments: a small heap of thin soba, buckwheat noodles; oily underdone grilled gai choy, nicely cooked young sugar snap peas, and a BBQ sauce supposedly of ancho chiles and soy. However, it tasted mostly of hoisin, which she likes. It was a good-sized plate, so she brought about a third of it home.

I ordered the chicken thighs, braised with a tasty gravy of fresh tomato, onions, bacon fat (probably from the bacon bits in my salad), whole Hungarian hot peppers, capers and caperberries. There were small quarters of Yukon Gold potatoes and well-trimmed pearl onions in the braising sauce. Underneath the chicken thighs was a small heap of fresh wilted spinach leaves topped with a fine onion confit, fine shreds of white onion cooked down to soft sweetness. The dish had a little heat and nice depth of flavor from the gravy. I don't care for caperberries, but they were left whole and didn't seem to over-acidify the dish. The only flaw was that the chicken thighs were overcooked, one of them seriously, the other one only slightly. 

Carlos got the kebab, which was swordfish in nice 2" chunks, threaded on a skewer with two shrimps and some onions/bell peppers to separate them. The kebab was excellent: not overcooked and flavorful. However, the accompaniments were substandard. The tartly dressed mixed green salad was the same as the one that came with the duck liver starter, except with the inclusion of tart chopped green olives. The greens had matched with the richness of the liver, but with the milder fish a cold salad didn't work. An even worse choice by the chef was the starch: limp batter-fried French fries. Kebabs need either a high quality or interesting starch, and this wasn't it. If we could have had the kebab with a good risotto, or even with the salad if it had been leavened with some good tomatoes, which are certainly in season in early September, it would have been a much more successful dish.

Still, overall we were pleased with our meal. All of us opted for dessert. Inez got a scoop of vanilla ice cream, her default dessert. Carlos ordered the special of a root beer float, which surprised us by being quite small. It was delicious, however, with enough ice cream to make it milkshake-thick, which is how we both like it.

I picked the cornmeal poundcake with fruit and whipped cream. The fruit turned out to be fresh brown figs poached in red wine syrup, which I liked but Carlos didn't. The poundcake exhibited the erratic sizing that makes Sidebar remind us of A Cote/Oakland, where we've eaten several times although not always happily. This was a huge portion, with two thick giant triangles of crunchy poundcake, well browned on all sides but still soft within. The poundcake shouldn't have been toasted; it would have been fine without it. 

I didn't understand the sizing of this dessert. There wasn't enough fruit and whipped cream for two triangles, and one triangle would have been more than enough, even to share between two people. The toasted poundcake wasn't good enough to stand on its own without accompaniment. This was good, but not as well thought-out as it could have been.

Sidebar offers fine quality coffee and tea. The latter is loose-leaf Numi. Although they don't identify the coffee, I had the French Press decaf and it was superb, so good even Carlos liked it.

The music must have been the same mix used by Stark's Steakhouse in Santa Rosa last month. Lots of Beatles music, even the early EMI songs (before the Beatles formed their own Apple Records label), Elton John, Don McLean. I loved it, although I thought it was an odd choice, given the mixed crowd.

Sidebar's menu and food reminds us strongly of A Cote, but we like it much more, even with its minor faults. A Cote offers wonderful service and a couple of excellent plates. But when a dish goes bad at A Cote, it goes really bad. We have gotten some food that had no business leaving the kitchen, or were such poor quality ingredients they should never have been accepted by a professional chef to begin with. 

As a general rule, at home we eat the way Sidebar cooks: vegetables and meats, with modest amounts of carbs. If Sidebar can buff up their service a bit – although it was good overall, the waitress missed telling us about the goat cheese soufflé special, which we saw on the signboard as we were walking out – and tone down the slightly heavy hand with the acid, they would make it into the "A" level with us. We would also like them to be a little more consistent about sizes, but that's a minor issue when we're satisfied with the food overall.

As it is, they still hit the B+/A- level, and we're looking forward to returning to Sidebar. That's something we don't always say about the restaurants we try, so thanks to Kevin and Karen for giving us the push to look a little closer to some of the restaurants closer to home!

Three people, dinner: three starters, three entrees, three desserts, two beverages, with tip was $146.