Title: May 29, 2014
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Dirty Habit (formerly Fifth Floor) @Hotel Palomar
4^th St. @Market., San Francisco, CA
http://www.dirtyhabitsf.com/menus/dinner/
Review date: May 2014

We have loved David Bazirgan's cooking at Fifth Floor restaurant, Dirty Habit's upscale predecessor, dining four times in the last three years. Each time we were wowed by the creativity, balance of flavors, skillful execution, and excellent service. Every dinner was better than the last, as Bazirgan's cooking evolved and refined. The dining room was tasteful, low-key, sophisticated and quiet. It was the contemporary equivalent of La Folie, California-style.

Unfortunately, we were amongst the few who ever bothered to take the elevator up to the restaurant. The biggest crowd we ever saw dining there was after it was publicly announced the space would be remodeled into Dirty Habit with a new bar menu. Carlos and I came for one last dinner at Fifth Floor two weeks before its close, with my niece Suko and our friend Ilkay. The four of us had a wonderful dinner together.

We were intending to dine at Acquerello for my birthday dinner, but decided instead to try the new Dirty Habit in the Hotel Palomar/SF. The evening didn't start off well. Despite making a reservation on OpenTable, Dirty Habit's small interior dining room was taken for a private event and the only seating was outside on the patio – no warning, take it or sit by the bar. It was fortunately a nice evening for San Francisco – tee-shirt weather, no jacket needed.

It was unfortunate to discover all the large heaters set all over the patio were working full blast. Requests by diners, including us, to please turn them off, were met with firm refusals by staff. Between the unneeded heat and the incredibly loud obnoxious rock music (which they said they would turn it down "a bit" but did not – in fact, after a brief lull it came back on even louder than before), the stage was set for disappointment.

Fifth Floor was about 50% bar and 50% restaurant. Hotel Palomar has apparently given up the gastronomic fight and surrendered to beer and cocktails galore. There is a menu, but it's labeled "bites". It lists twenty small plates, and three larger ones that are not listed as entrées but serve that purpose. 

Dirty Habit is now a bar, plain and simple. The food is secondary, perfunctory, and ultimately forgettable. 

And now for the good part: Our waitress, Rebecca, was very good (which frankly surprised us). We gave her our order of four starters and two entrées, which she didn't write down but remembered flawlessly. The pacing was excellent. Our water glasses were refilled so often Carlos remarked afterwards it got a little annoying!

OTOH, this was bar service, not restaurant service. They would take one dirty plate away but leave the second. The tableware was never changed out. It was reminiscent of the type of service from Charlie Palmer Steakhouse in Reno NV last week, but pumped up a full level – all good customer service, but not necessarily the most professional waitstaff service. 

Did I mention the weather in SF was unusually good that evening? That was very nice, a gift from the weather gods. It's a shame we didn't spend it somewhere worthwhile.

We asked our waitress if ordering several starters was a good idea, given that we planned to order two of the entrée plates. She said their starters were small, so three or four should still work. We ordered the following:

Steamed buns, fried lamb belly, peanuts. A variant of Peking duck, these are thin, light-textured steamed Chinese buns. The lamb belly is boneless, cooked until tender, cut into squares, lightly coated with cornstarch and deep-fried. It has the gamy taste of strong lamb, which we happen to like. The peanuts are finely crushed and a light sprinkle; they have no effect on the taste of the dish. The drizzle of sauce isn't hoisin as one would expect, but instead a tamarind-soya mix. 

We liked the flavors overall, but the tamarind-soy is salty and the drizzle is too generous. It makes the end impression one of saltiness and gaminess – harsh and strong. This turned out to be endemic. In a major shift from the elegant balance of Fifth Floor, everything Dirty Habit creates is full of salt. It's meant to accompany sweet mixed drinks and stand up to them. Or maybe it's just food for people who don't know what good food is, since they never came to Fifth Floor anyway except to drink.

Chicken wings, sweet soy, chili vinaigrette. There are thin fragile threads of chile pepper, but unlike Mokutanya's/SMateo elegant combination of chile threads with raw beef, there are too few of them here to make any impact. The chicken wings are big, juicy, and lightly battered, which we like. The sauce is achingly simple: sweet soy, chile paste, and rice vinegar. It's good, and the glaze is light, which is even better. Still, they are sticky and you'll need to trek (and it's a trek) to the bathroom to wash your hands afterwards.

Yes, they're tasty…like they are in a thousand other restaurants in the Bay Area. It's hard to believe the same chef who used to offer a dreamy uni flan, amazing venison steak, and a perfect swordfish with lentils; who has classical French training and years of experience (Elisabeth Daniels, Baraka [where he won Michelin stars], Cooking Papa, Fifth Floor), is reduced to offering fried chicken wings on a nightly basis.

Pork croquettes, pickled mustard seeds, raita. There were also long thin shavings of salted cucumber, which would have been wonderful if they'd been drained properly, as the excess water thinned out a really wonderful raita. Chilled to almost freezing; rich with cooling mint and balanced by hot chiles, it was stunning together with the cucumber. The pork croquettes were tasty but salty (surprise, surprise). Meaty with no fat, they were breadcrumbed and fried to a golden brown. The sharp pickled mustard seeds on top were just right; not too much nor too little. 

This dish is a simplified version of the one my niece Suko and I both ordered during our January 2014 dinner, just before Fifth Floor closed. I liked it almost as well except for the sloppy prep. This was by far the best balanced dish of the evening,

Octopus, eggplant, pine nuts, cherries. Not mentioned on the menu were the plumped-up dried cranberries, and a really fabulous smoked eggplant baba ghanoush, lightly smeared on the plate to act as a sauce and drizzled with EVOO. The Bing cherries were pitted and left whole, three thin slices of baked baby eggplant were garnished with the EVOO and pine nuts, and the octopus tentacles were incredibly tender, fully flavored with a brush of harissa, the flavorful hot chile paste, grilled to smoky perfection....and heavily salted as well. Without the excessive salt and the Bing cherries, which were sweet but superfluous, this would have been the dish with the most creative flavors. But the "kitchen sink" mentality sunk it to a "coulda been, shoulda been."

Then came our entrées. Carlos' "aged rib eye" must have been someone's idea of a joke. It was 1/2" thick, good-sized and tender, medium-rare as ordered. It was also poorly trimmed, flabby in texture, with absolutely no crust on it except for the grill marks. At Fifth Floor the meat was always top quality and the flavor was amazing. This…well, you'd never know Dirty Habit's predecessor was known for quality. This steak was somewhere around the quality level and execution of a second-rate Sizzler.

The steak fries were roasted so long they were almost dead, and guess what? Oversalted, yes, of course. The asparagus was a mix of thick and super-thin spears, some literally thinner than a chopstick. They had been grilled, so the thin ones had burnt tops and a charred flavor. The sauce was listed as béarnaise, which it wasn't, unless somehow the classic recipe has been changed to include a hefty dose of crème fraiche. The tarragon flavor was very aggressive; I like tarragon but this was a little too much like licorice crème fraiche. There was a second sauce in a separate cup; it appeared to be red pepper aioli. Carlos tried both but left them untouched thereafter.

I ordered the halibut with spring vegetables and tapenade. I love fresh halibut but this prep, not so much. The plate was blazing hot, which ensures an overcooked fish. But the thin filet of halibut wasn't that fresh, so cooking it to a firmer stage than usual was an improvement rather than a negative. The spring vegetables consisted of tiny florets of baby cauliflower and slightly starchy peas. The tapenade, as it usually is, was salty and tasty, but when combined with an oversalted fish filet, became simply unpleasant. As it was smeared into the middle of the filet where it had cracked open (a sign of an overcooked fish to begin with), I couldn't just scrape the tapenade off. 

I took two bites, but when the waitress stopped by for the umpteenth time to ask how we liked the food, I told her it was oversalted and handed the plate back to her. 

In its place, I ordered the starter of Monterey sardines with apricot, bulghur, and guanciale. The latter was a single tiny baked bacon-like strip. The two apricot halves were skinned and cooked, with a rich tart-sweet flavor. The bulghur was mixed with shreds of piquillo peppers and spring onion bulbs, but I couldn't identify what kind of vinegar or acid was used. It tasted as if it had just been mixed minutes beforehand. Carlos liked it, I didn't. None of the flavors had combined. The grilled sardine filets weren't oversalted, thankfully — but they also weren't that fresh.

The dessert menu was banal; neither of us was tempted by ice cream sandwiches or doughnuts with an ethnic name. By this time the music was giving me a headache. Thankfully Carlos agreed to skip our usual after-dinner coffees and just ask for the check. The price was reasonable for the amount of food, but the quality and execution was so far from what Fifth Floor's kitchen used to send out, one can't even remotely compare the old restaurant with its current incarnation. 

As for why David Bazirgan, whom we consider one of the most accomplished chefs in the Bay Area, needs to put his name on a menu of marinated olives or pretzels with sausage and mustard....well, maybe he wants a break from the daily grind. Because this kind of Food Network menu could be put out by anybody. It doesn't require much skill or thinking to produce.

This is bar food, plain and simple. It's intended to be cheap and affordable after you pay for those high-priced cocktails. 

As Carlos said, it was all decent bar food, but unremarkable on a restaurant level. There wasn't anything good enough that we would order again or return for. 

Dirty Habit is a fine bar. It's noisy and lively and the crowd of Millennials discussing their latest project deadlines over endless cocktails keep the waitstaff hopping. Very few people were ordering food, and the ones who were had only a couple of starters delivered at most. The food is just good enough and inexpensive enough, that it will accompany a large bar tab without too much added pain.

Just forget about finding any trace of Fifth Floor. This is the pseudo-sophisticated, fake upscale equivalent of Crogan's, the sports bar neighborhood hangout near our home. But the food isn't actually any better.

When David Bazirgan eventually moves on, let us hope he will find himself eager to create another real restaurant – hopefully one that will draw in the people who will appreciate his rare blend of expertise, creativity, and passion. Something like Aubergine, perhaps; or even a Bouchee or Walter Hansel. 

Because none of the sterling talents of chef Bazirgan appear in Dirty Habit, unfortunately.

But at least the weather was really good. Did I mention that?

Two people, dinner: four starters, two entrées, with tip was $136.