Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: GCS

Fleur de Lys
777 Sutter St., San Francisco, Ca
http://www.fleurdelyssf.com/ 
Review date: May 2011

I don't go to Fleur de Lys often. But my first visit here was so long ago, it was back when the Rouas brothers owned it, long before they convinced Hubert Keller to enter the kitchen and several years before I met Carlos. It became famous as the first stunning decorating job done by the late Michael Taylor, an Arabian Nights tent-like luxury of hundreds of yards of red paisley cotton fabric, shirred across walls and gathered at the ceiling. The food was good, but not quite to the Le Trianon/Le Bourgogne level.

When Keller took over in 1986, the food took a leap upwards along with the prices. They kept the décor, although the fabric has been changed several times over the years. I've had some terrific meals at Fleur de Lys, and was eager to go back after an absence of four years. This was an especially interesting time, as we ate at La Folie just a few nights ago for a head-to-head comparison.

Sadly, it wasn't much of a competition. The food was high quality, the execution was skillful, the service was good – but the food combinations had something of the same overdone flourishing that ruined our meal at Michael Mina/San Francisco. And where it wasn't over-elaborate, it was stunningly rich with cream and butter.

Mind you, we like cream and butter. And I use them, although not in such lavish quantities every day. But even in haute cuisine, you don't use them in every single recipe for each ingredient on a plate. It's overkill, and fatigues the palate, not to mention being a hard meal to digest.

The amuse-bouche was quite good. There was a small cup of a thick cucumber vichyssoise with crème fraiche, and a spoonful of black quinoa salad.

The menu is sizable, with a dozen different starters listed. But I was surprised that there was only one salad listed, no soup, with all the other starters being either meat or fish. There were no sweetbreads, which was mildly disappointing; I've always loved their sweetbread plates. 

Instead I started with the vegetable ragout, served with a poached egg, truffles and a truffle port wine sauce. It was a beautiful assortment of vegetables, and I love poached eggs. But the yolk made a rich butter/cream sauce even richer, to the point where I commented to Carlos that although delicious, it was right on the edge of being too much.

Carlos ordered the foie gras torchon, which was listed as coming with a pineapple-vanilla syrup and fresh brioche. The torchon was lovely, but it was served cold, which for a cool spring night wasn't an ideal concept (and it's been chilly for the last week, so why anyone thought a cold liver appetizer was a good idea, puzzles us). We're not fond of fruit with meat, so although the pineapple-vanilla syrup was based on a nicely tart pineapple, the perfume-y vanilla syrup just didn't interest Carlos.

He ordered a fish course – jumbo prawns with a brioche crumb crust, sweet and sour radicchio, cannellini bean sauce, crispy pork belly. When you order four courses instead of three, the price is the same but they reduce the size of the plates. So in a 3-course meal you'd get three prawns, but if you have a 4-course as Carlos ordered, you get....one single prawn. The crust is really just a dusting of bread crumbs, not a coating of any kind. The radicchio is lovely as is the bean sauce, but although the pork belly is possibly the world's best bacon, it didn't quite match the other ingredients.

And this disconnect continued with our entrees. I ordered the Kobe beef cheeks, which had a nice tart zucchini chutney on top to cut the richness. But the braised red cabbage was also tart, and had the wallop of German mustard in addition, making it a little strong even for full-flavored beef. 

The two beef cheeks flanked a tiny center sake cup that held wilted fresh spinach and a few (like four) tiny, tiny cubes of sweetbreads in a very rich cream sauce. It was good, but the beef cheeks and sweetbreads just didn't make an interesting combination. They were separate concepts and remained that way. The tastes on the plate were excellent but it felt like there were too many ingredients, placed there mostly for show.

Carlos got the filet mignon with lobster truffled mac'n'cheese 'en brioche'. The menu claimed it comes with a classic Bordelaise, which it does if you leave out the roasted marrow. As a beef-stock reduction with red wine it was fine. The mac'n'cheese was a big hit with Carlos, who believes the more buttery/cheese-y his pasta is, the better. Adding a brioche 'bowl' that had been toasted with more butter, was the proverbial frosting on the cake.

What really impressed us was the filet itself. It was small but absolutely perfect, with the rich full taste of properly aged Prime beef. Expensive but absolutely worth it; he loved every bite. Why a good steakhouse can't offer us this kind of quality, or anything even close to it, is a continual frustration to us.

Up to this point we were barely full, as despite the richness of the food, the size of the portions was stunningly small. But then came dessert, an embarrassment of riches. This would have been wonderful if the desserts had been excellent. 

But they weren't. 

They were pretty, but we both ordered chocolate desserts and the chocolate was, to put it kindly, weak. In the Bay Area, where we practically invented artisanal chocolates, this is nothing short of embarrassment.

Carlos got the chocolate souffle, which was twice as large as expected. Sadly, it had half the flavor we expected, tasting mostly of egginess and almost nothing of chocolate. It came with a chocolate crème anglaise to pour over, which had a little more flavor – rather like Nestle's Quik chocolate powder drink. Certainly none of it held any artisanal cacao complexity, in fact it ranked in flavor somewhat lower than a bag of grocery store chocolate chips.

I ordered the espresso-dark chocolate mousse cake. I got two very tiny slices of a modest chocolate cake/white chocolate-espresso ganache that also lacked intensity. The decorative thin white chocolate layer on top had more chocolate flavor, and I don't think much of white chocolate. The plate was full – too full – of other little 'nibbles'. 

One was a simply terrible creation of a fried coconut truffle: barely sweetened dark chocolate coated with thick coconut shreds, then deep-fried. The chocolate smears on the plate, and the shreds taste of frying oil. Yuck.

Another was a small pouf of whipped chocolate ganache, a little more flavorful than the mousse cake filling, in a cone of folded dark chocolate. A liqueur-soaked fresh grape was coated with white chocolate for an odd combination of flavors. A heaping tablespoon of overcooked pearl tapioca cream was piled atop toasted brioche in a strangely unpleasant pairing of textures.

Because I had mentioned it was my birthday, I was expecting my dessert plate to be decorated. Instead, they brought a second dessert – a strawberry mouse that again, lacked any intense fruit flavor. Smooth and creamy, but no real flavor worth noting.

And then, they brought yet another dessert amuse bouche, this time a tray with two tiny little pastry tarts (one fruit, one chocolate), along with half a dozen freshly fried mini-doughnuts with dark chocolate sauce. Carlos ate the two tarts and had one of the mini-doughnuts with sauce. He said they were all okay, but nothing special.

Fleur de Lys has had the same management team and chef de cuisine (Rick Richardson) since Keller and he joined the restaurant in 1986. So there is no excuse for this excessive garnishing and weakness in pairing, or the tired and overdone "trio of this and trio of that".

Carlos found the service very good, but I was in the position where I was viewing the kitchen doors and it was a frenetic dance of people coming and going, quite unrestful. All in all, we both agreed that until Fleur de Lys turns itself around, this place goes to the bottom of the list of upscale French restaurants we have eaten at.

One three course, one four course, three beverages, with tip was $248 – comparable to La Folie, but way behind in gustatory impact.