Author: GCS

RN74
301(B) Mission St. @Beale, San Francisco
http://www.michaelmina.net/restaurant.php?restaurant_id=3&action=menus
Review date:  May 2010

This is the ‘casual’ restaurant of the Michael Mina empire. Located in between Boulevard restaurant and the Transbay Terminal, we were pleasantly surprised to see how crowded the restaurant got on a Saturday evening. These days there are so many restaurants around the Financial District/SoMa/Union Square area, one can’t be sure how many will survive the current recession.

It’s a nicely done modern space, although the tables are small and crammed together. We also hated the chairs, which seemed comfortable at first but turned into torture devices after two hours of leaning forward to shout at one another. Crowds + thumping rhythmic bass music = hard of hearing. Or more accurately, a little too much information coming from the conversations of the tables next to you. Some folks like this; we don’t.

A few weeks ago we dined at Michael Mina, his flagship restaurant in Union Square. We liked it, but didn’t love the endless contrived trio concept, nor the heavy amount of salt in certain dishes.

Sadly, that bent is magnified at RN74. Most people were having cocktails and multiple glasses of wine, and if you do that, you might not notice how salty most of the food is. Sadly, we don’t, and did. Even Carlos, who loves salt much more than I do, complained after we walked out that he could still taste the salt in his mouth.

I ordered the beef carpaccio starter. The red wine salt was a too-generous sprinkle of big crystals, overpowering what were four tender slices with the texture of hanger steak. I tried to scrape them off but even so, every bite crunched with salty crystals. The two thin shavings of asparagus with canned hearts of palm were not salted, thankfully; nor was the rounded tablespoonful of very bland pea sprout/something unidentifiable puree. Unfortunately they were sitting in an extremely harsh sauce that tasted of Coleman’s mustard powder and wasabi...oh, and more salt! Needless to say, I left as much as I could of it on the plate.

Carlos ordered two starters. The hamachi (yellowfin) crudo is his favorite sashimi. This was a generous starter, with six or seven decent sized slices with radish and shiso leaf on top. But the sauce underneath tasted of nothing but salt, he complained. The boudin blanc, by contrast, was perfect – a tender, juicy, soft pork sausage in a veal casing. The mustard sauce was a blend of whole-grain mustard, wasabi (do we see a trend here, LOL?) and a heavy dose of high-fat butter. The mustard and wasabi cut the taste of the European butter, which Carlos doesn’t care for, so he slathered it on every slice of the sausage.

Our entrees continued the heavy-handed salting: I had duck breast and he had the beef rib-eye. Both came with half a sausage, the duck with a liver-added duckmeat sausage, the rib-eye with a chorizo type. Both sausages were mediocre and so salty we couldn’t finish them. The duck breast was massive – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a larger duck breast – served very rare, which was fine. But the skin, although beautifully crisped, was so salty I could not eat it. We eat a fair amount of bacon in our house, but this was like cupping Morton’s salt in a spoon and trying to chew it.

The rib-eye was served in slices, a beautiful piece of meat cooked to perfection. But again, the outside was so salty, Carlos ended up trimming off the lovely brown crusts on each slice. The saltiness kept building up in the mouth until it reached the stage of perceived bitterness – which takes a lot of salt to reach that unpleasant level for him.

The sauce for the duck was a BBQ-type sauce, very fruity with pomegranate molasses. The wilted spinach was a generous serving, too. Carlos really liked his green garlic-sherry brown sauce, but it had enough salt by itself to be unpleasant if eaten with the oversalted beef. 

We ended with the chocolate-praline bar, a hazelnut mousse on a layer of chocolate spongecake, with a spoonful of lemony crème fraiche sherbet and another too-generous sprinkling, this time of crushed toffee bits. It would have been very good with maybe half the amount of sugar used. The chocolate had a lovely flavor but after a few bites Carlos remarked it was like eating a candy bar.

Carlos got a cappuccino, which was so weak we thought at first perhaps they goofed and threw milk foam into a regular coffee. Interestingly, the cappuccino smoothed out the regular blend, a la Starbucks, so if it hadn’t been so weak, it would been acceptable. The decaf was extraordinarily strong, much more so than it was at Michael Mina, but the blend was the same very high-acid blend, which I don’t especially like. Making it stronger just made it more unpleasant, to the point where I stopped after a quarter of a cup.

A friend had given us a gift certificate for RN74, which brought the price down a reasonable level. We’re glad we tried both RN74 and Mina so close together, because the comparison showed a definite consistency in heavy-handed salting. For two different chef de cuisines to display the same level of excessive salt means that we didn’t just come on a bad day, or that perhaps one kitchen was showing a fault in executing the executive chef’s vision. 

What we tasted in both restaurants was something Mina himself must be approving. Just from health reasons alone, there is absolutely no excuse for using so much salt. Our personal take was that the menu at RN74 is more interesting and less contrived than Michael Mina, but we simply don’t care for what he’s doing these days. 

Our meat entrees led to an inevitable comparison with Mark Dommen of One Market, which we loved but haven’t been back to in a while. We stopped there to check before going down to take BART, and Dommen still does the prime rib special every Tuesday. Carlos and I agreed we would go back to try One Market to compare it with RN74, so hopefully we will have time to do a carnivorous comparison of entrees in the next few weeks. 

BTW, the kitchen sent out a complimentary salad for me because Carlos had two starters and I only chose one. This was a nice touch, and if the salad had less vinegar and....SALT...sprinkled on the Buttercrunch-type leaves, it would have been even better. 

Three starters, two entrees, one dessert, three beverages, with tip would have come to $170 without the gift certificate. Is Mina worth paying $70/person, less wine and tip, in an area where fine chefs are so numerous you can trip over them at every farmers market?

Regretfully, our palates say no.