Delfina

After years of hearing about Delfina, I finally got the chance to try it tonight. In a nutshell: amazingly enthusiastic kitchen staff, friendly wait staff, delicious food, fair price, and I would go back to give people a taste of San Francisco but am not chomping at the bit to become a regular or anything.

Thinking back, I enjoyed the meal as much as I did at least partly because the room was charged with the positive energy of people who had waited in the rain to get in and were excited to be eating at on of the City's most popuar restaurants. I try not to focus on ambiance over food, but the cheerfulness of everyone in the room was unmistakeable. The fact that the food didn't disappoint after all the hype just made me even happier.

Tripe al Florentina: the best thing I had all night. It's ugly, but was utterly transcendent. First of all, it comes to the table still bubbling, and it smells of meat, smoke, tomatoes, spices, and only very faintly of offal. The tripe is sliced very thinly, mixed with tomatoes, carrots, celery (?), and spices, then sprinkles with bread crumbs and baked in a wood oven. The smokiness of the wood oven was very apparent; I almost wondered whether some smoked bacon was involved in the dish. I sopped up all the sauce with chewy, crisp-skinned country bread from Tartine Bakery (which is next door to Delfina).

Gnocchi with nettles and chanterelle mushrooms: nice, but too much for one person. I just can't eat that much gnocchi by myself. I can eat a whole plate of pasta, but gnocchi is too dense. That's not to say that these gnocchi were in any way heavy. They were very light, delicate, and obviously home made. I'll never understand the fuss over nettles, but the chanterelles were nice and slightly crunchy. The best thing about this dish was the light flavor of lemon. It took me awhile to decide that there indeed was lemon in this dish. Perhaps this solved my question, "What are meyer lemons good for?" Meyers always seem pointless to me because I like my lemon desserts to be extremely tart, and Meyers have the scent of lemons without so much the tang. In this dish, however, the mild tanginess and fragrance of Meyers kept it from becoming a sour plate of gnocchi. It really was just right, adding sort of an elusive fragrance to the dish.

Buttermilk panna cotta with candied kumquats: Delfina's panna cotta is famous in San Francisco. Velvety smooth, it's thicker than yogurt but softer than flan. Again, I don't think this is something I would eat alone. It's just too much dairy. Then again, I can't finish a container of yogurt by myself either because it's too thick for me, so maybe people scarf this down all the time.

Funny story: the caramel sauce on this was very bitter. At first, I thought "Oh, burnt caramel." As I kept eating, the sauce got more and more bittter. I literally could not eat more than a drop of the sauce with every spoonful of panna cotta. I thought it was strange, but assumed the kitchen was experimenting with some kind of new bitter sauce. By the end, I couldn't eat any of it because it was much too bitter, like someone had added very bitter citrus pith to the sauce. When my waiter asked me how I liked it, I said the panna cotta was great but I was curious what they put in the sauce to make it so bitter. I figured if I could learn their secret it would be a shortcut to burnt caramel sauce. He was confused too, so he went back to ask the kitchen. Turns out someone had slightly burned the sauce--I'm not crazy! To Delfina's credit, our server took the panna cotta off the final bill.

Delfina Menu (changes frequently)

18th and Guerrero