The Brasserie Savoy
580 Geary (at Jones), 441-8080. Open daily 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Monday through Thursday 5 to 11 p.m., until midnight weekends. Dinner reservations strongly advised. The restaurant is wheelchair accessible. Parking: valet $7, street difficult. Muni via the 38 Geary and 2 Sutter.
I have some fond memories of the Brasserie Savoy in its previous incarnations, but as so many restaurants do, it started going through conniptions and convulsions, and finally snapped shut like an aggrieved mussel. When it recently reopened with Fabrice Canelle as its new chef and partner, my hopes were so high that I made reservations a full 10 days in advance, on grounds that the restaurant was likely to be as hot as a blowtorch caramelizing a creme brulee. Canelle made his name as a chef to watch during a brief stint at Moose's, before he was mysteriously fired. Since Ed Moose runs through chefs like a bull moose runs through Yellowstone, Canelle's rep remained unsmirched. I called my "French connections," Christian and Denny (he's French by birth, she by preference); they were so jazzed they offered to bring a couple of burgundies sent from Dijon by Christian's grandmere -- the widow of a restaurateur with a precious star in the all-powerful Michelin Guide.
Since the restaurant didn't call me to reconfirm, on the afternoon of the dinner I phoned them. A frosty phone-person finally succeeded in unearthing the reservation -- but evidently reburied it, since that evening, my party waited for several anxious minutes while an abstracted young Frenchman disinterred the name again from the subterranean depths of his pad. Our physical appearance surely played no part in this grudging welcome, as we'd all bathed and cast off our usual filthy rags for the occasion.
After several more minutes consulting with the owner about something else, the receptionist finally seated us in a very Gallic bistro -- mustard-cream walls, French posters, wood-and-mirror wainscotting, Piaf on the sound system. Large booths on one side and a banquette on the other surround a huge bar, whose voluble habitues (including an entrenched pair of drop-dead blondes loudly having more fun) overrode Piaf's warblings and our own attempts to converse. But our server was a droll, perky Paula Prentiss-Sandra Bullock type, who instantly intuited that our foursome would mainly eat "family style" and cheerfully provided the requisite extra plates. While we waited for Granny's white Bourgogne to chill (corkage was $10 a bottle), Christian and I tried the house-special cocktails ($6). My "French Martini" had French vodka with a soupçon of passion fruit liqueur and a drop of cassis; his "Paris Passion" was the same sans cassis. "They taste like high-octane gasoline," Denny sagely diagnosed. We'd have been better off choosing our starter-glasses from the house wine list, which is French to the Beaune, and includes plenty of "little" regional bottlings at reasonable prices.
Christian was amused and perplexed to find the appetizers listed on a menu section titled "Entrees" (a linguistic leftover from French aristos' multicourse meals in earlier centuries). Bypassing raw oysters, cold seafood, and a plate of Hobbs' cold cuts, we zeroed in on a Maine lobster "Martini" ($11), one of Canelle's signature dishes. It proved a martini glass filled with an incoherent basil-flecked lobster salad, featuring hard, tasteless little fava beans. (The late rains ruined the flavor of this year's favas, and I wish restaurants would just forgo them.) The lean Meyer lemon dressing was too stark to unite the flavors, much less disguise the toughness and blandness of the lobster bits. "My aunt used to work in a lobster-processing plant, preparing frozen shelled lobster claws for restaurants," said TJ, the taste reawakening old memories. "She'd send us 5-pound bags of 'seconds,' and we'd eat them still frozen as 'lobsicles,' because once they defrosted they lost all their flavor."
A trio of oysters warmed in a champagne sauce ($10) with crisp leeks and Osetra caviar were more sensual in their mild, undistinguished sauce, although the crispiest leek-shreds seemed to mimic shell grit, and the wee pinch of caviar on each oyster mushed out from the heat. A "terrine" of duck foie gras ($13) came accompanied by an adorable little cherry tart, but the unlayered rose-beige slabette looked more like a páte or a mousse than a typical terrine. Its flavor was flat, tinny, and elusively familiar; on the way home I finally realized how similar it tasted to the Marcel & Henri duck liver mousse I sometimes buy at the supermarket. Pork rillettes (a loose páte of shredded pork cooked in its own fat) "with pistachios and black truffles" ($8) looked like tuna salad and tasted mainly of fresh lard. No pistachios were perceptible to any of the senses, and instead of subtle, seductive black truffles, the stuff reeked powerfully of white truffle oil -- which I consider Europe's answer to Asia's infamous durian fruit, its overpowering aroma blending divinity and noxiousness.
But our first main course was a marvel of rich earthiness and balance. The mijote of beef cheek in burgundy sauce ($18), another of Canelle's signature dishes, arrived fresh from the oven in a blue Le Creuset casserole. "Do we get to keep the pot?" I asked cheekily, as the waitress set it on a plain red brick that served with self-conscious funkiness as a trivet. The luscious fall-apart meat was robed in a deep, beefy red wine sauce, and sank into a bed of horseradish mashed potatoes whose pungent, musky undertone was a perfect complement to the stew flavors. "This dish makes the whole meal worthwhile," said Christian, to emphatic nods all around.
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