Avenue G's San Francisco Cuisine Needs a Road Map

We hadn't consulted her on the fish dishes, but we thought both the ones we tried were pretty much a disaster. The salmon came plopped unattractively in a white bowl, set on a white plate with a pile of fried shrimp alongside. The shrimp were hard, salty, and overcooked. The salmon, in a horror of a sweet glaze, was mushy and salty, sitting in something identified as lobster sage broth, with, apparently, green madras olives, sun-dried tomato puree, artichokes, and Spanish rice — but the combination tasted mostly metallic. The sea bass feijoada was similarly unpleasant: mushy-textured fish heaped on a messy, salty accumulation of what the menu called drunken black beans, linguiça, acorn squash, and cumin-scented caramelized onions. I love linguiça. I love cumin. In several bites, I could taste neither.

I think the pork wasn't stuffed that night. Anyway, my slice — I just checked the remains in the fridge — betrays nothing of the rosemary, prosciutto, and fontina stuffing mentioned on the menu. It was covered with a marsala mushroom cream sauce, topped with a few slices of underripe fig, and artlessly sided by a clump of congealed polenta and another clump of spinach. If the polenta had been mashed potatoes, and the spinach had been speckled with an enormous quantity of chopped garlic, the plate could have issued from an Iowa kitchen rather than an Italian one. My friends, again, think I have ended up with the best dish on the table, but I'm not really beguiled. The plate apparently was cooling for some time, and the pork is not only barely lukewarm, it also has the same mushy texture as both the fish dishes.

The desserts are, if anything, more careless than what came before: an individual cheesecake so dry and hard that my spoon bounces off it, really nasty; and "berries and cream" that turn out to be chunks of the same underripe figs, plums, and tasteless strawberries under unadulterated whipped cream.

I take another look at the menu. (There's also a bar menu, with such items as baked brie and something called Nashville Fingers, which are chicken tenders, oy vey, done what seems to me to be Buffalo-style with Tabasco, celery, and blue cheese ranch dressing.) There are so many wacky-sounding ingredients on the menu, in such unappealing combinations, that I expect Gordon Ramsay to burst out of the kitchen in a nightmare, simplifying as he goes. Avenue G's menu promises the world, but it isn't delivering.