Eating Sea Urchin at Saison, San Francisco
Saison, Joshua Skene’s 3 Michelin Star, fire focused restaurant in San Francisco, is easily the most fun dining experience I’ve ever had in a fancy restaurant. What a treat to combine serious, sophisticated food with a vibe that was warm and irreverent. It was such a blast! I dined at Saison about three weeks before the 2018 announcements for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants were made. That night, Saison was number 37 and it has now dropped to number 46. With Atelier Crenn somewhat controversially dropping out of the list, it is now the only restaurant in San Francisco represented in the Top 100.
Located near the baseball stadium, the Relais and Chateaux restaurant is housed in a red brick warehouse which is pretty unassuming from the outside, with tinted windows masking the warmth of the room inside. As I walked in for the early seating at 6pm, I was immediately at ease. This was a welcoming, casual space – the website states there is no dress code, ‘come as you are’. Half the room is taken up by an enormous, entirely open kitchen. I was seated in a banquette style mini booth, near the small bar area. The styling consisted of rough timber pylons, exposed ceilings, lots of greenery, undressed tables, wood stacks and bunches of dried herbs hanging from the racks above the kitchen alongside copper pots and pans. It was quite noisy, with sounds from the kitchen and a very eclectic 1980s soundtrack pumping making it clear this was not a place where hushed, reverent tones were expected.
The $298USD (before tax and tip and booze…deep breath) multi course set menu meant I didn’t need to make any decisions except about what to drink. As the sommelier poured me a complimentary glass of champagne to start and handed me a hefty wine book, even that seemed a little overwhelming. So instead, I made the decision to just give the expert a modest budget and after a couple of questions, he said ‘leave it with me’! We started with a very reasonably priced half bottle of a 2014 Gitton Sancerre Les Belles Dames which was lively and citrus driven, a great food wine. Then, as we moved into the more meaty part of the meal, he poured me a glass of 2009 Copain Pinot Noir from California that cost almost as much as the half bottle – worth every penny and he still came in under budget!
The food philosophy of baseball cap wearing Joshua Skenes and Saison is very clear – taste is king. Everything revolves around fire and local products, nothing is imported or commercially available. Taste drives everything. Whilst there is plenty of complexity in achieving that taste, essentially the quality of the produce and the skill of cooking with fire is front and centre.
The meal started with make your own wraps consisting of a bowl of gorgeous salad greens and slices of raw Amberjack alongside a sticky chicken wing and pieces of pineapple that had been charred on the fire. No cutlery to be seen, you just used your fingers to make the wraps and eat them. It was a fun, fresh way to start and I will definitely be grilling pineapple when summer comes!
I then had my texture issues seriously challenged by the appearance of enormous pieces of orange uni, the edible part of a sea urchin served on top of buttery, grilled bread. And this was before I actually knew that uni is the sea urchin’s gonads…best to not think too deeply about this. I took a deep breath and hoped for the best, but the flavour overtook any texture issues I had been worried about. Wow – no wonder this is considered a signature dish at Saison! The bread had been soaked in a sauce made of stock, seaweed, brown butter and lemon and somehow that massive umami kick plus the sogginess of the bread meant that the texture of the uni was not as challenging as I feared. I definitely needed the hand towel to clean up after that one!
The fascination with fire continued when I was presented with a beet that had been roasted for three days in the coals at the back of the open-flame grill. The tableside theatre really went up a notch when a waiter poured liquefied bone marrow out of the centre of a cow femur bone into a pot of beet sauce! The result was an incredibly rich, viscous beet dish that melted in the mouth.
Roasted, honey glazed quail was served alone on a plate with only a hand towel for company. Fortunately, I had just about finished the half bottle of Sancerre before I embarked on the experience of picking up a quail wing and gnawing on it at a three Michelin Star restaurant!
After choosing my own steak knife from a selection presented at the table (I had done that the night before at Atelier Crenn so I was really getting the hang of it), a roasted fillet of perfectly pink antelope was finished off by the waiter searing it on coals on a mini grill tableside and served with a southern style biscuit, dusted with chilli. Oh and house-made honey butter that made me keep eating the biscuit long after I should have stopped. Broth made from the antelope bones and topped with a sage leaf followed as the last savoury course. That was my first time eating antelope and it was tender and lean, similar to venison but perhaps a little sweeter.
The service was genuinely delightful. Equally adept with as much tableside service proficiency required as Atelier Crenn, but at Saison it was done with humour and a refreshing lack of ernestness. It’s possible a special effort was made because I was dining solo, but several wait staff engaged me in conversation over the course of the night about the food, the wine, where I was from and what I was doing in San Fran. I never felt like I was dining solo for long!
The friendliness seemed to seep into the whole atmosphere of the room. The sommelier had taken me on a tour of the open kitchen after I simply asked if it was ok for me to take a photo, a waiter from Adelaide wanted to know where I had eaten in his home town and we chatted about Hentley Farm, the couple at the table next to me struck up a conversation – she was an Aussie and he was Texan. The night had taken on a distinctly Aussie vibe in our little bar section of the restaurant and the presence of Ben Shewry, owner and head chef of Attica (which jumped from number 32 to number 20 in the 2018 World’s 50 Best list) sitting a couple of metres away at the bar just sealed the deal! It was really cool to watch such an accomplished chef be so excited about the food, taking photos and posting them to Instagram just like me!
The sommelier, who couldn’t possibly confirm or deny that was Ben Shewry sitting at the bar, then took my night to a whole new level by bringing out a bottle of 2002 Château d’Yguem Sauternes. He thought I might like a glass, on him. I know Sauternes dessert wines are exceptional, so this was a big deal. But it was only upon further research I found out this particular wine is widely regarded as the best Botrytis Semillon in the world. It retails for about $250 for a 375ml bottle and it was like drinking liquid toffee. That’s a pretty damn generous gesture and I’m almost certain it’s because I was a solo diner who was clearly enjoying herself to the max!
The three desserts of caramel sundae, wild strawberries and an orange buttermilk creamsicle (a mix of ice cream and sorbet) served inside a hollowed out orange were all delicious from memory! But by that stage, I was just way too in the moment and happy and yes, a tiny bit tipsy, to take any detailed notes to share with you here – my notes page on my phone finishes with “Antelope Broth”!
With a little dutch courage on board, I made a point of speaking to Ben and Josh as they were chatting at the bar. I dined at Attica in 2013 with my friends Matt and Lauren. We had booked dinner to celebrate mine and Lauren’s birthday and the week after we made our booking, Attica was named for the first time in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List at number 21, the highest new entry. Attica was my first taste of a world class restaurant, my first time eating perfectly executed conceptual food. It was a nice moment of synchronicity to now be eating at Saison with Ben as a fellow diner. They were both very gracious, Ben taking the time to say goodbye as he left a bit later. After shaking Dominique Crenn’s hand the night before, I was basically in chef fan girl heaven!
A lot has been written about how eye-wateringly expensive Saison is (for a little while, the set menu was priced at $398 per person, but has since dropped to $298). With tax, compulsory gratuity and drinks (even with my very modest budget of $70) my experience at Saison came in at $474USD. That’s $641 Australian dollars. Easily the most expensive meal I’ve ever had. By a long way. By comparison, Reale in Italy, also a 3 Michelin Star restaurant and number 36 on the World’s 50 Best (up from number 43 when I visited last year – yay), came in at $450AUD for the 11 course menu with matched wines. It’s a huge difference – you could also get a room for the night in the gorgeous 16th century monastery at Reale with your leftover change. I’m a bit embarrassed even writing about the cost; it’s hard to justify even when you love food as much as I do. All I can tell you is that I had to look up my credit card statement, only 2 months since I ate there, to check exactly how much it was. I’ve already forgotten the cost, but as I’ve been writing this, I can still feel the texture of that uni and I when I typed the words ‘house-made honey butter’ I could actually taste the sweetness of that smooth, addictive stuff. And, it wasn’t just a great meal, it was a really fun night out which can’t always be said for fine dining. Worth it? Maybe not for some, but just take a look at my face below and you’ll know it was for me!
