By now, you’ve heard the news: This has been the Year of Indignity for fine dining, with white tablecloths falling by the wayside and food trucks taking over our fair city’s streets. Formality is out. Farm dinners are in. A multicourse meal that costs as much as a mortgage payment now comes across as a bout of outré excess, as cartoonishly grotesque as a Monty Python fatty cramming down one last wafer-thin mint.

But even in an age whose culinary ethos is shaped by Slow Food restraint and fiscal gloom and doom, some chefs remain open to experimentation. They’re reluctant to launch the next Fleur de Lys, but they’re also not resigned to flipping grass-fed-beef burgers. Instead, they’re seeking the happy ground in between.

Take Joshua Skenes. With his partners, Kristopher Esqueda and wine man Mark Bright, he’s launched Saison, a first-rate restaurant that proves, once and for all, that fine dining isn’t dead. It has merely taken root in new terrain.

Saison is French for “season,” and the word reflects the restaurant’s quest for easygoing earthiness, as well as its debt to haute cuisine. When the restaurant first opened, Skenes and Bright declared their wish to do away with “unnecessary froufrou,” even as they promised, on their $70 four-course prix fixe menu, with $40 optional wine pairings, to include such vital froufrou as amuse-bouches and mignardises.

A cynic might suggest that they’re trying to play it both ways. But the frills Skenes and company are out to excise have little to do with food and everything to do with the baggage of upmarket eating: the Sun King dining room with leather-bound menus, ruled by a fawning maître d’. Bright and Skenes both know from fancy, having worked together at Stonehill Tavern, a Michael Mina resort restaurant in Monarch Beach. Prior to that, Skenes wore the toque at Chez TJ, a refined redoubt in the South Bay. At their new venture, they’ve kept alive their interest in high-minded cuisine, but with the upscale ornaments stripped away.

The setting they chose is a renovated stable behind an artsy café in the Mission district. Saison operates just three nights a week. Reservations are required, as is up-front payment, a policy that makes for both smart economics and good guerrilla marketing. By the time I paid my first visit, enough buzz had built around Saison to send a foodnik’s heart aflutter with the sense that he was eating on the leading edge. A small crowd had gathered in a shaded courtyard, and an Adam Lambert look-alike was filling crystal flutes with sparkling wine. Glasses clinked, conversation crested, and I felt like a guest at a private dinner bash.

Saison cultivates such intimate moments. On the way to your table, the staff lead you through the kitchen, where a chef’s table is set beside one of the workstations. Every seat in Saison has a good view of the action, and diners are welcome to wander in and watch Skenes, whose cooking is what really steals the show.

On my visits, meals began with two amuse-bouches. The first was a sweet farewell to summer: corn pudding topped with zesty tomato gelée. Next came a slow-cooked egg, layered with dashi cream and Meyer lemon. It was served with a crisp rectangle of brioche, toasted in seaweed butter and ideal for piercing the egg’s salty-citrus upper strata to reach the oozing yolk below. As
we nibbled, Bright refreshed our glasses, a generous practice he repeated with each flight; while in the kitchen, a painstaking creation was nearly complete. Skenes’ garden-vegetable course takes an hour and a half to plate, and no wonder. It features as many as 35 vegetables, from ice plant to sweet onion, cucumber to beets, prepared in various ways: roasted, poached, and shaved raw. The jus from each is salvaged, then bathed back over the vegetables, along with an anchovy-infused olive oil and a frothy crème fraîche seasoned with Meyer lemon, all intricately layered. This dish is to a garden salad what the Medici palace is to a Berkeley bungalow.

Which isn’t to say that Skenes’ cooking lacks a rustic base. It’s so rooted in the seasons that it never risks a run-in with pretension. Grilled albacore, netted in leaves of wilted cabbage, leeks, and seaweed, and washed with gentle currents of foie-gras butter and seaweed bouillon, tastes at once sophisticated and straightforward.

Straddling the line between fancy-pants and farmhouse takes excellent balance, and Saison makes some small missteps. The dishware is too chichi for a refurbished stable, while the hard-edged chairs inflict undue torture during the nearly three-hour meal. One of Skenes’ many strengths may not be pasta, judging from his oddly crunchy agnolotti. An intriguing sea urchin sauce, flecked with coffee grounds, was too thin to cling to the pasta. The flavors never fused, and there was no spoon for scooping them up. Yet such quibbles seem minor when you consider how much else is done right. Dessert was slow-roasted pineapple, a tropical treat taken for a worldly urban spin. The near caramelized fruit was slivered thin and filled, ravioli-like, with panna cotta, then studded with fiery pink peppercorns and cooled by Meyer-lemon pineapple granita.

Habit soon inspired me to signal for the check. Whatever the cost, it would have seemed worth it. Then I remembered—I’d already paid, gratuity included. At Saison, calculating the tip is just one more formality you’re spared.

Saison: 2124 Folsom St. (bet. 17th and 18th Sts.), S.F., 415-828-7990, saisonsf.com, dinner only, reservation required, valet parking, wheelchair accessible $$$$ three stars