Restaurant updates

By John Birdsall and Scott Hocker

Redd
In a town that’s turning into a fine-dining theme park, it’s thrilling to know that style and substance can coexist. Redd’s minimalist room and its staff’s uniforms are deceptively simple: Witness the floor-to-ceiling windows throwing natural light on the contemporary furniture and the bussers’ aprons, which subtly invert the colors of those worn by the servers. Richard Reddington’s food, too, is quietly sophisticated. Rice appears in multiple guises. Fried, it adds texture to a dish of yellowfin tartare with avocado and chili oil. As the base for hamachi sashimi with edamame, it lends sticky body. Whether pan-searing sole and dressing it with mussels, chorizo, and a frothy saffron-curry sauce or saving pork belly from overexposure by slicking it with soy caramel, Reddington is incap­able of leading diners astray. (S.H.) 6480 Washington St. (at oak cir.), 707-944-2222 $$$ RVW 3 stars

Restaurant Gary Danko
Consistency is the holy grail of restaurant dining. It takes peerless focus and keen improvisational skills to execute a perfect dish hour after hour, day after day. In that regard, the kitchen at Restaurant Gary Danko has fine dining nailed. Signature dishes, such as oysters and salsify swathed in lettuce cream, and Moroccan spiced squab stuffed with couscous, are technical marvels. So, too, are seasonal preparations like caramelized scallops with rutabaga purée and tender braised celery. The trouble is that these dishes often emphasize craft at the expense of soul. It’s a trend also apparent in the smilingly robotic phalanx of Josef Duran–clad servers, and the famous cheese cart that offers far too many far-too-familiar cheeses. Similarly, the flower arrangements—a combination of disco balls, strings of blossoms, and Buddha statues—look as though they were culled from a Taoist convention at Studio 54. Everything about the dining experience here is so predictable and free of surprise, it’s like Chow for the expense-account set. (S.H.) 800 North Point St. (at Hyde St.), S.F., 415-749-2060 $$$$ DRVW 2.5 stars

Town Hall
Local chefs of a certain pedigree stick to the lingua franca of France and Tuscany, meaning a de facto dis of everything else. This makes the success of Town Hall—a place steeped in American vernacular with a Southern lilt—all the more surprising. Since launching the restaurant in 2003, chefs (and siblings) Mitchell and Steven Rosenthal have managed to steer clear of caricature, mining the whole backcountry angle with the seriousness of scholars. As a result, a dish as hackneyed as buttermilk fried chicken becomes archetypal, while a softly poached egg on a raft of chunky ham toast turns transcendent, thanks to a silky cream sauce charged with the green-stem twang of jalapeño. Even a dish with the cartoonlike name gingersnap gravy (sauce for slow-roasted duck) has a fine haute edge. (J.B.) 342 Howard St. (at Fremont St.), s.f., 415-908-3900 $$$ RW 3 stars


D= Dinner only
R= Reservations recommended
V= Valet available
W= Wheelchair accessible