restaurant-menus – Some Ben?

Saison

Dinner at Saison was really solid. Spectacular service with attention to detail, an open kitchen with almost-haphazard arrangements of tables around the high-ceilinged, taxidermied space. The smell of the wood-fired stove filled the room. Our winter menu was from late December, 2019. My favorite beverage was a sake, Shirataki’s Jozen Mizunogotoshi (junmai ginjo).

We started with champagne and tea made from a bundle of herbs in water. This reminded me of putting a sachet of herbs de Provence in a broth.
Then tiny cuts of sea bream sashimi seared on charcoal, served with sea lettuces, orange yuzu, sesame seeds in an oil, and sriracha chili water.
Lovely “nose to tail” dish of dungeness crab, featuring every part of the animal including the tomalley. Served with a thick almond milk sauce, and grapefruit.
Seared scallop in an oily berbere-like sauce. My wife had a tofu dish with carrots & kimchi.
Then we had trout with its roe alongside fartichokes, higher quality than the aquacultured McFarland Springs trout that’s everywhere else now-a-days.
Tiny white bread poppy seed rolls, served warm in a little basket on the table.
Black cod served with a chestnut puree, and a punchy (miso?) broth.
One of our favorite items was uni served over a piece of grilled sourdough, looking a bit like nigiri. The texture was wet from a bread sauce being spooned over, presumably made from their house-fermented bread hanging above the kitchen.
Spectacularly-beautiful radish dish, with a variety of colorful radishes & radish greens & flowers presented on a high, white plate.
Venison loin sous vide with raw garlic inside, in a demi sauce with ribbons of pickled kohlrabi & grated horseradish, and chanterelles.
The standout of the meal was the roasted honey nut squash mashed with a crunchy breadcrumb & herb mixture that tasted like Israeli salad.
Weak cheese course that was a bland, soft buffalo cheese wrapped in banana leaves and served with a nice flatbread cracker. Given the high bar of Saison’s ingredients, I would have preferred an actual, editorial cheese course.
Then a persimmon and creme fraiche dish, less savory.
The first dessert was a disappointment. Something with candy cap mushrooms & chocolate & tea, but the mushroom just ate gimmicky. I would preferred something baked cake-y or tart-y with more crunch, acid, and texture.
The second dessert with huckleberry & yuzu was for my birthday, and was very nice.

Sons & Daughters

Menu notes from dinner at Sons & Daughters in San Francisco on October 20th, 2017.

Aperitif was a glass of Cava
Taste was a leek and beluga caviar tartlet (crunchy)
Glass sphere w/ celery broth, dehydrated okra seeds, chestnut puree, and hipster bacon
Salad of abalone & cabbage, w/ black garlic puree & mild pistachio butter
Broccoli rabe, radish, tomatillo salsa (very off, chemically flavor)
Delicata squash roasted & pureed, linguini of Granny Smith apples, shaved dehydrated foie gras
Very al dente purple barley w/ lobster mushrooms & dark roasted mushroom broth (barely there tarragon)
Bavette steak (yawn) stuffed w/ truffles & salsify a few ways
Set “Japanese cheesecake” of Big Rock Blue w/ quince (awful, sent it back)
Limequat ice cream, buckwheat honey, fennel meringue
Sous vide sesame cake w/ dehydrated buttermilk sprinkles, agastache greens, frozen carrot puree
Bookended meal w/ a chocolate & honey sphere tartlet

Motoi

Menu notes from our dinner at Motoi in Kyoto, Japan on May 13th, 2017.

aperitif: Rice flour dumpling
(deep-fried rice flour dumpling, stuffed w/ a bit of sweet bean paste, wrapped in prosciutto)
amuse-bouche: Firefly squid, beans, potato mouse
(flute w/ white potato mousse, green peas, broad beans, squid, topped w/ a soft consomme jelly)
porc: Baked pork back ribs Cantonese style
(small slices of tea-marinaded fatty pork w/ crisped skin, strawberries & Italian basil)
pousse de bambou: Kyoto’s fresh bamboo shoot, wakame soup
(lukewarm wakame soup w/ fresh bamboo & shiitake mushrooms & sansho leaf, confused but tasty)
asperge blanche: White asparagus
(shredded white asparagus, noodles, caviar, edible flowers w/ thin onion-y aioli)
ris de veau: Sauted sweet bread and herb salad
(sauteed sweetbreads, bitter green leaves, balsamic vinaigrette drizzled at the last minute)
poisson: Panfried Japanese bluefish, Kyoto’s bracken, butter sauce
(wild bracken, onion bulb heads, beurre blanc w/ tomato concasse)
boeuf: roasted Ozaki beef
(rare, tendon-y wagyu beef, fiddlehead ferns, white onion, w/ cherry demi sauce)
dessert-1: Walnuts with lemon
(walnut ice cream, lemon granita, icy)
dessert-2: Banana, coconutscream, rasberry [sic]
(coconut & raspberry frozen cream wrapped in a brown banana fruit leather, candy-like)
dessert-3: Miyazaki’s mango
(mango, Campari liquid nitrogen granita, meringue shingles, white miso whipped cream, fromage blanc ice cream)
mignardises
(tea & chocolate macarons, champagne meringue cookies, cannelle, also rosewater jelly, chocolate & coconut truffle, cinnamon curl cookie)

Atalier Crenn

We had dinner at Atalier Crenn on Friday night, and here are details on her menu:

White chocolate shell filled w/ cider, topped w/ creme de cassis jelly (Kir Breton / “Spring has come with its cool breeze”)
Trout roe in a tiny buckwheat cheese tart, and black truffle & citrus salad w/ greens (Citrus, Golden Trout Roe, Black Truffle / “Orbs of the air, earth, and sea coalesce”)
Shreds of fried potatoes w/ seaweed powder and gold flake & smoked trout w/ foie gras mousse & foie gras crunchy skin & Greek yogurt cream (Fish & Chips / “In search of those swimming creatures, tasty and crispy”)
Leek, fennel, (olive?) oil broth, sushi rice paddy w/ kombu, butter poached sea urchin w/ sesame seeds (Koshihikari Rice, Wakame, Barigoule / “Come with me and look into the golden light”)
Caviar w/ rice cream (koji?) & salty, buttery, seaweed-crusted rutabaga (Caviar, Rutabaga, Koji / “A burst of oceanic feeling, salty black pearls”)
Abalone slices w/ oyster cream, egg yolks & brioche w/ fine herbes butter, whipped beef fat butter (Abalone, Roasted Garlic, Oyster Cream / “The whimsically ebullient blue umami”)
Morels w/ lardo & parmesan custard, pine nuts, smoked creme fraiche spheres (Morrel, pint [sic] Nu, Parmesan Custard / “Earthly song of the elfin singers”)
Wagyu beef, pickled carrot jelly, edible flowers, roasted chicken cognac sauce (A-5 Wagyu, Foraged Spring Herbs, Carrot Veil / “Under a shroud stirs the tender-footed beast”)
Harbison cheese tart, onion marmalade, quince, zucchini weave cover (Cow’s Milk Cheese, Quince, Onion Marmalade / “Green lattice, in dulcet reminiscence”)
Pistachio ice cream “olive” (green tea?) olive oil (Recreated Olive / “A precious token”)
Chestnut, sage cream in little chocolate egg shells & fillo ‘maki’ wrapped around yogurt, apple, fennel & blood orange ice, rosette of something pickled (Egg of Chestnut & Sage / Toasted Fillo, Yogurt, Apple, Fennel / Blood Orange Ice / “Walking deep in the woods” / “Strolling on, into the orchard” / “As the earth might have something to spare”)
Sorrel, mint sponge w/ pine nuts, blackberries reconstructed from spheres, stuffed w/ ice cream & shaved dark citrus cookie shaved like truffle (“The Forest” / “Spring has come and is full of sweet surprises”)
Tree of meringue cookies w/ calabash (?) jam, raspberry w/ chocolate jellies, nougat squares & box of chocolates, a white chocolate bark, white chocolate w/ coffee bonbon, Peruvian dark chocolate square truffle (Mignardises / “Sweetness, bounty, thanks”)
Granola sticks to takeaway

Happy Birthday, Hipsteraunt

Last month was the two year anniversary of the website Hipsteraunt, which I built with my friend Lance Arthur. He did the design, I did the random menu generation. It is a quirky bit of AI and NLP under-the-hood, so a user gets menus featuring free-range suspended chicken feet, truffled shisito pepper with achiote, and marshmallow crudo, at a place with an ampersand in its name. The inspiration had been a particular dinner out in San Francisco, at an immensely overrated restaurant. But it could have been Brooklyn or the West Loop. I am a quant & machine learning researcher by happy vocation, but also a chef by training. (Le Cordon Bleu with honors, thank you.) So the term “foodie” has always struck me as what privileged folks call themselves when they like to eat fancy food, but would not be caught dead hanging out with a line cook.

Hipsteraunt remains a tender satire of a certain sort of fetishized dining out. It was meant to be an acerbic call to check-your-privilege, together with a reminder that nothing in food is new. No combination of ingredients or flavors has not been tried a thousand times before. Even offal and the Asian flavors everyone loves to exoticize. (Awkward…) We lived through the fusion cuisine of the 1980s, remember? In hindsight, it might have cut a bit too close to the bone. The site garnered plenty of attention, but less heady pokes like the fake Guy Fieri menu and the brilliant Jacques le Merde have been far more successful. An annoying bug with making menu URLs permanent snagged things up the first couple weeks, too. Nonetheless on Hipsteraunt’s second birthday, I celebrate by raising an artisanal cocktail (a lemongrass aviation, perhaps) and toasting the addition of a few new ingredients: Keep an eye out for those trendy signifiers of faux-edgy cuisine we all love, like burrata and purslane, za’atar and togarashi. Goodbye ginger, goodbye almond milk. But it looks like bacon is still there.

What is There to Eat Around Here?

Or, why clams are bourgeois — the presence of clams on menus is indicative of a place where people spend a lot of their money on housing. This is how I found out.

We have all played the proportional rent affordability game. How much of my income should I spend on where I live? One rule of thumb is “a third,” so if you take home $2,400 per month you aim to spend about $800 on rent or a mortgage payment. Some play the hypothetical budgeting version of the game. We might pay more of our income for housing if it means being able to live in a particularly desirable area.

Expensive Housing
Here is a map of income normalized by housing expense, for a bunch of Bay Area neighborhoods. This information is from our Altos Research active market real estate data. More technically, each dot on the map represents the ratio of a zipcode’s household income to the weighted average of single family home list prices and multi-family home list prices. I used median numbers, to minimize the impact of foreclosures or extremely wealthy households. Single and multi-family home prices were weighted by listing inventory, so urban condos matter as much as those McMansions in the ‘burbs. The green dots are areas where proportionally more income is spent on housing, and blue dots are the opposite.

The data shows that people living in the city of San Francisco spend a much larger proportion of their income on housing than Oaklanders or those in San Jose. If we assume that the real estate market is somewhat efficient, then those who choose to live in certain neighborhoods forgo savings and disposable income. Why is it that housing expenses for living in San Francisco are so much higher than San Jose, even when we control for income disparity?

The Real Estate Menu
Like a proper hack economist, I am going to gloss over the obvious driving factors of proportionally expensive housing, such as poor labor mobility, lack of job opportunities, and a history of minority disenfranchisement. I am a chef by training — culinary arts degree from CHIC, the Le Cordon Bleu school in Chicago — and remain fascinated by the hospitality industry. So instead of diving into big social problems, I focused on something flippant and easy to measure: Where people go out to eat, across areas with different levels of proportional housing expense.

I analyzed the menus of a random selection of 5,400 sit-down and so-called “fast casual” restaurants across the United States. This menu population is hopefully large and diverse enough to represent dining out in general, though it is obviously biased toward those restaurants with the money and gumption to post their menus online. However there is not a disproportionate number of national chain restaurants, since even the most common restaurant, T.G.I. Friday’s, is only about 2.5% of the population:

Menu Words
The next step in my analysis was counting the common words and phrases across the menus. Here are the top fifty:

1. sauce, 2. chicken, 3. cheese, 4. salad, 5. grilled, 6. served, 7. fresh, 8. tomato, 9. shrimp, 10. roasted, 11. served-with, 12. garlic, 13. cream, 14. red, 15. fried, 16. onions, 17. tomatoes, 18. beef, 19. rice, 20. onion, 21. bacon, 22. topped, 23. mushrooms, 24. topped-with, 25. steak, 26. vinaigrette, 27. spinach, 28. lettuce, 29. pork, 30. green, 31. potatoes, 32. spicy, 33. white, 34. salmon, 35. in-a, 36. soup, 37. peppers, 38. mozzarella, 39. lemon, 40. sweet, 41. with-a, 42. menu, 43. beans, 44. dressing, 45. fries, 46. tuna, 47. black, 48. greens, 49. chocolate, 50. basil

Pervasive ingredients like “chicken” turn up, as do common preparation and plating terms like “sauce” and “topped-with”. Perhaps my next project will be looking at how this list changes over time. For example, words like “fried” were taboo in the 90’s, but more common during this post-9/11 renaissance of honest comfort food. Now-a-days chicken can be “fried” again, not necessarily “crispy” or “crunchy”.

A Tasty Model
Next I trained a statistical model using the menu words and phrases as independent variables. My dependent variable was the proportional housing expense in the restaurant’s zipcode. The model was not meant to be predictive per se, but instead to identify the characteristics of restaurant menus in more desirable areas. The model covers over five thousand restaurants, so menu idiosyncrasy and anecdote should average out. The algorithm used was our bespoke version of least-angle regression with the lasso modification. It trains well on even hundreds of independent variables, and highlights which are most informative. In this case, which of our many menu words and phrases are correlated with proportional housing expense?

The twenty menu words and phrases most correlated with low proportional housing expense (the bluer dots) areas:

1. tortilla, 2. cream-sauce, 3. red-onion, 4. thai, 5. your-choice, 6. jumbo, 7. crisp, 8. sauce-and, 9. salads, 10. oz, 11. italian, 12. crusted, 13. stuffed, 14. marinara, 15. broccoli, 16. egg, 17. scallops, 18. roast, 19. lemon, 20. bean

Several of these words of phrases are associated with ethnic cuisines (i.e. “thai” and “tortilla”), and others emphasize portion size (i.e. “jumbo” and “oz” for ounce). Restaurants in high proportional housing expense areas (greener dots) tend to include the following words and phrases on their menus:

1. clams, 2. con, 3. organic, 4. mango, 5. tofu, 6. spices, 7. eggplant, 8. tomato-sauce, 9. cooked, 10. artichoke, 11. eggs, 12. toast, 13. roll, 14. day, 15. french-fries, 16. duck, 17. seasonal, 18. oil, 19. steamed, 20. lunch, 21. chips, 22. salsa, 23. baby, 24. arugula, 25. red, 26. braised, 27. grilled, 28. chocolate, 29. avocado, 30. dressing

These words reflect healthier or more expensive food preparation (i.e. “grilled” or “steamed”), as well as more exotic ingredients (i.e. “mango” and “clams”). Also, seasonal and organic menus are associated with low proportional housing expense. The word “con” turns up as a counter-example for Latin American cuisine, as in “con huevos” or “chili con queso”.

Food Crystal Ball
This sort of model for restaurant menus could also be used for forecasting, to statistically predict the sort of food that will be more successful in a particular neighborhood. This predictive power would be bolstered by the fact that the population of menus has a survivorship bias, because failed or struggling restaurants are less likely to post their menus online.

This confirms my suspicion that housing expense is counter-intuitive when it comes to dining out. People who spend more of their income on housing in order to live in a desirable location have less disposable income, but these are the people who pay more for exotic ingredients and more expensive food preparation. Maybe these folks can’t afford to eat in their own neighborhood?