This maximalist new S.F. restaurant served our critic one of her favorite dishes of the year

San Francisco Chronicle​

4 days ago

When I was an editor at Bon Appétit, many of our most popular recipes followed a simple formula: It's this, but it's also that. It's an apple cider doughnut, but it's also cake. It's French onion soup, but it's Taiwanese beef noodle soup too.
The appeal is obvious — why settle for one delicious thing when you can have two — and there is a certain type of gonzo recipe developer whose brain is naturally wired for this genre of culinary innovation. They're not the people who will spend months perfecting a classic recipe for, say, Bavarian pretzels. They're maximalists. They're going to ask hard questions like, what if Bavarian pretzels and jerk chicken had a baby?
Parker Brown is that type of chef. At his new San Francisco restaurant, Side A, the menu is riddled with unholy alliances that, like Shrimp Jesus, are undeniably compelling. 'I like fried potatoes with cheese,' you think, 'and I like fried potatoes with caviar. Why wouldn't I like both smashed together?'
This is not to say Side A is a restaurant that runs on AI slop-style gimmicks. After getting his start in restaurants in his native Chicago, Brown moved west to train under Michael Mina and, most recently, was chef de cuisine at Aphotic, the Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant that closed at the end of last year. His chops are real, his flavors are dialed, his technique is unimpeachable.
Take the short rib gnocchi ($34). It's an Italian beef sandwich, but it's also pillowy, beautifully-seared pâte à choux dumplings. It's one of the best dishes I've eaten all year. The Parisian gnocchi swim in an impossibly rich sauce made with veal stock, but in every bite you'll encounter a burst of brightness from the house-pickled giardiniera. Fresh goat cheese from Tomales Farmstead Creamery adds tang, and the whole soupy, beefy mess is blanketed with microplaned Parm and finely chopped chives.
There's also the chicken cutlet ($36), a buttermilk-brined breast coated with panko and cornflakes that gives schnitzel the golden arches treatment. The pounded cutlet, topped with a mountain of herbs, rises out of a sea of positively slurpable honey mustard sauce, thinned with chicken jus. It's McNuggets' final form. The sole element that distracted from nostalgic bliss was the braised chicories, a pleasantly bitter but texturally reminiscent of hot, wet salad.
Breaking the mold is Side A's halibut ($39). Neither cute nor clever, it's simply delicious, a mature combination of beans, charred onions, fish and salsa macha. Brown obviously delights in the over-the-top playfulness of his other menu items, but the halibut sends a message. He doesn't need a 'concept' to sell a dish.
If all this sounds like a far cry from the type of foam and edible flower-flecked food Brown cooked at Aphotic, that's by design. For Brown, fine dining was a job, one he happened to be very good at. It was never a passion. A former high school athlete, Brown worked as a strength and conditioning coach before making the jump to restaurants. 'Coming from a sports background, it was an easy transition to fine dining,' he told me. 'It's competitive, semi-egotistical. Very translatable.'
But at Side A, the focus is not on chasing stars but rather, in Brown's words, yumminess. You may have student debt and borderline LDL levels, but what does your inner child crave? Definitely that large format chicken tender, but maybe a salad as well — specifically the garbage salad ($25), a composition that is as much jammy egg, smoked blue cheese, candied pecans and crispy pork belly confit as it is vegetables.
For dessert, there's carrot cake ($18), an only barely scaled-down version of the one that Brown and his wife, Caroline, who mans Side A's DJ booth several nights a week, served at their wedding. Two people will struggle to finish it. Brown will assure you that the leftovers will be excellent the next morning with a cup of coffee, a fact to which I can attest. Perhaps this is because it's generously showered with toasted coconut and candied walnuts, essentially granola.
If you weren't tipped off to Side A's Midwestern sensibilities by the Italian beef and Miller High Life on the menu, then the portion sizes might clue you in. And if the portion sizes weren't evidence enough, then the warmth of the Browns is a giveaway. 'We're huggers,' they might tell you on a second visit. The Browns set out to open a neighborhood restaurant for them and their community. If you're there, well, then you must be a friend.
On my visits, my fellow diners seemed primed by that Midwestern geniality — as well as by their good fortune at having secured a tough reservation — to have a convivial time. This is no silent temple to tweezer food. Caroline, a music industry veteran, and her guest DJs pull from a deep selection of vinyl, spinning Peter Gabriel and the Police for a Father's Day dad rock set and mixing D'Angelo and Biggie later in the evening. The Browns have added sound-absorbing panels to the walls of the old Universal Café space, but it's still not the place to have a quiet tête-à-tête. Bring a date you'd like to lean closer to.
Brown's maximalist swings uniformly delight, but they don't all hit their mark. While I do love both burgers and bone marrow, it turns out that I don't find them to bring out the best in one another, particularly when a luscious soft-ripened slab of goat cheese is also invited to the party ($35). With pickles and a ramekin of jus on the side, figuring out how to eat it gracefully is an intelligence test I was not bright enough to pass. And although I had high hopes for that appetizer of cheese fries bedazzled with two types of caviar ($39), it was also a challenge to eat — it's hard to balance roe on a French fry while swiping it through Mornay sauce — and somehow less than the sum of its parts.
But while eating that more-is-more cheeseburger, I was reminded of my high school theater director who encouraged his actors to make big choices. 'I'd rather have too much to work with than not enough,' he'd say.
Brown's ideas are bold, his cooking confident, and the space he and Caroline have created is vivacious and inviting. It's a yummy restaurant, but it's also a house party filled with nice people. Sounds like a recipe for popularity to me.
Side A
2814 19th St., San Francisco. sideasf.com
Meal for two, without drinks: $95-$150
Drinks: A large selection of wines by the glass, including a house white and red that are collaborations with Ryme Cellars ($13 glass, $49 bottle); rotating draft selection as well as the Champagne of Beers ($6); N/A options including housemade lemonades ($8)
Best practices: Expect more of a party vibe on Fridays and Saturdays and a slightly more mellow situation Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday. If no reservations are available, walking in is possible, but prepare to wait.