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AL's Place San Francisco Tripadvisor Reviews
Latest Reviews On Tripadvisor
9 Reviews
0 Replys |
A Lovely Dinner, but it wasn't worth the hype
$83 for a family style dinner with $54 pairing and then a surcharge on the 35-day dry aged grilled ribeye is what I paid for this dinner for two. Al's Place is a highly recommended restaurant by locals and while the restaurant has a simplistic decor, it has an open kitchen. The service was good and the waiting staffs could not be friendlier, except the rush towards the end of the dinner. The food is what I think will be called "New American" with a heavy Asian influence especially on the "snacks" course in the beginning. Some of the dishes seemed a bit odd but I enjoyed the brine pickled french fries with smoked apples sauce, fava'd mushroom broth chawanmushi (Japanese style steamed egg), Raw Hamachi starter, and the 35-day dry aged ribeye with grilled peach, genmaicha and burnt tamari. The wine pairing is good and the staffs are very accommodating to our tastes. However I am still not convinced of the hype and the Michelin star. I actually think I will give it a higher rating without all these additional expectations. It's a nice dinner but not sure if it is a $300+ dinner with two.
Be the first to ReplyExquisite Combinations of Ingredients, Delicious & Pricey
If you can spend $83 per person for a Family Style dining experience where everyone agrees to let the chef decide what to serve you, you’ll probably have one of the most exceptional dining experiences of your life. We opted to order individually and managed to share dishes and a good bottle of wine for about $60 per person. When we were there on a Wednesday evening, we had a reservation and within minutes every table was filled with guests. It is a very noisy restaurant where you are likely to have trouble hearing your dining partners unless you have exceptionally good hearing. My daughter asked for the music to be turned down but even with that request granted, it was still difficult to hear other people chatting at our table. However our meal was indeed exceptional.Heres the highlights: you must order their “ brine pickled French fries with smoked apple sauce”! We had two orders of the fries ! We loved the Baby Lettuces, herbed avocado & pistachio crumble as well as every dish we shared! Their hanger steak was incredibly tender and their pasta dish was unlike anything we’d ever tasted. The service staff was excellent and our meal was truly exquisite!
Be the first to ReplyDelicious Flavors!
Small, busy restaurant with outstanding service and delicious food. A lot of small plates, eclectic menu. Try the salad with guacamole (eat with your hands), the chick peas, the soup. Extensive wine list. A little pricey but not exorbitant.
Be the first to ReplyGood but very expensive for the experience!!
Went here recently for a dinner for five.
The space is small and loud and overcrowded.
The food is mostly vegetarian with a few meat and fish options
You can get wine but no hard liquor because they have no liquor license according to the waiter
The food is very good
The wines are super expensive
Overall my impression was: good but very very overpriced
A hype
This restaurant was chosen based on Yelp recommendation and that in fact has 1 Michelin star.
We chose the family style.
What a bummer it was.
The tast, spice combinations, was bland.
The red bow trout was dry and hard to chew. It should be extremely soft.
As a Norwegian I know fish!
They were out of tartar and rib eye.
We did get steak strips which was so chewy we could not eat.
I will not recommend this place. Michelin should take a second visit as I am sure they will loose their star.
Happily surprised!
Our vegetarian daughter convinced us to take her to Al's Place while we were visiting her recently. The menu was very different and didn't understand half of the ingredients. However, our excellent waitress guided the three of us through 5 or 6 shared plates and all were amazing! Loved them all, but least favorite was the meat dish. Go figure! Really awesome food and service. We booked a week out but could only get the patio, which was totally fine since the weather was beautiful.
Be the first to ReplyExcellent service and superb vegetarian dishes
Parking on Street if you can find a parking meter, our meter was scratched up and we couldn't read what was under the cloudy, scratched glass so risked a ticket for 6 minutes and sprinted up the street to Al's Place. They kindly seated us even though we were 15 minutes after our scheduled reservation but let us know we would have to release the table at 7:30 for the next guests. Thankfully, as we were not finished in that time, we were not hurried. The recommendations for two vegetarians were excellent, and explanations of the dishes were given. 5-6 small dishes to share + 2 desserts was perfect, even took home a little leftovers. The standouts for me were the eggplant dish and the kimchi soup. Dessert, which I assume is seasonal, was AMAZING, peach and syrupy and zaatar which I'd only ever had in entrees before. My guest had the blueberry lemon tart, also loaded with lemony goodness. Big enough to share and bring some home. Everything had such great flavors and textures. Service was attentive and the food just kept coming.
Can't wait for another excuse to go back. Allow time to park. No ticket phew!
Off the beaten track, not to be missed
Aaron has put together an exceptional restaurant with a truly culinary experience, that is for those for looking for something that is unique, memorable and out of the ordinary. We decided to go with the Family Style Chef’s menu, and it was a consistent culinary explosion of unique tastes, with exceptional dishes, not easily identifiable, but unique and award winning presentation. We tried several cocktails, and they were truly enjoyable. Aaron was away this night, but his general manager, Kimberly was on point, and did a fantastic job. What was most memorable was also the service. Any server that walked by and say a empty disk, would whisk it away, to keep our table clean and focus on our next dish. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience an exception culinary dining experience.
Be the first to ReplySo many San Francisco restaurants that do the quirky, opinionated, idiosyncratic faux-casual thing better
If you were to draw-up a list of the saddest fashions, affectations, ill-placed culinary passions, and grande cooking mistakes of the last few years, I think Al’s Place would solidly tick Every. Single. Box. This place is a living, breathing, performative satire of what fine dining should be.
First the place has no air conditioning and a single, beleaguered bathroom. I stood in line waiting to wash my hands, sweating from the warm San Francisco evening, and swapped places with a pregnant woman behind me who was certainly in more dire straits.
Clearly someone has pretenses of being a DJ, since they blare music so loudly that I could not hear anyone at my table a couple feet away. This was the recurring leitmotif of our dinner, and the main reason every one of us was hurrying through our mains and skipping dessert to just get out. Our first server was replaced by someone manager-ish, but they nonetheless misheard part of our order and just straight-up missed one of our wine requests. Each time we caught the attention of a new server, food runner, or host, we adulted and asked that the music be turned down. Call me crazy, but sometimes I go to a restaurant to get to know my companions better, as well as eat some neckbeard / topknot’s confusion cuisine. One of the servers eventually said the loud music was just the “vibe” of the restaurant, and we literally laughed out loud. At one point the woman at the table next to me leaned over, closely, to commiserate about the music. Most of the people in my row of table seats were physically leaning forward to yell. The place was so loud that when we asked for bowls for our shared soup, we were told they had heard us say we did not want them. And so on. The music itself? The usual quirky and dated garbage from the 90s, with a whiff of the post-ironic.
Their menu is a complete mess. First of all, they are too lazy to time the meal correctly and plate their dishes. Al’s Place calls this “family-style” or something, but its just cynical. Compounding this, neither of our two servers could actually tell us how much food to order for our party size, because there was no relationship between the section of the menu and the amount of food that ends up in front of you. There was some myth-making about “chef” wanting to treat proteins as a side, because they think this a comment on steak houses. But note that a real steak house can serve a plate of hot food umm, hot. Eventually we were able to map which lines on the menu were tastes, starters, mains, and sides, but to get this done meant literally taking out a piece of paper and a pen. I wish I was kidding: While negotiating with our servers about Lana Del Lame in background, we wrote our own translation of the Al’s Place menu, from hipsteraunt to English. After delivering an incorrect item with no explanation of what it was, they told us we should not have taken a bite before telling them it was wrong. How else were we supposed to find out what it was?!
The food is… fine. Their french fries were undercooked and soggy, but boy were they salty! Or should I say “brined.” The smoky mayonnaise alongside was too sweet and tasted like a dessert. Marlowe’s fries were better a decade ago. The Al’s Place lettuces were meant to be eaten by hand — see my queuing up for the bathroom sink, above — and for some reason had a bland avocado mousse streaked underneath. Can we please stop putting sauces under the food, to trick wraithy Instagrammers from LA into actually eating a sauce? The Progress does the reversed-salad-thing better. The chickpeas and harissa had some refrigerator burn to the legumes. The cold chickpea salad at Hey Day is better. The Al’s Place bean soup was overseasoned and was bad seasonal choice to have on the menu during hot weather. But hey, they’ll put kimchee in it so you can think it’s exotic. Or something. The minestrone at any one of a dozen Italian joints in North Beach is better. The Al’s smoked brisket needed to have its fat better trimmed, and ended up tasting more lukewarm St. Patrick’s Day-corned-beef than cozy passover seder. And so on.
We only passed on one of our tastes of wine, so an actual professional was involved in their wine list at some point. They had no beers on draught, which is weak in a drinking town like SF. Also there is no hard liquor license, so your cocktails will be those sweet sherry & vermouth-heavy shims instead of a before-dinner classic like a Manhattan.
Al’s Place joins Hakkasan and The Progress as the two dinners that have me doubting the Michelin guide’s star ratings. The Michelin guide used to be insulated from silly trends and dopey culinary tricks, but they are clearly lowering their standards to appeal to teh youths. Al’s Place is also in that rarified competition of least bang for the buck, alongside the stunningly overrated and overpriced Hashiri.
Avoid Al’s Place like the plague.