Destination #29: Meatless Ragu

For girls night out, I met three friends at the swanky, San Francisco hot spot, A16. Walking through the front of a dark wooden facade into a dimly lit rustic interior from the Marina sunshine made me feel as though I were walking into a Hollis clothing store from a florescent mall.

We were lucky enough to snag a table with a view of the wood fired pizza stove and the railroad style kitchen, which matches the long-hallway feel of the restaurant itself. We started with a bottle of prosecco, and ordered many dishes to share over the next three hours, one of which was number fifty-one on my list, the maccaronara with ragu Nepoletana and ricotta salata.

This dish sounded super sexy when reading it. The maccaronara would inevitably be handmade, and what would ragu Nepoletana be? Some sort of thick meaty tomato sauce, probably. A Nepoletana pizza always has anchovy. Would there be anchovy??? And ricotta salata... a creamy fresh ricotta, pressed until firm and salted. I was intrigued.

It was a nice pasta dish with chunky red sauce and shaved cheese... whoopty freakin' doo. The noodle was long like spaghetti and round like the thick Vietnamese noodle, bún. The sauce was... tomato sauce. The ricotta salata shaved right on top. I did learn later that the sauce is cooked with a prosciutto rind for flavoring, but I did not pick up the prosciutto flavor (perhaps it was that one glass of prosecco that put me over the edge).

The rest of the food was... okay as well. The pizza was very underwhelming... doughy and cheesy. No italian would be proud of this pizza.

Working in the restaurant industry, I hear a lot of gossip about restaurants around the city. I now cook in a kitchen with a former A16 chef who gave me the full scoop. He left A16 when the kitchen began transitioning from a staff of passionate chefs whose goal it is to feed people the best food possible, to a staff with the sole purpose of making money and going home. This is a constant struggle in the current restaurant world… should one hire a fast, hard working, and cheap employee or a more detail oriented, foodie, who happens to cost more money.

Well, from my experience, the change in quality of food becomes obvious when you go from one genre of line cook to another. This is not to say that A16 doesn't care. I'm sure they do. Perhaps restaurants need to keep a close check on their values so that we truly do not turn into a fast food nation.