Slanted Door, SF’s famous Vietnamese-American restaurant…
Eric Asimov has an interesting piece in NYT today about how some restaurateurs in San Francisco, the capital of the
eat local movement, pick wines to go with their food rather than automatically choosing California.
“A surprising number of Bay Area restaurants, including many dedicated to cooking with local ingredients,offer wine lists dominated by European bottles.”
Hypocritical or just gastronomic good sense?
“Part of the issue is indeed matchingfood and wine. Italian restaurants,have specifically regional Italian flavor combinations. Nobody begrudges their offering a list of largely Italian wines. California has rarely produced wines using Italian grapes that bear even a faint resemblance to the originals.”
“Slanted Door, the landmark Vietnamese restaurant now in the Ferry Building, has rarely offered American wines on its list, sometimes to the consternation of its customers. “At Slanted Door, you need low-alcohol, high acid wines with residual sugar, and they don’t come from the New World,” said Mark Ellenbogen, the wine director. Instead, its list is heavy on rieslings from Austria and Germany.
For more, go to thepour.blogs.nytimes.com
