Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Beast and the Hare

Last week was a crazy and depressing week, of which I will spare you the details. Matt came out to the city on Thursday afternoon and we spent the afternoon at a cafe down the street from my place. He worked while I tirelessly tried to find a place for dinner. Can you believe that practically every fancy, semi-nice, American (new), Italian restaurant in the entire city of San Francisco is booked before 9pm on a Thursday night. Can you?
Anyways, I finally called Beast and the Hare where I left a desperate message requesting a table for two at 7. Then, I crossed my fingers and waited.
Lo and behold, they called me back an hour later to let me know that they had a table! I guess they knew I was having a bad week.

So here we go. Beast and the Hare. Not only do I now love the restaurant (located in the Mission), but their website is what drew me to them in the first place. They have a condensed menu which I love, but it's filled with amazing charcuterie, pastas, entrees, beers and wines.

We started with their house made spicy beef jerky which was on their happy hour menu. It definitely tasted of soy sauce, red chili flakes and it was very meaty. Matt and I think that they dried this in the oven because it was so dry in texture, but still very good.

Okay, get ready for this. If you're looking for a place that has the most amazing bone marrow for a great price, come here! Their bone marrow is served with grilled, crusty bread, a side of salt, and a salsa verde of shallots and parsley. I think this is the best bone marrow I've had to date. It was so flavorful--perfectly salted and the bread crumbs on top didn't hurt either. The salsa verde did a great job of cutting the richness of the fat, which was necessary by the time we got down to the third half of bone marrow.

We also got the fritto misto, which I could have done without. Although, the spicy aioli, the fried lemon slices, and the fried avocado were forces to be reckoned with. I think I prefer my lemon and avocado fried, now.

Paparadelle with bacon and english peas. So here's where the suckers for fresh pasta cave--more like fresh paparadelle obsessed, I guess. (If you haven't noticed this already, the post tomorrow will definitely point to our obsession.)

And to round it all off, vanilla panna cotta with cherry preserves. I love it, Matt was impartial to the sweetness of the cherry jam, so he would dig down deep to just get the panna cotta. But I liked the combination of the two--admittedly the cherry was probably a little bit too sweet, but the flavor was too good to pass up. We paired that with a Gwertz, which ended up not being a very good pairing because the cherry preserve was far sweeter than the wine. But the two on their own were fantastic.



If you're looking for a nice down to earth eatery--a little hipster, a taste of the Mission culture, a little fancy--try Beast and the Hare!

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