SF: Incanto

Although I find it difficult to keep up with all the restaurants in LA much less in other other cities, I’ve had my heart set on eating at Incanto in San Francisco for a while now. I follow Chef Chris Cosentino on twitter and covet every dish he churns out. We made it over there my first night in San Francisco.

If you’ve been following along my travelogue, I ate at La Taqueria for lunch, dessert at Anthony’s Cookies and had Happy Hour at NOPA. Was I ready for another meal? Of course! But first, wine and appetizers.

We ordered the mystery flight. The glasses came with their names flipped so you could later find out what they were. I immediately flipped them all to see what I was drinking. Carina let the glasses remain a mystery. I’m not sure what this says about us as people.

It is the summer of tomatoes for me. I picked out the tomato salad right away because it also had purslane which I love. This was some of the freshest, juiciest tomatoes and best purslane I’ve had. I also enjoyed the roasted tomato in the beef heart dish. While I know it’s tonnato, I think we would have eaten more if it was warm. Then again, maybe not because we had ordered the piglet salumi platter and the little pig made us go whole hog.

Chef Chris owns Boccalone, the “Tasty Salted Pig Parts,” salumi  and of course we had order some. I was delighted to see the garlic bulb. I will admit to eating most of it.

Hee.

Carina ordered the handkerchief pasta with rustic pork ragu. It was wonderful and exactly the sort of pasta I wanted to eat more and more of.

But I didn’t come to SF to eat pasta I could probably get somewhere else. I came for the trotters. The foie gras. And so I ordered the blood corzetti (flat round disks of pasta infused with blood). I enjoyed the tartness of the green strawberries with the richness of this dish. I was starting to get sad I wasn’t going to be able to finish it (note to self, do not eat massive amounts of food before going to dinner– or at least don’t order so many appetizers!). We didn’t even order mains because we knew it’d be too much.

I heard you can do a whole roasted pig at Incanto but you need a big group. Next time! I want more tasty pig parts.

Offal good. Yes, definitely.

 

Incanto

1550 Church St., San Francisco, CA 94131 – (415) 641-4500