Nose To Tail At Home

Last month on a trip back to California for work, I had an opportunity to visit the west coast Mecca for offal loving foodies, Incanto.  Run by chef Chris Cosentino–who is famous for his appearances on Food Network–Incanto is nestled in a quiet neighborhood of San Francisco.

My wife and I showed up a little early for a dinner meeting with Lee Gomes, the journalist that interviewed me last year.  While we waited, my wine savvy wife picked glasses of wine out for each of us.  When the waiter brought us the wine, the glasses had a small paper disk attached around the stem with the name of each wine on them.  What a great idea!  Not only do the labels keep people from mixing up glasses (unless everyone ordered the same wine) but, if you find a wine you really like, you can just take the label with you after dinner.

Here you can see a few of the various awards Incanto has won.  Note the artwork hanging over the doorway into the kitchen.  In the deli case…

… lots of tasty, salted pig parts were on display.  I’m going to assume they were from Boccalone, Chris Cosentino and Mark Pastore’s Salumeria located across the Bay in Oakland.

Mr. Gomes arrived moments after I took the above image.  We were then seated at our table, and the tough decisions began.  For the appetizer, should we get the zuppa di zucca with duck liver crostini?  Or maybe an order of the pastramied goose with chervil, shallots & pickled cherries?  Thankfully, we had three people so we could order more than one thing to start off with.

I picked the Chef’s last meal, the sanguinaccio with a fried egg and oysters. Sanguinaccio is a traditional northern Italian blood sausage.  I’m a big fan of blood sausages in all forms and this one had a light hint of chili which worked well with the creamy and rich pork blood.  The wonderful texture of the fried egg and the briny oysters really made this a memorable dish.  I understand why Chef Cosentino loves it so much.

My wife picked the grilled sweetbreads with green walnut salsa.  The sweetbreads were perfectly cooked and the green walnut salsa was very interesting.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe its flavor, but the best I can come up with is that is had a very light pine taste to it.

As we were working our way through the appetizers, all of the sudden a waitress walked up and placed a few more dishes on our table.  It turns out that Mr. Gomes had called the restaurant and told them that we were coming.  While Mr. Gomes is a journalist of note, I’m not really anyone per se.  It was very kind of the restaurant and I really appreciated it.  The fact that the dishes they brought us weren’t even on the menu made it even more remarkable!

First up was smoked cod puree on toast.  We demolished this in no time, and my wife described it like so:

“It had a lovely smokey flavor to it, but not to the point where the smoke was over-powering. It was nicely balanced with the light taste of the fish.”

Next was the spicy trippa neapolitan.  I’d like to consider myself a fairly recent tripe loving convert.  The first tripe I really enjoyed was at B and B Ristorante which I talked about last year.  Mario Batali brought me far enough to like tripe, but Chef Cosentino convinced me that it possible to love tripe.  It was soft with a great texture and covered with a rustic and spicy tomato sauce that ignited my taste buds.  The tripe was so good, that I had the leftovers the next day for breakfast.  That’s right, breakfast. I love tripe!

Before our main dishes arrived, the last gratis plate showed up, seared lamb kidneys with spicy lentils & mint.  The kidneys had no uric flavor to them, just a slightly sweet hint of liver.  I’ve made lentils a couple of times now and I’d have never thought about adding mint to them.  It’s a stroke of genius and they worked very well with the kidneys.  If you’d like to try this at home yourself, here’s the recipe.

At last, our main courses arrived.  I had picked the roasted lamb neck with creamy polenta, rapini & gremolata.  The neck meat was wonderfully tender, with an intense lamb flavor to it.  I get the feeling that the neck meat was actually braised like one would braise short ribs, but I could very well be wrong.  Sadly, I was so full at this point that I couldn’t finish my meal, there was just no more room in my stomach.

My wife had ordered the corzetti with trotters, foie gras, dates & pangrattato.  Corzetti are a kind of fresh pasta made in north-west Italy.  What my wife was given was curzetti stampae, which are small, thin rounds of pasta.  Without a doubt, this was the best dish of the evening.  Everyone had a bite of it, and we all agreed that it was beyond spectacular.  The dates added just the perfect amount of sweetness, which worked in harmony with the richness of the foie gras and trotters.  I only managed to steal one bite, as my wife began moving the plate farther and farther away from me to protect it.  The next time I visit Incanto, I’ll be ordering this for sure.

If you live in California, or are visiting San Francisco, I highly, highly recommend you make reservations at Incanto.  The prices are beyond reasonable, the food is top notch and the staff is friendly to a fault.  Chef Cosentino’s reputation as a talented chef is well deserved and I personally appreciate his work on bringing offal to the masses.

Incanto
Noe Valley
1550 Church St
(between 28th St & Duncan St)
San Francisco, CA 94131
(415) 641-4500
www.incanto.biz