Azie (San Francisco, CA)
The totally amazing Dream Theater is in town and my friend Tom (of Butter Pig fame), his girl anne, and Janet and I decided to join the festivities. But of course, we needed sustenance to gird ourselves for the 2 1/2 hour show. A day before the show, we wracked brains trying to find both a place within walking distance of the Warfield, a place actually open at 5pm *and* an available reservation. You'd be surprised at how that criteria is somewhat difficult in the restaurant-rich San Francisco. Finally, the chips turned up Azie...
...fortunately anne had dined at Azie before so it seemed like a good bet. Azie is a fusion-like place with a leaning toward Chinese. Well, sort of. To top it off, it's one of those "small plates", "big plates" types of places.
I think that the small/big concept is hard to pull off well. Lots of places do it with some success but I sometimes feel either budgeoned by the small plates (as in too much, too dynamic, too overloaded) or thoroughly underwhelmed (too small, ordinary flavors, lots of fillagree). That is where Azie differs.
Azie does small plates exactly right. Nice, little, compact bites that are richly flavorful enough to put you just on the edge of wanting more but satisfying enough not to order more. It allows you to order a bunch of dishes and bathe in a swirl of flavor point-counter-point. I went from dish to dish anticipating the next innovative twist like one navigates a good mystery.
The crispy curry calamari was not your ordinary fried tentacles and rings - there was a nicely tingling curry burn that caught me by surprise. The tuna sashimi was nothing like the plates you get in a Japanese restaurant - little cubes of tuna wrapped in thinly sliced daikon with the barest hint of avocado between the two. Mussels with red curry were briny and dressed in the sweet-hot Thai influenced curry. The white corn gratin was rich with a slight corn crunch and a velvety white sauce. And that was just under half of what we ordered...the rest was just as satisfying.
Other highlights included an excellent bloody mary (with a hint of soy), a light, non-leaden Mascarpone cheese cake and a very interesting after-dinner drink menu with single malts and calvados and other delights.
We (especially Janet) had our doubts about Azie hearing only "fusion" and thinking the worst but we were proven wrong. Azie is definitely a place to get back to in short order.