Perbacco

Ligurian food is all the hot these days, apparently. While some establishments are San Francisco institutions, others are more recent additions. Downtown’s Perbacco focuses specifically on Italian food from Piemonte and Liguria, and this narrow focus allows them to offer a modest menu of regional specialties, many of which were new to this relatively seasoned diner.

We arrived at 8PM and apparently I booked the table for 9PM (doh), but the hostess was courteous and professional and managed to seat us within 20 minutes or so. Perbacco’s dining hall is surprisingly large for a restaurant with so little frontage, lucky for us.

After seating, they serve breadsticks with “salsa verdi” (bad pun?) and bread and butter, which is a little odd. The salsa was a bit watery and dripped on the paper menus (oh well).

Straight to the point: the agnolotti with rabbit and summer truffles was the star of the night. I ordered it as a piatti primi and it was just beautiful, the reduced rabbit stock clear and simple in its purity, reminiscent of the clearest consommé I’ve had in San Francisco (at the wonderful Quince). A plate arrived with about 15 unbelievably delicate agnolotti which I had to defend from the other diners for the remainder of the first course. A hamachi crudo was about everything you want in a crudo — fresh, barely seasoned, and lots of it. The mozzarella burrata with white anchovies pleased, but the burrata itself was fairly bland. A little sea salt would’ve gone a long way here as the fresh anchovies, while bright and fresh, have none of the fermented flavor you’d fine in the cured anchovy.

Entrees were a bit hit or miss. The short rib stracotto with chanterelles was wonderful — again, seasoned in a simple clear style echoing the rabbit reduction sauce. The trofie was a bit less successful — while the fresh pesto has the full, light taste of fresh herbs, there was too much of it to balance with the delicate pasta straws. The risotto with scallops and lobster looked very promising on the menu, but upon arrival the rice grains looked as though they had been cooked in an electric cooker rather than as a risotto — almost none of the starch had broken down, replaced with an oddly weak tomato flavor. This dish was in fact bad enough that we had to send it back and other instead an entree-sized plate of the rabbit agnolotti. While the pappardelle with a short rib ragu was enjoyable, it didn’t seem particularly special.

[Review truncated: a couple hours after eating at Perbacco and writing this review (but before hitting the post button), I got violently ill — 90 minutes of refunding my dinner at 3AM. My comments about the food still stand, it’s as-yet unclear to me whether I was food poisoned or not, given that we all shared the dishes and the other diners were fine. YMMV, of course.]

Perbacco ($$), 230 California Street (at Front), San Francisco.