Are you ready for a fun French restaurant offering surprisingly good sauces and prices — at the corner of 17th Street and Florida? We’re talking about the darkest Mission here, one block from the new Autocenter, where baseball fans used to cheer at sunny Seal Stadium.
Le Domino has been at this site for what seems like forever. It has long been known as a gay hangout, a place to meet, have a drink and a meal far from the madding Castro crowd. But last September, Luc Pelletier, who has run Le Domino since 1974, changed his chef, his cuisine and his hours. Lighter dishes, with more finely crafted sauces, started to flow from Le Domino’s kitchen, and as an experiment Luc opened the restaurant for quite reasonably priced lunches, hoping to lure southward some of South of Market’s more peripatetic lunchgoers.
That experiment, as of this writing, has failed — Le Domino is once again open for dinner only. On the one occasion I was able to eat lunch at Le Domino, two of us dined for less than $30 on a (slightly over-) broiled ono steak in an elegant simple butter sauce and a wonderful spicy lamb sausage, with peppery meat and a crunchy skin, on a bed of too many onions. We had some wine, and finished the meal with what must be the world’s smallest cappuccino. The service was reasonable but not hurried, and we re-entered the workaday world refreshed.
One of the factors that makes that possible is Le Domino’s ambiance. This is not one of those restaurants that is one with the city’s streets; far from it. When you walk into Le Domino, you’re greeted with a cocktail lounge that has seen better times. But turn right and walk up the stairs and you’ll find yourself far from the Mission, in one of the city’s nice French dining rooms. It is, in fact, a room that could be in an inn in a small town in France, with old oil portraits on the walls, a massive chandelier hanging over the stairway and candle lamps flickering on tables set with while tablecloths above a deep burgundy carpet.
Where once Le Domino aped in a heavy-handed way the approach to French cooking of the Cordon Bleu, it now has found a lighter, more reasonable path that it pursues quite successfully. Consider two recent dinners:
One began with a shared dish of fettucine with mussels and shrimp in a crayfish sauce with dill ($5.75), a lovely presentation in which the black mussel shells ringed the mounded shellfish meats, presented over mixed white and green fettucine. The sauce was considerably lighter than it looked, well-crafted if a bit over-reflective of the onion in its preparation. The sauce was nonetheless the star of the dish, setting off the plump mussels to perfection and showing up the shrimp as less than fresh.
The entrees in that meal were a substantial portion of nicely grilled sockeye salmon, slightly burnt at the edges, set off by a rich, buttery pistachio “butter,” accompanied by an uninteresting rice pilaf and overcooked mixed vegetables ($14.50), and a slightly dry cut of rabbit in a wonderful light yet assertive and delightful cream/tarragon sauce, accompanied by sauteed “pommes frites ($13.25).”
The second, on a crowded Friday evening, began with a Pedro Domenq La Ina sherry and then a shared dish of beef tongue, chewy yet soft, in a nice vinegar/mustard/capers sauce that complemented the rich fattiness of the tongue. It was a dish that, in small servings, could grow on one.
The onion soup that followed was built on a solid stock base and was deeply onion-flavored, but suffered from excess saltiness, perhaps from the cheese melted on top, and a disjointed character.
The sweetbreads on the current entree menu (La Croustade de Ris de Veau, 13.50) are, in a word, magnificent: delicate and flavorful, lightly breaded and flavored with mushrooms and wine, served as a “sandwich” within triangles of puff pastry with pilaf rice and sauteed vegetables. The same, unfortunately, could not be said of the honey/ginger-sauteed veal chop (La Cotelette de Veau au Miel et Gingembre, $16), a striking single double-thick chop with a long, curving rib bone. While it was visually impressive, the milk-fed veal chop was flavorless, a bit too fatty and overshadowed by a sweet honey-based sauce.
In both meals, the apres-entree salad was a nice butter lettuce plate sporting a nice straight-ahead vinaigrette. The cappuccino was weak, but in the latter meal a nice lemon tart by Tarts rounded the meal out well.
Both dinners at Le Domino toted up at around $68, with wine and dessert included. While that’s a bit more than a couple of burgers will cost, Le Domino offers a pleasant, off-the-beaten-track dining experience that is likely to leave you feeling good about yourself and your partner, about Luc and about the world. That, if Luc keeps up the good work, puts Le Domino in a class with Le San Tropez, Camargue, Zola and a handful of others of the city’s better everyday French restaurants.
And who knows? If the outcry is loud enough, Luc may start lunches again. He says he thinks 17th and Florida is too far away from the action, and doesn’t believe people will come at noon from the South of Market and downtown. What do you think?*
LE DOMINO 2742 17th St., SF, 626-3095. Mon.-Thurs., 5-10 pm; Fri. and Sat., 5-11 pm.