Prana? Poleng Lounge? What else?
Has anyone been to either? I have a food obsessed friend coming to visit next weekend who used to live here and I wanted to take her to something new and delicious. Must be in SF. Please none of the usual (eg Incanto, Zuni, Range, Myth, Aziza, Coco500, A16, Nopa, Farmerbrown, etc). But in that price range would be good. Thanks so much!
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Candice
Oct 16, 2006 05:59 PM
Most of the ethnic places I come up with are not in the price range of the places you mentioned nor do they have the level of ambiance associated with that price range. On the more budget side of the spectrum I would say Darbar or Thai House Express, other than that, Aziza (which you've ruled out), or maybe Kiss Seafood, or somewhere between, the Helmand. I haven't heard anything about Prana.
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I ate at Poleng last week. While I agree that the service was friendly and caring, it was also slow and choppy, particularly with the drinks. Most plates were too small/pricey to be labelled "affordable", while the quality was nowhere near the level of a Slanted Door Jr.
I too found the "Buddha's Treasures" leaden and oily.
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Poleng has alot to recommend. . It has passion. It is affordable. The food is focused in an Indonesian kind of way.... In some ways, I look at it as an early stage Slanted Door. The owner/chef, assuming he keeps his eye on the ball (a restaurant that did not.....Butterfly during the Dotcom era when it was under the freeway strong start, sudden crash) is on to great success. Service was a but slow but frankly I did not care as the food, when it arrived, was straight from the loving arms of the chef, to our table. Was in it the quantity your mom (or mine) would serve..no.....so what...its a restaurant and a business..they shouldnt. The servers were young, but professional or at the least learning to be professional, and they cared. It is clear there was not a bucket of money behind the creation of this restaurant and that will lead to growing pains. But there is a bucket of passion. To me, that means more than all the corporate funding that may be received in the future when people will look back and say..."remember that chef when he had that funky place on Fulton. I miss that old place...this place it too fancy"
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re: tomritza
Candice
Oct 16, 2006 04:42 PM
I don't pay $120 for waitstaff that are "at the least learning to be professional." I do agree that they were well intentioned, however when taking out of town guests somewhere, it's important to know what type of service to expect. There are a large number of servers in the business in their 20s and 30s that are far more polished. I don't think that the service problems had to do with the age of the servers. I also think that if your business focuses on drinks, that drink service should be faster. It's unacceptable to receive drinks midway through the meal, I'm talking about a glass of wine here, not a complex cocktail.
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re: Candice
coolbean98
Oct 16, 2006 08:59 PM
I agree. I mean, I'm willing to give them time to improve but in our last visit they were very adamant about us giving them an accurate head count in advance and each guest had to specify meal selections and pay prix fixe, and yet we did not get the items we had asked for and got the equivalent of an appetizer's worth of food for $45. We were all prepared to pay quite alot of money for the evening, but I think being totally hungry and offended at the rude handling of the situation is not something we were anticipating, and were justified in being upset about. They really need to fix this.
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Emily Hope
Oct 14, 2006 01:24 AM
We went to Poleng for the first time a couple of nights ago. We liked the food, and although service was a little rocky (rough and inexperienced seems fairly apt, although I would add well-intentioned), we'll definitely be back.
We ordered: Salt and pepper squid -- perfectly cooked tender squid, well-fried, not greasy at all. The sauce was interesting, but a little sweet for my taste.
Long beans with shrimp paste -- these were good and a very large portion for $6, but a little too shrimp-pastey for my taste (I'm not a fan). Next time, I'd try the vegetarian option.
Garlic noodles with crab -- these were fantastic (although it's hard to mess up garlic and butter with starch). Crab didn't really add anything to the dish, but since it's out of season we weren't expecting it to.
Green papaya and mango salad -- this was the only real disappointment. I expect very specific things from my green papaya salad, and this was far from the ideal. The shreds of papaya and mango were too chunky to absorb the flavor of the sauce, which didn't have enough of any of the essential ingredients -- fish sauce, lime juice, or hot peppers.As I said, service was a little off, especially when it came to the drink orders -- admittedly, it took me a while to make up my mind (I found the multiple multi-page drink menus a bit overwhelming), but it took so look for my cocktail to arrive after ordering that we were almost finished eating. I also wasn't especially impressed with the drink -- mango with green-tea infused vodka -- flavors weren't particularly well integrated and it was a little bitter, whether from the green tea or cheap vodka, I don't know.
Total before tip was $53 for 4 dishes, 1 cocktail, and a beer, and we had lots of leftover green beans and papaya salad. I suppose this is a little pricey if you're thinking about it in comparison to, say, the asian restaurants on Clement, but isn't too bad compared to other small plates-and-fun-drinks kinds of places around town. And I like the fact that I can get all of my guilty pleasure tasty snacks from various asian cuisines all in one place!
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Candice
Oct 13, 2006 10:42 PM
I went to Poleng last night and I can't say I was entirely impressed. While most of the food was good, I felt like the serving sizes were small. The eggplant temple was almost $8 and you get about 4-5 bites of eggplant. The Buddah's Treasures were a disappointment too, 5 grease-laden dumplings, square in shape with a pool of oil on the top. These were made out of wonton wrappers and were not fried well. After reading Bauer's review, I expected 7 dumplings, but we only got 5. Poleng's version of salt and pepper shrimp was tasty but you can get a whole plate of shrimp for that price ($10 for 6 shrimp) at many Chinese places in town. They only had one curry available and I can't say that the flavors were as bright or integrated as my local Thai joint. It was a big bowl of curry, but there were only about 3 spoonfuls of anything aside from sauce. I guess I expect more when ordering something vegetarian (due to one person in our party) b/c a few more eggplant or tofu cubes doesn't cost much.
Our service was rough and inexperienced and drink service was really slow, about a 15 minute wait for a glass of wine or cocktail while seated int he dining area. One glass of wine was bumped and almost knocked over, one glass of white wine was brought out at room temp after she said they had just chilled the bottle, all plates were stacked on the table in front of us, and when food was brought out, the server and food runner both had a hard time setting them down smoothly. The infused cocktails were interesting and not too sweet and the grilled edamame with smoked salt was tasty and a good value at $3.50. Overall, it was very convenient b/c it was right down the street from our friend's house and while the food wasn't offensive, it didn't seem like a good value to me. We felt like we could have had a better meal for $120 for 3 people with 2 drinks each.
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coolbean98
Oct 13, 2006 08:31 PM
I have been there twice and the quality of the food and drinks have been very good, although the second time we went we ran into some serious service issues with our large group.
We went with a group of about 30 people and they had asked us for our choices on the prix fixe (about $45/person not including drinks) menu ahead of time, but when we got there they only brought out (family style) about half the amount of food per person that I got when I had eaten there before off the a la carte menu (which was not very much to begin with). We were all quite hungry afterwards and the guest of honor had to complain, and their excuse was that the orders they took ahead of time were just "an estimate" of how much they needed to make, albeit a gross underestimate in my opinion. After some arguing, they brought out about 2 more dishes per table. I am willing to dismiss this as the growing pains of a new restaurant, but our party (mostly Asian-American 30-somethings) did agree that if our mothers ever saw such a tiny amount of food served to them they would never hear the end of it.
Anyways, at both visits the food was very tasty and innovative (enough), and the soju, sake, tea, and cocktail menus are quite impressive, so if you are going with a small group, I'm sure you will have a good time (just sit away from the speakers near the DJ booth).
My (positive) impressions of Poleng: http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/...
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