Market (SD)- What's the fuzz about ?

[honkman]

Everybody who is interested in food in San Diego knows about Market and it is often claimed as one of the best if not the best restaurant in San Diego. Yesterday we finally made it to Market to find out if it is true what we have heard so much about it.
We both choose the tasting menu and tried to cover as many different dishes as possible. (We haven’t made any written notes and so the descriptions are not very detailed about all ingredients.)
The amuse bouche was very nice – a large prawn with some vegetable puree.
As the starters we had the curry squash soup which had unfortunately way too much curry taste which covered everything else. The soup also included a very good crab cake. The second starter was the foie gras tasting with seared foie gras on a blueberry cake which was outstanding and foie gras au torchon which was ok (I still prefer the version at Cavaillon) but not really good which was served on the pistacchio bread which was old, stale and very hard (The guest at the table next to us where also complaining about that).
The fish course was for my wife Halibut with a ravioli (filed with pea puree), homemade sausage and different vegetables. The problem with this dish was that the chef used too much lemon/vinegar in the sauce which made it very sour/bitter. The second fish course was black seabass with a rice cake, braised portbello mushroom and fava beans. The fish and the portobello mushroom were very nice but the fava beans very hard and the rice cake absolutely tasteless.
As the meat courses we choose a lamb dish – rack of lamb and lamb filet. Unfortunately the chef used again way too much vinegar in this sauce which was again very bitter/sour. The second meat course was the braised beef ribs with whipped potatoes, cipollini onions and grilled vegetables. The meat was clearly browned too long (large dark brown/black spots) before it was braised and had a strong burned aftertaste. In addition it could have been braised one/two hours longer.
One dessert was a caramel/peanut butter tasting which contained peanut butter milk shake, ganache cake, and caramel popcorn. All three were ok but at the same time very boring. Nothing what we couldn’t have made easily at home. The second dessert was very disappointing (even though it was highly recommended by our waitress) which was a deep fried tapioca pudding. Unfortunately it wasn’t clear from the menu description that the tapioca pudding was deep fried otherwise we wouldn’t have choosen it. The taste from the deep frying covered everything else.
The evening ended with two sad jokes – the worst cappuchino and espresso we ever experienced in an upscale restaurant. The cappochino was very thin coffee with a little bit of badly made foam and the espresso lacked any crema and taste.
From other reviews we were afraid that the the service would be bad at Market but the service was very good and one of the best we experienced in SD.

So overall Market is definitely a good restaurant and we will also most likely visit it in the future but at the same time it is far from the best restaurant in SD. It is not enough to always claim that all of your vegetable are from Chino Farm and your meat is from Brandt etc. It is more important the kitchen knows hwo to use this ingredients in a clever way to create outstanding and unusual dishes. For a restaurant at this level (and price range) most dishes had surprisingly many flaws in the execution and often the ingredients didn’t really fit together.
There are many restaurants in SD where we had better meals (dinner or lunch) as The Better Half (still for us by far the best restaurant in SD), Arterra, 9-10, Farmhouse Café (we recently visited for the first time and had an outstanding dinner), Cavaillon (the service sucks but the food is outstanding), Café Chloe (their menu is very short and doesn’t change much but every evening they have two specials which show their great creativity and quality of the kitchen again and again).

[wanker]

I think Market's great, and I've eaten their numerous times without any misteps. Sorry to hear that it didn't live up to the hype. I'd say give it another try perhaps on a different night, but since.San Diego now has enough great other restaurants stick with what you like. Curiously, I recently ate at Nine-Ten's (a similar restaurant in style), and I was disappointed in the food -- and yet it consisently gets good reviews on the board. Thus I suspect that your palate may not match that of Market /Carl Schroeder. Just my two cents.

[honkman]

I don't think it so much the taste of the food (even though we found some combination not really striking) it was more the execution of the kitchen which was the biggest disappointment (burnt meat, undercooked beans, wrong amounts of spices, badly balanced sauces). I am more then willing to accept different opinions about what ingredients are good to mix or not because there is no real right or wrong and it is very subjective but there is a clear objective view about the quality of the execution which was missing.

[Alice Q]

That is kind of odd - I agree that the praise for this place is a little sycophantic sometimes, but I have never had bad cooking there - the techniques have always been spot on. It's too bad you didn't get a chance to at least try the food at it's best.

[honkman]

We heard from another table that Chef Schroeder wasn't cooking at that night which might be an explanation for the bad cooking but it is not an excuse. Restaurants at that level should have good sous-chefs which should be able to turn out flawless dishes even if the chef is not around.

[daantaat]

Eh, sorry to hear you had a badly executed meal there. Never a good thing, especially at that price point. We've been fortunate to have consistently very good meals there since they opened.

Interestingly, we had dinner at Arterra recently and I found my food to be unbalanced in terms of acid to non-acid taste ratio (too much acid going on and I tend to like acidity) and things on the plate didn't seem to relate to each other.

[foodlover3]

I always had a problem paying around $40 a meal at restaurants. For that price, I have very high expectations and I'm always disapointed. My recent restaurant experience was the "better half bistro" in hillcrest. Meals are around $20 and I find them the same level than a fine dining restaurants. The flavors are great and I think it's one of the best value restaurants in San Diego.