McCormick & Kuleto’s: Congratulations! You’re the Worst Restaurant in San Francisco.
Written: Jan 07 '03 (Updated Jan 07 '03)
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Pros: Nothing. Seriously. Nothing.
Cons: Expensive food, prepared poorly and served by the least ept waitstaff alive.
The Bottom Line: ept is a word, isn't it? Well, it should be.
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| Mr.Eyore's Full Review: McCormick Kuletos |
You know, there’s really no explaining why people with otherwise immaculate taste release massive brain farts when trying to select a restaurant on vacation. I have no idea if New York's China Grill [1] is any good or not, but no Chinese person I know has ever said anything nice about it. Nevertheless, every time someone in my family is headed to New York, they start with the raves and the boasts about how they’re gonna eat some of that scrumptious calamari salad. Neat. Whatever.
Equally inexplicable are those otherwise reasonable folks who come to L.A. and bend over backward to get into Spago to eat some o’ that new-fangled wood-fired pizza among the glitterati. I don’t know anyone in L.A. who would even consider suggesting Spago as a place to eat.
And yeah, so our friends from New York were visiting for a wedding. Our friends who probably never heard of China Grill. Our friends who cook delicious, inventive 6 course meals for dinner parties of 15 people. And where do our friends insist on eating: McCormick & Kuleto’s.
The place is awful.
McCormick & Kuleto’s is some kind of bastard child of the semi-respectable chain restaurant McCormick’s Seafood and the least imaginative design ideas of Pat Kuleto (Kuleto’s, Jardiniere, Farralon), birthed on the unholy ground of Ghirredelli Square. It’s not clear what, if anything, the restaurant is shooting for, but it seems to have staked out the lead among establishments specializing in completely trashing perfectly decent fresh seafood.
Ghirredelli Square is the tourist mecca near Fisherman’s Wharf, abutting the Marina district of San Francisco. There isn’t much street parking, but there is an overpriced lot that you may have to wait a few weeks to enter. It’s also right there at the end of the Powell Street Cable Car line. So if you’re a tourist – and you’d have to be – you can hop right on the Rice-a-Roni-Treatmobile (after a 45 minute wait) at the end of your day shopping in Union Square and be at Ghirredelli in half an hour. If you’re lucky, the Cable Car driver will even stop near the bottom of Lombard “crookedest in the world, but only second crookedest in San Francisco” Street.
the room(s)
McCormick & Kuleto’s is a huge, split level restaurant with at least five distinct dining spaces. None of those dining spaces is particularly noteworthy, except in their utilitarian minimalism, designed to appeal to (or at least not offend) the lowest common denominator.
We were placed in the baby ghetto, a room toward the back of the restaurant that housed all of the groups that included anyone likely to cry or spit up formula during the course of the meal. I suppose I appreciate that the restaurant actually has a plan for how to keep peoples’ annoying spawn from molesting other diners, but it doesn’t make for the most pleasant dining experience to be stuck in a room where, at any given time, at least one child is making a nuisance of itself.
service
I have eaten at McCormick & Kuleto’s twice now, and it has provided me each time with the most abysmal service of any restaurant I’ve ever eaten at that charged similar prices. They are understaffed. By mental defectives. And it seems clear that this is part of their business model. Because the vast majority of the people eating there are tourists who will not be providing much repeat business, management doesn’t seem to care whether the dining experience is all it could be.
Our hostess sat us and asked if we needed a high chair for the 2 year old we brought with us for comic relief. “Yes, please,” the child’s mother responded, and we never saw the hostess again. Nor did we see a high chair until we had been seated for nearly 10 minutes and we had asked our waiter twice.
Pretty much everything we asked our waiter for, we asked for twice. Except when we had to ask three times. He didn’t seem particularly slammed, or particularly interested in checking up on us, or in fetching our food from under the heat lamps in the kitchen, or anything else. Any drink request had to be made more than once; the typical wait for a beer or glass of wine was 10 to 15 minutes. This was pretty much the same time-table adhered to on my previous visit a couple years before.
the food
McCormick & Kuleto’s drafts a new menu each night, depending on what the fresh catch of the day is ... sort of. Really, the menu is pretty much the same every day, but they will list where the various sea food used in that day’s preparations was acquired. It’s mostly a fine selection of fish and shellfish, but it’s not like the source for any of them is particularly noteworthy. I mean, you wouldn’t be terribly impressed if you saw “Coalinga Beef” or “Cincinnati Pork” on a menu. Why would we care that the Salmon came from “Near Fort Bragg” and the respectable, but not astounding oysters are from Tomales Bay?
I started with what I assumed would be a dish impossible to screw up: Half a steamed Dungeness crab ($16.00). McCormick’s found a way to screw it up. By the time it was placed in front of me, the crab had been so over-steamed, then left to sit so long, that it tasted like some kind of reconstituted fish jerky. Even that might have been worth eating were it not for the fact that the drawn butter was served with a semi-dry Meyer lemon. I love Meyer lemons. They’re nicely sweet, perfect for lemonade or on poultry. But I think fish needs a little tartness on it, and a plain old lemon would have been the better choice here.
Two in our party had the crab cakes, which they found disappointing. One claimed that M&K’s used to make “the best crab cakes in the city” but called them an abomination on this visit. (Okay, I’m paraphrasing; they said the crab-cakes tasted like “wilted a.ss in a Frosted Flake batter”) Where the crab cakes had in the past been served in a beurre blanc, now they rested next to what appeared to be a puree of carrots and red bell pepper. The small mound of mashed potatoes had been sitting on the plate for so long by the time it arrived at our table that they were wrapped in a thin film of ick.
The fourth member of our party had the Black and White Ahi, which I think was like a tuna roll with dipping sauce or something. I can’t really remember. But he said it was good, and it actually did look pretty tasty. And it probably was pretty good, because another in our party ordered the entree version of the same dish for her main meal.
I had the Linguine Frute di Mar, which was, well, awful in every respect. The mussels were of the overly large east coast, trash-of-the-sea variety. Several of my clams were unopened. The sauce was watery and utterly lacking in flavor. The pasta itself was overcooked. In every possible way, it was an atrocity and an insult to the words “frute” and “di mar”, and maybe even to “linguine.” I wouldn’t ordinarily spoon parmesan onto this dish, but if anyone at the restaurant had been kind enough to offer a little, I think it might have improved things a little. A very little.
Thankfully, nobody at our table wanted coffee or desert, so we were able to ditch the place early enough to justify a later run to In and Out Burger. At about $40.00 per person, McCormick and Kuleto’s was close to the worst value I have ever received at any restaurant in San Francisco.
One final note: I know a lot of people like to eat at M&K because it’s located on the water, and the main dining room features massive windows facing the Bay. The view is not really all that good, though. It’s standing water near the Marina and there are no clear sight lines to the most spectacular portions of Marin county from the restaurant. If it’s a view you’re looking for, and you must be in this area of town, there is a perfectly wonderful Indian restaurant in the same building, three stories up: Gaylord’s. The view is better. The food is fantastic. The service is first rate. Go there instead.
[1] I do know, however, that the China Grill in Vegas is pretty good. But New York is a different animal, and even if the one there is as good as the one in Vegas, I can't imagine foregoing The City's noumerous first class restaurants in favor of an overpriced hipster joint that merely serves excellent versions of the same thing you can get on any corner.
Recommended:
No
Kid Friendliness: Yes
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Mr.Eyore
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I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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