I admit to being a bit of a design snob. I initially judge blogs on the way that they look or their terrible photos rather than the quality of their writing. And I often want to avoid restaurants whose websites have irritated me in one way or another. Of course, once I look further into some of those blogs I find writing I love, and once I actually go to some of those restaurants I find I enjoy them. But first impressions mean a lot.

A couple of days ago, a friend was asking me for a restaurant recommendation. Easy task, I thought. I had some restaurants in mind and just needed to check and see if they were open and send her the websites. What should have been a 5-minute email turned into a half-hour nightmare as I slogged through websites that are more intent on impressing me with movies, music, and other annoyances than on giving me direct information.

Hear this, restaurants: We are not looking to your sites for entertainment. We want to get our information, get out, and get back to watching Eli Stone. Noise of clinking glasses or a dull roar or fancy music does not make us want to go to your restaurant more, it just tips off our employers that we are making dinner plans instead of filing our TPS reports. We don't want to sit through 30 second flash movies of how happy we'll be if we go to your restaurant. We just want the facts: When are you open, what's for dinner, and how much does it cost. And I want to do that in as few clicks as possible.

Oh, and also? We are in the Bay Area -- arguably the technology capital of the world. How difficult is it to learn to code up a simple HTML page? Why are you still making us click through to PDF's of your menus or (horrors) Word documents? It's all about time for me, and opening up the pdf takes up my precious seconds.

MY FAVORITES

Some of my favorite restaurant websites are super basic, nice to look at, and tell me all I need to know.

Spork. Looking at this website makes me want to spend my hard-earned money to hire this designer to redo all other restaurant websites. It's gorgeous.

Bar Jules. The lovely Bar Jules site changes daily and tells us what's for lunch and dinner.

Slanted Door. Chock full of information, and has a handy plug-in to make an Open Table reservation.

Arizmendi Bakery. Arizmendi's pizza changes daily, and Arizmendi has a calendar for the whole month of delicious flavors.

SITES THAT MAKE ME WANT TO SCRATCH MY EYES OUT
(warning, many of these have music)

Bix. I want to send a friend directly to Bix's list of cocktails, as I had an excellent one there the other night. Oh wait ... the whole site is in FLASH so I can't send a direct link!

Market Bar. Don't. Resize. My. Browser. Ever. (And while you're at it, you might want to get spellcheck. Mediterranean is spelled with one "t".)

Spruce. Let's review how many steps I have to go through to find the Spruce dinner menu:

1) wait for flash site to load
2) click "menus"
3) click "food"
4) click "dinner"
5) change my browser to allow pop-ups for this site
6) PDF!

House. Give us prices. Seriously. Not having prices reeks of pretentiousness and is absolutely useless.

And then we have a "bandwidth exceeded" message over at 1300 Fillmore.

Fortunately for us consumers, there are ways around these horrid websites. Menu Pages, while not the prettiest site out there, lists over 4000 menus in San Francisco. And Yelp is the easiest place I've found to figure out restaurant hours.

Let's call out all the bad restaurant websites -- which would you nominate? What are your pet peeves?

Labels: 1300 fillmore, arizmendi, bar jules, bix, jennifer maiser, market bar, restaurant websites, Slanted Door, spork, Spruce

A provocative question, especially for a food-loving town in a beef-righteous nation. It's a question that I can't even answer, really, not having sampled every burger in the Bay Area, or even the smaller list of San Francisco cult favorites.

But one thing I can tell you is that the burger at the newly opened Spruce is absolutely, unequivocally, utterly delicious.


photo by Jen Maiser

I met a friend there on a recent Monday night about two weeks after it opened. (Was this the most highly anticipated restaurant opening in recent memory or what?) We snagged two seats at the bar and settled in for drinks, I with my bourbon stone sour ($8) and Jen with her Clover Club ($8), a sweet-tart blend of gin, lemon juice, and Hangar One Aqua Perfecta framboise eau de vie. (The former: eh; the latter: double-yum.)

Even though we were splitting a burger at the bar, our meal started with an amuse bouche, a small gift of the world's best beet chips, vivid vermilion and perfectly salted, with a side of horseradish cream. They hit the spot.



We were in a nibbly mood so we shared two orders ($7 each) of housemade charcuterie -- which is surely now the most oft-typed phrase in my restaurant write-up vocabulary -- and enjoyed noshing our way through coins of soft smoked chorizo and glossy slivers of spicy coppa. I devoured the onion relish compulsively, and liked the sprinkling of smoked pimenton. We drank, we talked, we admired the view (chocolate mohair walls, soaring steel trusses, a glittering skylight) and took in the crowd, mostly couples and friends hungrily eyeing their food rather than one another.



When the burger ($12) arrived, it was draped, on request, with a melted slice of cheddar but otherwise unadorned, save for a small garden of lettuce, tomatoes, pickled red onions, and thin sheets of dill pickle on the side. Many regulars of the Village Pub, also owned by the trio behind Spruce, liken the "bun" to an English muffin, and that seems as apt a description as any for the thin, textured, somewhat porous bread. My only complaint is that they really overdid it brushing the bun with butter. Other than that, the burger was perfect -- hefty enough to feel good in the hand, satisfying, well-seasoned (an area where the kitchen clearly excels), juicy, and flavorful. Every bite was delightful and I would have eaten every last pickle if my mother hadn't taught me to share.




The fries that came with it were served in a silver cup, and assuming they are the same ones that accompany the bavette steak on the dinner menu, fried in duck fat. Holy Deliciousness, Batman! Crisp, just the right side of greasy, and perfectly salted; odd, however, that we had to ask for ketchup (and mustard). Is it really so rare to want these condiments when ordering a burger and fries? They should just slap them on the side and be done with it.

The service throughout the meal was spot on, though the lamp on the corner of the bar made it hard for our bartender to tell when Jen's drink had run dry. We passed on dessert, even though they were created by Bay Area wunderkind William Werner, formerly of the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay; a girl has to save a little something for the next time.

I perused the dinner menu while I was there and, despite being written by a devoted minimalist, a few things on it popped out at me -- watermelon and arugula with cured sardines, for instance, and crudo with vegetables escabeche (did I call this new trend or did I call this new trend?).

I'm looking forward to my next visit.

Spruce
3640 Sacramento Street
(415) 931-5100
San Francisco
Open 7 days a week for dinner, M-F for lunch

Labels: burger, catherine nash, restaurants, reviews, Spruce, Village Pub