One of the fattest assignments I've ever gotten was a food column called "Home Cookin'," which featured the Bay area's most accomplished amateur cooks.
I found subjects by asking people who, among their friends, family and acquaintances, was the best cook. Whose dinner party invitations were particularly coveted? Whose recipes did everyone want? Whose culinary gifts rated highest during the holidays?
It was then my job to hang out with the most knowledgeable and creative local cooks, inspecting their fancy home kitchens, sampling their best dishes, and scoring a few of their terrific personal recipes to publish with the column, which ran periodically in one of those Other Papers.
It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it …
During the interviews, I would ask which restaurant the cook favored, and was almost always surprised at the offbeat replies. One liked J. Alexander's Restaurant, and that's how I began dining there just after it opened six years ago.
I hadn't been there recently, though, so I stopped in to get reacquainted, and found its food fresh, flavorful, and attractive — with one glaring exception and a couple of minor faults. Its setting was polished, the service friendly and prompt. What it isn't: the culinary cutting edge. It occupies the casual mainstream, featuring popular dishes like steaks, seafood and pasta, huge salads, and homemade soups, dressings and breads.
Inside, it glistens with expensive mahogany paneling and leather booths. It attracts a varied crowd of vigorous, prosperous businesspeople, comfortably racially mixed. They jam its 250-seat dining room and big, curved bar, overflowing to a patio overlooking an amazingly ugly parking lot. At night, the main dining room is popular with couples celebrating anniversaries and groups of partiers.
Part of its appeal has to be its excellent bar drinks. I started with a fancy Cosmopolitan ($7.50), made with vodka, Cointreau and cranberry juice, with a squeeze of lime juice. Half was frosty pink in the glass; the other half sat in an iced decanter for me to replenish as needed.
It went down like liquid velvet behind homemade tortilla chips and spinach con queso ($5.95), a hearty bowl of handmade chips, matched with a light, cheesy dip floating big clumps of fresh spinach.
The menu lists a different selection of soup each day, including red bean, black bean, gumbo, mushroom and baked potato. My favorite was Everyday Chicken Pasta soup ($3.95), a nearly flawless rendition of a classic dish. Its chunks of poached white chicken breast were moist, its broth tangy and creamy, and it carried just a few pieces of penne pasta and fresh snap peas for added color and texture.
Another day, I was joined by Marty Martindale, who runs a culinary website called www.foodsiteoftheday.com and has long been a fan of J. Alexander's. She tried the San Antonio tortilla soup ($3.95), a Southwestern-style dish loaded with cheese and shreds of tortilla and flavored with cilantro. She thought it delightful but found it hard to eat because strands of hot cheese melted on her chin.
We laughed because J. Alexander's also has a reputation as a discreet site for clandestine job interviews; the Southwestern soup would certainly present a challenge if you were trying for a composed, professional appearance.
The menu also lists seven salads, big hearty and colorful with varied greens and interesting accoutrements like wontons, feta cheese, bacon, diced tomatoes and almonds, and meat or fish toppings such as ahi tuna, chicken or salmon. The salad dressings, made in-house, include honey Dijon, creamy bleu cheese, ranch, vinaigrette and even a wasabi cilantro vinaigrette.
Probably the best entrée of several I tasted was the house special: barbecued Danish baby-back ribs ($18.95) that came with a healthy serving of tequila beans and a side of exotic, chunky and crispy bleu-cheese coleslaw. The ribs were smoky from the grill and so tender they fell off the bone easily and languished in a lip-smackin' barbecue sauce. The beans were lightly cooked so they maintained their shape but had a nice, vinegary vigor.
The restaurant's single glaring fault involved a steak ordered one night by a dining companion. After he had eaten half, he noticed a single, half-inch hair on the plate's rim. The server apologized, and without further comment, removed the dish from the bill.
Because I am well acquainted with the restaurant, I have no doubt it was an unfortunate anomaly; I was not concerned about its sanitary standards. Still, the responsibility for such an error falls with the kitchen manager, who views each plate before it goes out to the customer, and with the server who sets the plate in front of you.
If you happen to find yourself in such a situation, consider your previous experiences at the restaurant, the quality of the food in general, and whether the server handles your complaint appropriately. Then decide whether to cross that restaurant off your list.
Though most of the dishes we got that night were exemplary, one mishap can ruin the mood of the evening and leave a big, black pall in its wake; that's what happened to us that night. We attempted to recoup our good cheer with dessert — Key lime pie ($4.95) with so-so filling set in a limp, graham-cracker crust; and carrot cake ($4.95), a gigantic square heavy with nuts and raisins, but an unacceptably soggy texture. Though we hadn't complained about the desserts, we were surprised to find the server had removed both from our bill, too.
Thus, my meals there were a mixed bag — one nearly perfect, and one problematical.
This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2003.