Blue Elephant and I decided to take the plunge – finally – for a Monday prix fixe dinner at Digs Bistro, a small restaurant on Dwight and Sacramento in Berkeley.
We’ve heard much about this place as it was formerly known to be one of the hippest underground dining experiences in Oakland, run by chefs who would serve delicious meals to selected friends and diners.
I wish that I was privy to Digs’ former glory days.
While it is interesting to see the evolution of underground dining into a real restaurant locale, I am not yet convinced of its results. Besides, Digs has replaced one of a few darling mini restos in Berkeley, the French-inspired Olivia Eats. I’ve been hesitant to return to the renovated restaurant for over a year now. But today, I had to confront mental comparisons of this new restaurant with its predecessor. The result was not as pretty as I would have hoped.
Before heading out of the house, we checked out their sample menus online. The choices – a sampling of major meats, Berkeley Bowl-esque vegetables, and some standard desserts – were quite conservative, ie. we weren’t blown away. “Are we setting ourselves up for disappointment?” we wondered.
Well, as we approached the wooden glass-paned door to Digs we saw a hand-written 3-course menu for the night. We looked at each other and realized that we didn’t have a choice in the matter, as we will be served the chef’s choices for tonight.
Settling down onto our seats, I noticed some remnants of Olivia – the French cursive writing on a chalkboard, the tiny restroom, the short zinc bar. I was glad that they knocked down the wall and made the space much more open. Of course, we can’t miss the Modigliani-inspired art all around us: women’s faces painted or assembled with found objects, done with a cubist touch.
The bread and whipped butter arrived to our delight – we had seconds. The sourdough has a chewy crust and a tangy taste in its meat, and the butter was fresh and mild. Not bad!
Then came the Salad with walnuts and goat cheese with mustard dressing. While the greens (some baby frisee, spinach, and radicchio) were very fresh — in fact, all the ingredients throughout dinner tasted fresh — my dish didn’t come with enough dressing. It tasted quite bland as the walnut-and-goat-cheese combo was a tired formula, until I had a second bite and was inundated with the taste of coarse sea salt. Thereafter every bite was as salty and umami as stir-fried chinese Ong Choy. It was quite weird, and I couldn’t figure out whether that was intentional. Perhaps some fresh ground pepper or mustard seeds may do the fresh greens some justice?
Next was the Hangar steak with Gordo Rancho Beans, soaked spinach, and piperade. Done medium rare, the steak paired nicely with the well-seasoned piperade. The spinach was merely poached and was flavorless; the beans reminded one of better days at campsites. Altogether, the dish was a hearty meal one may have at home with friends, or maybe at a chain gourmet restaurant a la Ruby Chris Steak House. I hesitate to comment further: everything tasted fine, and perhaps it was our hopes that let us down.
The saving grace was the fruit tart – nothing over-seasoned or saccharine, it tasted of fresh berries, good butter, and white flour, sprinkled with powdered sugar. The hand-whipped Chantilly was a nice touch and was tactfully draped along one edge of the tart. The crust was almost like shortbread and I craved to finish it with some raspberries!
Blue Elephant shall elaborate, I suppose, on our disappointment. But Digs Bistro’s efforts are nonetheless commendable, for their use of fresh ingredients and no-nonsense attitude to restaurant cooking. Perhaps it’s not our cup of tea, but local businesses who have Digs’ mindset are valuable, and worthy of patronage, nonetheless.
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I will indeed elaborate! There’s a certain kind of restaurant at a certain kind of price point that inspires me to make sure I’m not being ripped off.
Dig’s Bistro is one of those restaurants, as far as I can tell from taking quick peeks at its menu for months and having finally tried the third-Monday-of-the-month $25 three-course prix fixe.
Unfortunately, as I tried hard to find the supposed “mustard vinaigrette” through the mountain of salt Dig’s apparently piled onto our mixed green salad starter, the verdict was immediately that I was definitely being ripped off. After some reassurance from Hippo that I was being too harsh, I’m convinced now that, okay fine, it would cost more for me to make such a salad (though the salt is free – it’s on my shelf), along with the relatively high-quality hanger steak entree.
So after some thought, I’ve decided that it’s not so much that I was getting ripped off as it is that this kind of restaurant – perhaps exactly because of its price point – needs to, or just inevitably does, aspire to present a certain kind of food. The food cannot just taste decent. In fact, in some sense the food cannot just taste good. I can’t admire this food just for its being homey, oily curry from a Thai momma’s kitchen. It has to taste unique – at the least it has to have some semblance of that. I want, in other words, not to “be able to make it at home,” if you know what I mean (I mean what you might mean if you say, “I can do that,” in front of certain works of art; most of the time you’re being facetious, but sometimes…sometimes you really mean to be making a criticism).
In any case, our meal at Dig’s just didn’t cut it, I think. At first we weren’t sure if the salad was meant to be so salty, but upon re-reading the menu – “mixed greens with toasted walnuts and mustard vinaigrette” – I think it’s pretty clear it wasn’t. Anyway, even if it was, it didn’t work.
The very first thing I noted about the hanger steak dish that came next was the fact that it was, as far as I could tell, done more medium than the requested medium rare. Some of Hippo’s meat looked more rare than medium rare, so you do the math.
Aside from that, the entree was, like I said, decent – even pretty good.
But we was supposed to be eating “soaked spinach piperade” with the steak. That seems to me to suggest that there’s some spinach *take* on piperade. What I received was (bland) soaked spinach placed next to piperade (the sweet peppers of which were admittedly pretty good). This was all, again, placed next to a pile of beans. Oh, sorry: “Rancho Gordo beans.”
Perhaps one of the criteria for the “uniqueness” I mentioned earlier involves what I would typically consider snobby consideration of the so-called “presentation” of food. In this case, it looked like we were served several ice-cream-scooped portions on a cafeteria line lunch tray.
The saving grace for the meal was the fruit tart dessert asymmetrically topped with Chantilly cream, which was nicely crumbly (until the very end, where it was too hard), and just the right level of heft.
As much as I wanted to like its respectable underground restaurant (from-Oakland!) origins, I must say that I would be reluctant to go back. Maybe it was because this was supposed to be their “deal” of a meal, but if an underground-turned-legit restaurant doesn’t want to provide me with a fantastic meal for a bargain, I’m not so sure it’s really legit.
Just to note, all was not lost on this meal. While writing about it, I discovered from Wikipedia that people consider the hanger steak – the cut of meat hanging from the diaphragm of the steer – more flavorful from the outer skirt steak because of its proximity to the kidneys, which allegedly allows it to preserve the aroma of kidney. How cool is that?!
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