A Tale of 2 Great SF Bay Area restaurants

Ace! NewsFlash

Exurban Excellence

In Napa and Silicon Valley, celebrations of California’s bounty

On the surface, you could hardly imagine two restaurants more unlike each other, each about an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Manresa is a finely crafted, opulent jewel in Silicon Valley; Ubuntu, 90 miles away, is the vegetable ashram of Napa. But they both celebrate the Californian bounty of ingredients and epitomize the closed loop of top eating places around the Bay Area that have eclipsed the foodie cred of the neighboring metropolis. And their chefs belong to the same talented, exurban cabal: Jeremy Fox, the executive chef of Ubuntu, and his wife and executive pastry chef, Deanie, apprenticed and worked, as a couple, at Manresa for chef David Kinch.

The restaurants’ locations on opposite sides of San Francisco mean the Foxes completely overleapt the urban center of the Bay Area when they left Manresa and moved north to found Ubuntu in 2007. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in other cities with big-time food scenes. I wouldn’t dream of insinuating that Mr. Kinch and the Foxes deliberately chose to boycott the city of San Francisco: Quite probably it’s just a result of the Bay Area’s dispersed nature in general. But they have been able to prosper in places that exist quite independently of the Big Bad City, thanks to wine in Napa and the cybersphere around Los Gatos.

Enigmatic but meaningful names are another thing the restaurants share. You don’t really need to know that Manresa is a town in Catalonia. But it is a strong hint of Chef Kinch’s reverence for the food of modern Spain, its masterful union of remarkable ingredients with an original application of science to the kitchen. Ubuntu is a Zulu word for human solidarity favored by Nelson Mandela. If you know what it means, then you are less likely to dismiss that whole place as a mindless outpost of New Age cookery.

Ubuntu’s chef Jeremy Fox and pastry chef Deanie Fox

Mr. Kinch, like Mr. Fox, has a tight relationship with local agriculture, and he will win oohs and ahs from most of you with his celestial supersalad called “Into the Garden.” But Jeremy Fox at Ubuntu stakes everything on his ability to turn out food of the highest quality and extreme innovation without a shred of meat or fish. In his statement of purpose, however, he is very definite about not running a vegetarian restaurant, but a celebration of vegetables. Ubuntu isn’t vegan, either, but the dishes with egg or dairy products in them are clearly marked as such on the menu. As you sit there, admiring the recycled wood and furniture, feeling pure about all the “biodynamic” effort that you will soon enjoy for a price far below almost any other top restaurant anywhere, you look up and see a lithe human body twisting wraithlike behind a scrim on the floor above. There’s a yoga studio there, and its strenuous spirituality pervades the dining room below.

So does a strong whiff of France. For me, the key to Ubuntu is its worshipful attitude, not to eastern religion or environmentalism, but to the French chef Michel Bras, a Michelin three-star perennial who famously applied the term gargouillou to a deliriously variegated plate of baby vegetables, separately cooked and intricately plated. Gargouillou was originally a peasant stew of ham and potatoes, itself named after a standard French word for belching and stomach rumbling. Mr. Bras’s vegetized purification has now found a New World apotheosis at Ubuntu.

In several other cases, Mr. Fox’s dishes celebrate vegetable karma with a skill he owes to Europe, but the translation of these ideas into (all right, I’ll say it) New Age Californian leads to a farrago of self-congratulatory dish descriptions, with foods and food terms from several languages such as “our log-cultivated SHIITAKE, young RADISH and nori coulis jus roti with akitabare sake, CHIVE BLOSSOM and preserved lemon.” (Capital letters signify an ingredient from Ubuntu’s “biodynamic” garden; price, typically, was under $15 for this horticultural banquet.)

Ubuntu’s food is delicious and provocative, dramatically presented. Take the signature dish: cauliflower in a cast iron pot, served roasted, puréed and raw, with house-made spice, CILANTRO sprouts and brown-butter toast. There are many other celebrations of individual vegetables of equal interest, but we got off the oxcart when confronted with a contradiction in flavors that combined the classic white Margherita pizza’s mozzarella (“hand-pulled,” natch) with “three-day Napa strawberry soffrito.” Our waitress, a penitently failed vegan, said this was her favorite dish and refused to charge us for it when we begged to differ.

It’s a free country, of course, especially in Northern California, and so we’ll pick the broader spectrum of food on offer at Manresa if forced to choose. The menu changes often in this elegantly restored old house in a quietly opulent town that sports Bentleys and Lamborghinis at the prominently placed car dealership. At the risk of damping your surprise, I will recommend the sterling parade of unlisted small plates that stream out of the kitchen at the start of the meal.

Mr. Kinch has an eclectic, inquiring mind fixated, as I see it, on dramatic flavors and flavor contrasts. My guest, a skeptical visitor from metropolitan San Francisco, was won over by the foie gras with smoked bread “because the bitterness of the bread was nice against the unctuousness of the foie.” We all loved the addition of olive oil to the traditional cakey pastry called madeleine. You could see the same sensibility matching lamb shank against lamb’s tongue.

And then there’s Mr. Kinch’s piscatorial version of gargouillou, “a winter tidal pool” in which abalone, sea urchin, foie gras, shellfish, mushroom and much else lurk. It’s a marvel of peacefully clashing miniatures that rivals the full-size fishy ragout swimming in the great aquarium in nearby Monterey.

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