Café Kati

It’s hard to tell the owner and chef of a restaurant that you’re not going to eat at his place after he’s come out into the cold to regale you with a story of intelligentsia secret knocks. That’s what happened to Jeanne and me.

We walked to Café Kati, a place that my friend Connie had wanted to take me to before she moved to Boston, to look at the menu. We had many eating options along Fillmore and wanted to make sure we scoped all of them out before settling. This was going to be her last meal in San Francisco for a while so it had to be spectacular.

As we stood outside the window of Café Kati to read the menu, Kirk Webber, the chef and proprietor, opened the door in his chef’s suit and proceeded to chat us up. It’s a marketing tool employed at various restaurants, most notably the ones in North Beach, where the human touch is supposed to convince passersby that they are suddenly hungry for whatever food is served within. But, with Kirk, it was different. It didn’t feel like a catcall from some greasy-haired Italian man trying to woo me with his garlicy noodles. It felt like he really wanted to welcome us to his restaurant, to make us a guest in his home, and to simply create a pleasant dining experience for us.

We followed Kirk inside. He introduced us to Jen (the new hostess who had been working for only a week), his girlfriend who was sitting at the bar and whose name I forgot although I sat next to her and chatted with her for almost the entirety of our meal, and to the kitchen staff as he gave us a tour of the place. Jeanne wondered how often he gave tours of the place and if the kitchen staff knew that this was his deal with young women who were virgins to his restaurant (this, apparently, is common chef behavior, according to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential).

The restaurant was dark, warm, and crowded with people in suits with ties and nice makeup (I felt embarrassingly underdressed in my bedtime tank top, jeans with a grease stain, and holey Chucks). Kirk poured us glasses of fruity pinot noir as he sat us at the bar and Jen set our places.

Jeanne and I were still studying the menu, trying to decide what to get, when a plate of spring rolls appeared before us. It was their Vietnamese style mango spring rolls with dipthong sauce. Not only did they look spectacular cut into pieces to reveal the colorful orange and green inside and topped with fried bean thread, but they were delicious. The rice wrapper was chewy yet soft. The mint was a refreshing contrast to the spicy kick of the sauce the crept up on my tongue.

The appetizer that we chose was the beet salad with watercress dressed with a caramelized shallot and sherry vinaigrette, blue cheese, and candied walnuts. It was an artistically deconstructed salad, with rounds of white beet stacked on top of each other at one end of the long rectangular dish and a small mound of bright green watercress on the other with the walnuts and cheese meeting in the middle. The watercress was fresh and crisp, and the dressing was full-flavored and rich while maintaining a certain lightness. The white beets were an interesting sight, simply for the fact that I had never seen beets that color before. They tasted just like the red kind and were perfectly tender. The cheese and nuts were the highlights of the dish though. The cheese was creamy, salty, and smooth, a sharp contrast that worked well with the crunchy sweetness of the walnut.

Our entrees included the tilapia with wild mushrooms, pumpkin gnocchi, spinach, and porcini mushrooms and the wild rice stuffed quail with Chinese broccoli, foie gras, sweet potatoes, and a port pomegranate sauce. The filets of tilapia were flakey and just a little crisp around the edges, but a bit too salty for my taste. The pumpkin gnocchi, however, was fantastic. They were little pale orange pillows of buttery smooth delicateness that simply melted away in my mouth.

I was not as big of a fan for Jeanne’s quail though. The rice stuffing was a bit hard to chew and grainy. It was too much work for my mouth without a big payoff in taste. The quail was tasty though and I could have eaten Chinese broccoli all night long.

Jeanne and I had planned to save room for dessert (Jen had assured us that there were to-go boxes) but we cleaned our plates and mopped up every last drop of sauce. Still, we said we would look at a dessert menu. We were just about to place our order for the chocolate orbit cake when a huge waft of chocolate hit me. Kirk had plopped down a huge dish with a sizable chocolate mousse-looking mound on one side and a scoop of vanilla ice cream that sat atop a cookie on the other behind our menu. Kirk really was a magician with food, complete with the ability to read minds. This chocolate “cake” was made only with egg, butter, and chocolate and was more of a mousse than a cake. With each bite, I felt my bridesmaid dress get tighter and tighter. The dessert was incredibly rich and decadent. We asked Jen if she had tried it yet, and when she said no, we insisted that she grab a fork and she did, mmm-ing at the wonder just as we did.

As our meal was winding down, we tried to figure out why we were treated so well. During the span of our two-hour meal, we learned the life of Kirk (how he started cooking at age 13, moved from Orange County to San Francisco to study at the California Culinary Academy, started Café Kati at the age of 23, was married for 22 years to a woman ten years his senior and recently divorced, has a 12 year old son whose dating life consists of holding hands, how he’d been almost killed twice in the past two years, how he lost his sense of smell and considered closing Café Kati until his power to smell miraculously returned), we met the entire restaurant staff, we chatted about my work and even attempted at providing an on-spot counseling session, and we got treated to tons of delicious food. For such an established restaurant, it seemed as if they were going above and beyond to expand their clientele base. In the end, we figured that it was because we were young, attractive, Asian women.