3859 Piedmont Ave.
Oakland, CA 94611
510.653.3902
www.commisrestaurant.com
Commis may be the latest restaurant in the San Francisco East Bay to have a Michelin star, but that doesn't mean it's worth visiting. Yes, the food is good - sometimes outstanding - but it's so noisy it's tough to enjoy the meal.
The restaurant is in a long, narrow space that seats just 31 people, with seven of those being at the counter around the open kitchen. Every surface in this restaurant is hard and the noise is overwhelming as diners try to yell over the music and then over each other. A relaxing spot for dinner this is not.
Dinner started with a small, refreshing glass of lemon grass soda followed by a firm boiled egg yolk in onion soup with buckwheat and chives. This opened the evening with an interesting visual and a surprisingly rich and luscious taste.
The three-course menu is small and vegetarian entrees are generally made from what the chef finds at the produce market that day. We were offered an entree featuring a variety of mushrooms or the option of selecting from various ingredients on the menu. (While I was told in two separate phone calls that the restaurant can easily accommodate vegetarians, it seemed somewhat more of a challenge than expected when I was there and told to design my own meal.)
We began with the cauliflower soup with cardoon (above) and the winter roots salad with crispy kale (below). The soup was excellent, very creamy and with the cardoon providing more texture than flavor. The salad was rather ordinary with the exception of the kale. Paper thin and crispy, it was a bit like crunchy nori.
The mushroom entree (below) came with dollops of black bean and bourbon sauce and atop black barley. This dish was very flavorful with the bourbon sauce providing the sweetness and thickness of a very well-aged balsamic. The second entree of root vegetables did not work nearly as well. It was a jumble of mostly bland flavors.
The thin slice of pumpkin pie custard was a heavy ending to an already rich meal. Other options included a cheese plate and an apple and huckleberry tart.The fixed-price menu is $59 and $29 more for wine pairings. There is an extensive selection of wines by the bottle in the $40-$50 range.
Overall, Commis provides a wonderful dinner, but in an uninviting environment and not really with vegetarians in mind.
