Chez Nous Review

Chez Nous rapidly served us decent small plates, but only two (of ten) spontaneously elicited positive remarks (one salad and the baked cheese dish). A neat observation: this means every dish with cheese was good.

Apologies if this review is terse; the remainder of it is written from my notes more than a month after the fact.

What we ate, roughly in order:

• Bread. Decent, with a crunchy exterior.
• Greek spreads with pita. The pita was wonderful, soft and warm, though more like thin focaccia than pita. Neither dips were that impressive: one was a creamy dill, the other a weird hummus that none of us liked.
• Salad of butter lettuce, gorgonzola, pears, and walnuts. With a good dressing, we declared it one of the best items of the night, though one attendee wanted more pears. Even I, who wasn't in the mood for it, had to declare it was good.
• Baked chevre (a type of goat cheese) with a fig and olive tapenade and slices of walnut crostini (toast). The best dish of the night. The crostini was bread of the type one traditionally gets on a cheese plate. The tapenade and cheese went really well together.
• Tuna tartar with wasabi creme fraiche and crispy wontons. Fine. The only feature of the dish worth mentioning is the very pretty avocado flower that came with it.
• Pan roasted sea bass with kale, pancetta (Italian bacon) chunks, and white butter. The sea bass was nicely juicy.
• Pommes frites with harissa aioli (garlic mayo). Decent shoestring fries, though drier and crispier than people like.
• Salad of grilled calamari, arugula, and cilantro. A vinaigrette sadly dominated the flavors of everything else.
• Gnocchi with a sweet potato cream sauce.
• Grilled lamb loin chops with lavender sea salt. Good. Nicely grilled and juicy. We, however, complained that it was underseasoned and we had to season it ourselves, something we don't like having to do in restaurants.
• Canneles de Bordeaux with creme anglaise and rum caramel. The canneles didn't excite us, as the crispy outside tasted like burnt marshmallow. However, the caramel ball was good, and one person really liked it.
• Chocolate pot de creme with a "croquet bordelais." The former tasted exactly like a Hershey's pudding cup -the resemblance was uncanny-; the later was simply a crispy sugar cookie.

What we drank:

• Strawberry sangria. Eh. Had too much wine. In its defense, it had lots of strawberries.
• Coffee, according the menu, organic. The pitcher of cream had no spout, making it hard to pour.
• English breakfast tea.Service was fine, with the notable exception that they generally didn't give us utensils with which to serve the food. Serving with one's own knife and fork was frequently difficult, especially for items like salads.

We enjoyed the decor: the understated, easy to miss entrance, the nice, impressionistic paintings, and the blue Moroccan chandelier, which the person who'd visited Morocco really liked.

Original Announcement

It's been a while since we had dinner. Before people start traveling for the holidays, let's head out this Wednesday at 8:00pm to Chez Nous, a Mediterranean small-plate restaurant in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of SF.

Please tell me if you are coming!

Comments from Other Attendees

Feel free to add remarks here.