“Zagat London Restaurants 2011” ($14.95, Zagat, 254 pages)
The British government may be cutting back, but that doesn’t mean the London restaurant scene is in dire straits. On the contrary, the folks behind Zagat mention a few high-profile openings, including bad boy chef Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus, a modern French restaurant in upscale Belgravia.
A few midpriced ventures also are new to the scene, such as the Anthologist, which serves modern European cuisine in a former police commissioner’s office. Another trend, they report, is the proliferation of local chains.
“Zagat San Francisco Bay Area Restaurants 2011” ($14.95, Zagat, 336 pages)
Like London, San Francisco is not immune to the recession, but, again like London, the city continues to see new openings even amid the inevitable closings.
Restaurant owners manage to survive by reinventing themselves or offering discount prices at previously hard-to-get-into places, which leads to more economical dining options for customers.
Newcomers include celebrity chef Tyler Florence’s Wayfare Tavern downtown in a turn-of-the-last-century building that serves upscale American cooking.
Other trends include the move toward gourmet sandwich shops (“sandwiches unlike anything your mom ever packed in your lunchbox”) at affordable prices. They mention, as an example, Naked Lunch in North Beach, which takes its moniker from novelist William S. Burroughs’ eponymous beat classic and — living up to its name — is a lunch-only takeout stand.
Another newcomer, Comstock Saloon, also in North Beach, is a gastro pub inspired by the city’s historic Barbary Coast era but updated to include a very 21st-century take on bar food (beef shank and bone-marrow pot pie).
— By June Sawyers, Chicago Tribune
