by Bill Citera

Examiner Food and Wine Critic, July 11, 1997

Captain Nemo, meet Escoffier. I'm not sure what those two would come up with is someone threw almost 4 million bucks at them and said: "Go ahead, make my restaurant," but I'll bet it would be a lot like Farallon.

Call it a French-influenced California chef cooking boldly imaginative, vigorously contemporary seafood-based cuisine in a lavish, faux oceanic setting. Call it 20,000 Leagues Under Post Street. Call it whatever you like, just call for reservations. Quickly, before every foodie in the greater Bay Area figures out that this month's "hot new San Francisco restaurant" actually deserves all the hype it's been getting . In Farallon, the roles of the good captain and the chef at the helm are played by Pat Kuleto and Mark Franz. Designer and co-owner Kuleto, the Jules Verne of restaurant designers and a restaurateur of increasingly formidable reputation, has fashioned a visually stunning space out of the 72-year old former home of the Elks Club near Union Square.

Chef and Co-owner Franz is best known for the decade he spent heading up the kitchen at Jeremiah Tower's Stars. At his new digs the menu is by turns lusty and opulent, dazzling the palate with house-cured caviares and smoked fish, oysters, lobster, and scallops so sweet they taste almost candied, then comforting the soul with earthy wild mushrooms, simply roasted skate wing and falling-off-the-bone tender lamb shank.

Their new restaurant is proof positive that a single picture is worth a bucketful of wriggling adjectives. To talk about Farallon's hand-made "jellyfish" and "sea urchin" light fixtures, backlit "kelp forest" columns, "caviar" staircase with 50,000 glued-on marbles and "octopus" bar stools makes the place sound like Kevin Costner's "Waterworld" with food. The reality is that Kuleto has brilliantly juxtaposed warmth and comfort with highly thematic high style. Description really doesn't do it justice, but of all the local Kuleto-designed restaurants - Fog City Diner, Postrio, Boulevard, Splendido, to name a few - I think Farallon is easily his best.

The food reaches for those heights, too, and much of it succeeds, especially unconscionably good appetizers like Franz's gnocchi with lobster and prawns ($11.75) or his signature Santa Barbara sea urchin with black truffled crab ($11.50). The thimble-sized potato gnocchi were positively ethereal, made even better with inclusion of fava beans and crunchy kernels of corn in a rich, buttery lobster sauce. The crab was the pure personification (crabification?) of luxury, an ineffably lush blend of snowy crabmeat atop truffled mashed potatoes, tucked into a sea urchin shell and napped with a creamy, almost nutty sauce based on the crustacean's roe.

Other offerings from the cooked side of the starter menu included a somewhat disappointing sampler of house-smoked fish (sturgeon, salmon, flounder and whitefish) on a large, pillowy blini ($9.25). No faulting the quality of ingredients, but their delicate flavors were lost under a thick mantle of creme fraiche.

A tiny soft-shell crab fared better. Fried crackling crisp and greaseless, it came drizzled with cilantro aioli and garnished with mango salsa ($12). Despite the inclusion of pricey morel mushrooms, a salad of the coneshaped fungi and asparagus with creamy tarragon vinaigrette ($8.75) seemed almost horney by comparison. Don't let that stop you, though. The musky-grassy flavor combination of the morels and asparagus is soulful and satisfying.

From the starters labeled "simply raw" came one of the most delightful dishes I tasted: silky, distinctively flavored mackerel with minuscule cubes of potato and crown of osetra caviar ($12.50). Sauce ravigote, a tangy blend of herbs and eggs, added a modestly piquant note and tied the different elements of the dish together.

If you're of a mind to indulge yourself - and let's face it, you wouldn't be here if you weren't - the iced shellfish indulgence ($16.75) is a great way to go. Strewn across a mound of shaved ice was a sampling of exquisitely resin piscine delicacies: creamy malpaque oysters, some topped with whitefish "caviar"; pellucid clams: steamed prawns and crayfish; glorious pink scallops. If you must, give them just the tinniest dab of a zippy house-made cocktail sauce or champagne mignonette, but their flavors are so clean and pure they require nothing more then a willing appetite.

Despite its obvious seafood bias, Farallon does offer several worthy choices for those of roe carnivorous persuasion. An entree of grilled squab ($23.95) was a meat-eater's fantasy. Since overcooked squab has the consistency of baked notebook Franz wraps the very lean squab breast around a mousse of the bird's legs and wild mushrooms, then wraps that in caul fat, which helps keep it moist and juicy. A light, natural sauce showed that nothing succeeds like restraint.

A Paliolithic-looking braised lamb shank with meltingly tender meat ($21.95) was one more hearty entree, while equally prehistoric-looking skate got a quite contemporary treatment, roasted and bone in, paired with a suave lobster sausage - another Franz signature - and an intriguing shellfish sauce of roasted prawns with a thick rice cake flavored with lomongrass, pickled shitake mushrooms and mildly spicy green curry-coconut sauce ($23.95). It didn't work for me. The flavors never melded, and the prawns were tough and chewy.

What did work spectacularly well were pan-seared scallops with black risotto, truffled celery root julienne and champagne sauce ($21.50). The scalps had the briny sweetness that to me makes them one of the finest of the foods. The risotto, dyed black with squid ink, was a dusky taste counterpoint, and the sauce was a cook-book-perfect example of classical French sauce-making technique.

But wait, there's more...

Farallon's pastry chef is Emily Luchetti, another Stars alum and one of the best reasons I can think of to have a good dentist. Don't miss her divine bing cherry napoleon (all desserts are $6.50), an architectural creation consisting of crispy sesame wafers stacked with lemon-scented rice pudding in a pool of luscious cherry sauce. Her achingly rich caramel chocolate brulee is served in a pastry shell with dark chocolate sauce.

Or how about creamy-dreamy warm chocolate fudge cake - sweets for adults - with the whimsical addition of malted ball vanilla ice cream, or her undessert dessert: fresh apricots wrapped in brittle shredded and fried phyllo, paired with vanilla ice cream and tangy huckleberry sauce? And if restraint doesn't do it for you, exceed with excess by ordering a large platter of goodies too numerous to go into here except to say you won't be sorry or hungry when they're gone.

And I can't let this space go without mentioning sommelier Peter Palmer's 300-wine wine list. While it leans toward the pricey, offers a thoughtfully chosen selection of primarily French and California wines. Many California labels will be familiar to the casual wine drinker, and there's also a good roster of "wine geek" favorites like Morgan Reserve Pino Noir and Pahlmeyer Chardonay on a more affordable note, the 1995 Cote-du-Rhone Les Figuieres from Jean-Luc Colomt ($28) is an excellent food wine, as the silken, full-bodied 1993 Marsannay from Philippe Naddef ($42).

It looks as if Captain Nemo and Escoffier have got themselves a helluva fine restaurant.