Good Taste is a menu for eating well in the Bay Area. This week, we’re checking out a fun collaborative menu between two sister restaurants in Emeryville and San Francisco.
In the nine and a half years since New Delhi’s ROOH opened an Indian restaurant in San Francisco, it’s been a joy to see a second location open in Palo Alto as well as the birth of the sister concepts Alora, a waterfront Mediterranean restaurant on the Embarcadero in San Francisco; the regional Indian restaurants Pippal at Bay Street Emeryville and Dublin, and Fitoor at Santana Row in San Jose and by the beach in Santa Monica.
They’re all thoughtful additions to the Bay Area and Southern California culinary scenes that have positively prompted colleagues to step up their game. I’ve been invited to several of these restaurants and have learned that they share a warm level of hospitality and execute gorgeous presentations that taste even better than they look.
This month, Pippal in Emeryville is offering an à la carte menu created in collaboration with Alora. The long menu explains that the dishes are intended to highlight how the two different cultures share the “trade journey of spices from Asia to Mediterranean.”
Food interests have been drawing me to Emeryville fairly often over the past year, including to explore all the new food tenants at Public Market Emeryville, which is walking distance from Bay Street, and for guava cake and other weekend treats by Honey & Pearl.
I was invited to Bay Street Emeryville to sample the Pippal x Alora menu and was honestly dizzied by the wide array of options. I don’t think I’ve seen such a long special menu.
Encouraged to over-order to Chef Vish Pandey, we still only sampled a small section of what’s available, starting with a Journey Through India, a sampler of street foods, and a plate of crispy fish Amritsari with garlic fries and mint-garlic chutney. It was a natural progression to follow with a bowl of fried Sicilian-imported burrata in vodka-rosatella sauce and adobo shrimp with Seville orange salsa. A fiery goat curry called mutton laal maas was cooled by the tzatziki accompanying the grilled lamb chops (and, later, by a Shirley Temple float at Humphry Slocombe next door). Because it was so spicy, Pandey wasn’t sure we should have to goat, but we braved its electricity after he said it was one of his favorites. It was an episode of Hot Ones!
This isn’t forced fusion as a gimmick, which is seen with numbing regularity in the Bay Area. Here, the pairing of Indian and Mediterranean foods is an organic flow worth further exploration. The Pippal x Alora menu is available through the end of June initially, but it may be extended if customers love it as much as I do.
