Good Taste tells you where to stick your fork in the Bay. This week, while we’re on the subject of Warriors stars who love to eat, there’s a fun new food tasting menu at The Eighth Rule, Steph Curry and Michael Mina’s bourbon bar at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.
The Eighth Rule and the neighboring Bourbon Steak have been in business for almost one year, but I just went to the former for the first time when I was invited to sample the new food tasting menu. I’m invited to a lot of MINA Group restaurants when they open or have something special to highlight, and there’s a consistent high standard of hospitality and food quality that runs through them all. But the new food style and service at The Eighth Rule is the most fun place they’ve got going in Northern California right now.
Curry’s wife Ayesha and Mina operated the nearby restaurant International Smoke, which closed in May after 10 years in business. I recall attending a hilarious dinner with a few food writers and a lot of social media influencers. As we all held up noods and invasive flashes in unison, the couple walked into the restaurant. Noticing the spectacle, Steph could only shake his head. We didn’t meet him that night, but he seemed like a fun and easygoing guy based on that scene.
This is a swanky bourbon bar, and if you’re seated among the comfortable couches in The Eighth Rule’s hidden back room, it doesn’t take long to feel like a baller. What appeals most to this teetotaler is that the tasting menu is à la carte, with each tasting plate starting at $15 per person, with several more elaborate dishes available for additional supplements, including a crunchy fried Caviar Fishwich for another $20. So if you’re not drinking—or even if you are, within reason—this luxurious experience could be relatively modestly priced for an evening of this caliber.
Encouraged to over-order for science, the dishes that shot to the top of my list outside of the Fishwich, the regular bar menu’s heartier-plated and jalapeño-crowned sesame lobster toast ($24), and Mina’s classic Caviar Parfait with crispy potato, French-style mimosa egg, and crème fraïche (for a +$40 supplement) were several of the $15 per person bites: morel mushroom-filled agnolotti pasta with corn pudding, charred corn, and summer truffle; a bacon-wrapped scallop with cherry, Marcona almond, and Madeira emulsion; and a petite braised Wagyu short rib with heirloom carrots, English peas, and Pommes Duchess, egg-yolk-and-butter-enriched mashed potato realness.
The Eighth Rule’s menu offers an opportunity to try a bite of some of the dishes Mina serves at Bourbon Steak for a fraction of the price—and a variable fraction of the city’s multi-hundred dollar tasting menus, where the diner is confined to the chef’s choice of dishes and quantity. These days, I don’t feel quite fancy enough to eat at Bourbon Steak, even though I was invited for media dinners several times in the original incarnation of the restaurant, which closed back in March 2016. But I’d love to repeat The Eighth Rule experience even as a casual person who happens to be a non-drinker; it’s still an undeniable slam dunk.
THE EIGHTH RULE 335 Powell Street, SF (inside the Westin St. Francis). More info here.
