All Spice
Sachin Chopra and Shoshana Wolff have cooked in a 1906 gatehouse since 2010, three, four or five courses that move with the season. A developer bought the land under it in 2018.
Why go
The house is the last piece of Antoine Borel's estate. Borel was Switzerland's vice-consul in San Francisco and ran the Bank of California, and his 300 acres were subdivided in the 1950s, leaving the gatehouse marooned in a parking lot off El Camino Real.1 Chopra trained at the Culinary Institute of America and went straight to Daniel in New York. He met Wolff at Amber India in Santana Row, where she was serving tables and finishing her prerequisites for a viticulture and enology program. They opened here in 2010 with three people in the kitchen and two out front.1 The star followed in 2013 and stayed three years.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the strip loin. MICHELIN's inspector describes
a brick-shaped, perfectly cooked strip loin ... accompanied by baby zucchini, pearl onions, confit mushrooms and smoked kale sauce for added enrichment.
2 - Avoid: a late booking. The kitchen seats from 5:30pm and stops at 8pm, 5pm on Saturday.3
What locals & experts say
- Grant Marek, SFGATE, on Chopra's cooking:
Chopra's Indian-inspired French Californian cuisine (which is still one of the best meals on the entire Peninsula).
1 - Shoshana Wolff, on running it anyway:
We were hopeful in the sense that, you know, we figured if we just kept at it, as long as we physically could, that this was not forever.
1
Good to know
- The clock. A developer bought this parcel and five beside it for $7.1 million in 2018 and announced condos in 2019. Chopra and Wolff have been signing short leases since.1
- Finding it. The house sits down an alley west of El Camino, in the middle of a circular parking lot. Marek's warning is blunt:
The first time you dine there, you absolutely will get lost trying to find it.
1 - The star is history. MICHELIN lists the restaurant today with no distinction attached.2
- Groups: rooms hold up to 18, and the whole house goes to 40.3
Verdict
should-visit — Two things carry this rung and neither is the star, which lapsed after 2015. The first is that a working critic said plainly what he thought of the cooking in 2022, and he had no reservations about it. The second is the room itself, a 1906 gatehouse with a demolition permit hanging over it since 2019, which makes the visit time-limited in a way almost nothing else in this town is. What stops it going higher is that nobody has reviewed the plate since, so the freshest description of dinner is MICHELIN's listing.