from Esquire 11/05

Myth

SAN FRANCISCO

Like Gotham Bar and Grill in N. Y. C. and Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, Restaurant Gary Danko (BNR 1999) in San Francisco has been a graduate school for a generation of brilliant American chefs%u2014perhaps none better than Sean O’Brien, thirty-five, who at Myth coalesces the many strains of California’s food culture that have influenced the way we all eat today.

Restaurateur Tom Duffy has provided O’Brien with a landmark nineteenth-century brick building with a glass atrium whose light is diffused through bronze-colored veils, a sexy backdrop for his locally driven food. Warm sweetbread salad is tossed with salty bacon, tart sherry vinegar, shiitakes, and pungent grain mustard. A New York strip steak lavished with blue-cheese butter and a syrupy red-wine sauce (with terrific french fries on the side) has unrepentant heft, while O’Brien’s presentation of candy-sweet heirloom tomatoes under a simple gloss of olive oil and a single anchovy stays truer to the elemental ideal of California cuisine than all the gourmet pizzas and nasturtium salads ever did.

470 Pacific Avenue; 415-677-8986; mythsf.com