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San Pedro Square BistroSan Pedro Square Bistro and Wine Bar delivers on atmosphere but needs to work on its menuby Stett Holbrook on Apr 21, 2010
SAN PEDRO Square Bistro and Wine Bar exemplifies the promise and problem with San Jose dining. First, the promise. The restaurant makes good use of a cool space on a side street just off Santa Clara Street. Inside the small dining room, the handsome interior with its dozen or so tables feels casual yet refined. There’s an outdoor patio. The menu offers a quick tour of upscale American and French comfort classics—steamed mussels, grilled salmon, braised lamb shank, steak and frites—with a few Asian dishes tossed in for good measure. Service is fast, friendly and accommodating. This is how urban dining in San Jose should be: attractive spaces, indoor-outdoor seating, no attitude and good food. San Pedro Square Bistro has it all in spades—except for that last part. The food. And that’s the problem. The most interesting food in downtown San Jose is found in so-called ethnic restaurants. But when it comes to the upscale-style American and Mediterranean restaurants downtown, San Jose falls flat. It’s as if the city’s restaurants aspire to nothing more than pleasing gastronomically timid, Midwestern men on business trips. I’m not saying that downtown needs a bunch of French Laundry–type restaurants. I’m just looking for a few chef-owned restaurants that serve distinctive food and that take full advantage of the wealth of local farms, ranches, creameries, breweries and wineries. The food at San Pedro Square Bistro is not bad. I had a good crab-cake sandwich. Too often, restaurants skimp on the crab and go heavy on the bread crumbs. San Pedro Square Bistro’s crab-cake burger ($11) was crisp outside with lots of crab inside. It’s served on a soft burger bun with tangy lemon aioli, watercress, tomato and some really great garlic fries. The sizzling Cornish game hen ($9) is one of the restaurant’s signature items. Few restaurants serve the midget chickens anymore, but San Pedro Square’s version was decent with its crispy, honey-garlic-butter-infused skin. The house and Caesar salads (both $8) were sparingly dressed with house-prepared dressings. Those were the most interesting things I had. The wild mushroom crostini ($6) contained no wild mushrooms, just sauteed button, shiitake and crimini mushrooms on toasted bread ($6) with a cube of less than melted Brie on top. The roasted mussels ($12) with cloves of slow-cooked garlic floating in the buttery broth were decent. The seared scallop appetizer ($12) was a clumsy but decent dish: fat sea scallops pan-fried a dark brown and served atop a layer of mashed potatoes and a pool of lemon beurre blanc sauce. The pan-seared cubes of filet mignon ($14) appeared to be the restaurant’s take on shaking beef, a dish made famous by San Francisco’s Slanted Door restaurant. Here, it was a mound of tender cubes of meat piled between a tangle of watercress and garlic jasmine rice. The braised lamb shank stew ($21) arrived in a nearly boiling vat of red wine sauce thickened with barley, mushy pearl onions and flavorless baby carrots. The lamb itself was tender, but the sauce drowned out any of the meat’s subtleties. As a wine bar, the restaurant has a lengthy list of wines by the bottle, but for me a wine bar is a place to discover new wines via the list of wines by the glass, but the restaurant’s selection doesn’t stray very far off the familiar path. The desserts (all $6.75) are predictable (tiramisu, chocolate torte, cheesecake, crème brûlée, etc.), but they are made in-house and pretty good. The food at San Pedro Square Bistro is fine. It’s OK. It’s solidly not bad. It’s a nice place to hang out. But San Jose has enough run-of-the-mill restaurants. I want something better. San Pedro Square Bistro and Wine Bar spsbistrowinebar.com 20 N. Almaden Ave., San Jose 11am–3pm and 5–9pm Mon–Fri and 5pm–close Sat French and American $12–$27 by Stett Holbrook on Apr 21, 2010 |
 HOT STUFF: San Pedro Square Bistro and Wine Bar’s pan-roasted mussels |
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