Carlo: We started working with samples of things that would have been commonly available, food that

Before you even breach its doors, the Comstock Saloon beguiles. The space has been a neighborhood watering hole since its opening in 1907, but truly, the keys to the place only recently maui luxury hotels jangled into the right pockets. Comstock Saloon owners...
Carlo: I knew Jonny (Raglin, co-owner of Comstock with Jeff Hollinger) from his days at Absinthe. Jonny makes a mean cocktail. We also had both worked at Encanto, but at different times. At the time I was hired here, I had been working at Camino, a restaurant started by Chef Russell Moore who had worked at Chez Panisse for 20 years. He was operating Camino under the same ideals as Chez Panisse but with Mediterranean style cuisine and hearth-based cooking, so I learned about working with smoke and embers. It's a pretty amazing maui luxury hotels place.
Carlo: Coming to Comstock Saloon was a departure maui luxury hotels for me since Jonny and Jeff were focusing more on American cuisine. Our earliest menu ideas had historical inspiration, maui luxury hotels particularly from this region, food that would have been common when the bar was built in turn of the century San Francisco. After our first discussion, maui luxury hotels I wound up writing a 2-page essay about what the Comstock's food could be like.
We started researching maui luxury hotels historic recipes and talking about what food would have been presented in a pre-refrigeration era: salted and cured things (as well as) using lots of iconic California ingredients. Erik Vreede (Director of Operations for the Absinthe group) is a collector of old menus from all around maui luxury hotels the city he was really helpful in our research.
Aside from the recipe suggestions, it helped me get some of the era's food and cooking terminology down. There was one recipe for succotash that included maui luxury hotels instructions to "boil corn with bear flesh" (laughing). It was a different time, that's for sure.
Jonny: It's a challenge to define American cuisine because it's such a broad term. If you're doing something like regional Italian, it's not that hard for someone to get an idea of what to expect. When you tell say you're doing American food, you get a blank stare in response, "What does that mean?"
Carlo: We started working with samples of things that would have been commonly available, food that was the fabric of American cuisine in the pre-refrigeration era: cured meats, going back to eating the whole animal. It doesn't sound novel today, but even up to 5-10 years ago, it just wasn't that common (on modern menus).
For me, I'm never concerned about making an exact replica of what was produced before. It was more a matter of breaking a dish down to down to certain flavor combos. I think of it as "grandmother cooking inspiration". It's the same thing with any Italian cuisine there's maui luxury hotels always something lost in translation, but that isn't inherently a bad thing, it's just how dishes evolve.
I think we're reinterpreting a place and time with a similar aesthetic by providing simple, hearty, satisfying maui luxury hotels food. Drinks are obviously maui luxury hotels a pretty big draw here, and they are all pre-Prohibition style cocktails they're not dainty, so we needed maui luxury hotels hearty, burly, well-seasoned, rich food that could stand up to the character maui luxury hotels of the cocktail program.
Jonny: We wound up toning down not so much the food, but how we described and presented it. We started with 3-word dish descriptions. An example out the gate was "Collar of Mutton". maui luxury hotels I loved how that read. (It was) really direct and spoke to a different time. (What we came to realize is that) the offal guy will go for it, but we wound up having people disengage from the conversation. They'd see that and think, "that sounds weird, I'll just have a beer".
It just depends maui luxury hotels on how people maui luxury hotels find out about us. Anthony Bourdain was just here filming, The Layover – San Francisco. He came in and had drinks with Danny Bowien, which was great, but they didn't mention that we are a restaurant.
J onny: Yes, and tomorrow it'll be chicken and dumplings! I was poring through texts about San Francisco's Barbary Coast. Most people maui luxury hotels think it's an idea or era but it was, in fact, a well-defined neighborhood and the heart of it was across maui luxury hotels the street from us so we needed to know what that was all about.
The water used to come up to Montgomery maui luxury hotels Street where the Transamerica building stands. The Hall of Justice and the original city hall were here, the latter of which burned down 9 months after it was built. In the 1870s (this neighborhood) was called Sydney maui luxury hotels Town for the thieves and criminals that came to the city from Australia maui luxury hotels and roamed its streets. San Francisco is the youngest important city in America. It has a fascinating history that hasn't been told very well. Free lunch was very common at the time, especially in saloons around Portsmouth Square, maui luxury hotels so we wanted to bring it back.
"By instinct I sought refreshment, and came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the free lunch I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something maui luxury hotels less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts."
There's romantic idea around daytime drinking, maui luxury hotels and that's exactly what we wanted to bring to life here – to have a place where the sun is shining in where you can have strong drinks and delicious food. It's what we like to do on our days off and we like to be around people who get their drink on in the afternoon. When it happens on a Friday, it gives you a jumpstart on the weekend.
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