Skool Restaurant: Making the Grade in Potrero Hill
Even when you eat out often, it’s not easy to discover a stand-out restaurant. The ingredients may be fresh but the execution predictable. Or the concept exciting but the taste unappealing. When you stumble upon a place where all the important factors come together – culinary expertise, presentation, and most importantly, good taste – you want to tell all your friends about it. Skool is one restaurant that will exceed your expectations from the very first bite.
Take their Coco Flat Bread with aji-himono, caramelized onion, goat cheese, sun dried tomato, olive tapenade, and local greens. Seems wholesome and simple enough, right? It also tastes amazing, enough to make your eyebrows go up as you realize just how succulently it all comes together. But that’s one of the main courses. Let’s go back to the appetizers.
Like much of the seafood, the oyster selection here comes from all over the globe, hand-picked by the chefs whose vision revolves around using local, sustainable ingredients with a world influence. The medium size, Fanny Bay oysters are flawless – super fresh, buttery, with just the right accompanying sauces.
In the starter menu, the ceviche represents much of what this restaurant has managed to accomplish. Freshness is already without question here. More than that, the dish is original, topped with brown popped rice that adds an interesting texture and toasty flavor to the cucumber citrus. At the same time, there’s a subtlety to it all – the dish isn’t so exotic that you no longer recognize it.
If you aren’t a drinker, the cocktails aren’t the only hand-crafted beverage in the house. You’ll appreciate the long list of teas and delicious “safe cocktails,” particularly the Ginger Mule, made with fresh ginger, lime, sugar, and mint, which give it a wonderful snap. And for dessert, only three words can be said: Lavender Panna Cotta. It’s almost too good to be true, and you’ve probably never had anything like it.
Relatively new to the Potrero Hill area in San Francisco, Skool is off to a strong start, owing in large part to the two experienced husband and wife pairs who run the place: Toshihiro and Hiroko Nagano and Andy Mirabell and Olia Kedik. Operating owner Andy Mirabell, former Director of Operations at Blowfish Sushi, says, “We’ve got a lot of tricks up our sleeves.” This includes maintaining a seasonal menu with staples like the Spiced Panko Salmon, heating the outdoor patio, and adding sound paneling to the main dining room to help control noise levels.
The “Skool” theme is already in effect, with the menu arriving on wooden slats with an accompanying pencil. The restaurant space features secondary colors – brown and orange, with purple and green accents, and the music from in here blasts into the street, attracting an energetic but sophisticated crowd. But while some restaurants are all about ambiance, using loud music and décor to distract visitors from mediocre food, that’s clearly not the case here, where the food speaks for itself.
Posted by Renee Rutledge
