Food review: Chicken piccata

Restaurant: Gordon Biersch (San Francisco)
Food description: Breaded chicken cutlets sauteed and topped with white wine lemon butter sauce and capers served with a side of jasmine rice and vegetables
Food rating: 6.5 out of 10
Times ordered: 1

The chicken was lightly breaded and tender, the sauce had good light flavor, but I expected a little more, and the capers were tasty. I would say it was "a step above good bar food", but doesn't pass as fine cuisine, and it doesn't stand out as something to remember. The veggies really weren't very good - no flavor or a kind of weird non-vegetable flavor, and the rice as a filler was just too plain - they should have used something else. This was my first time on this dish so I would order it again to compare, but if it's the same, I probably wouldn't order it again.

Food review: Goat cheese ravioli

Restaurant: Gordon Biersch (San Francisco)
Food description: Ravioli stuffed with goat cheese and ricotta, topped with sauteed mushrooms, pine nuts, spinach, shaved parmesan, and rosemary, in a brown butter sauce
Food rating: 7 out of 10
Times ordered: 1

This is a rare moment for me that I can actually review a vegetarian dish that I liked enough to order again. Of course whenever there's cheese involved, I'm willing to make some compromises on the meat factor, but only if it sounds really enticing. Plus, I'd already had the wings and wasn't all that hungry, so it was the perfect opportunity to try something a little lighter. When the pasta arrived it had very little sauce and looked a little on the dry side. Surely enough, when I tasted it, the ravioli without any mushrooms or spinach on top were too dried out. However, the ones that were not dry were delicious. The sauteed mushrooms were buttery and had a rich steak-like flavor. The spinach wasn't overcooked and was sauteed in just the right amount of garlic to bring out the spinach flavor, not overpower it. The pine nuts added some texture and complemented the spinach and goat cheese nicely. I didn't really taste the rosemary at all, which was fine, it didn't really need it anyway. I liked how they didn't want to drown the ravioli in the butter sauce, but it could have used just a tad more to prevent them from drying up. So aside from some minor details, I thought they did a pretty good job, particularly for a vegetarian dish.

Food review: Glazed chicken wings

Restaurant: Gordon Biersch (San Francisco)
Food description: Chicken wings fried then tossed with ginger, sweet chili, and sesame seeds
Food rating: 6.5 out of 10
Times ordered: 2

Wings again you say? Yup, good ones are really hard to come by, but you have to keep trying! After the wings arrived, I realized I'd ordered them before. I guess they weren't all that memorable the first time, thus the 6.5 rating! I can only eat crispy chicken skin, otherwise I'll remove it. Picky, I know, but worth mentioning. The skin was definitely far from crispy, so I picked it off, just like most of the other wings I've reviewed. With only a small amount of glaze left on the chicken meat and nothing to really dip it in, the flavor was a little lacking. Of course, had they cooked it properly, I wouldn't be saying this at all. The glaze itself, though generic, was still tasty. It wasn't overwhelmingly sweet or gingery but was way too greasy. If you've got a sweet sauce with not much vinegar, too much oil and sugar together can get a little sickening (though I haven't seen many places figure out a solution to this). So overall, these wings were simply ok, and I probably wouldn't order them again. For truly spectacular honey wings, check out these at San Tung.