By Tamara Palmer
Here’s your latest stunt food alert: Bisou Bistronomy, a lively French restaurant in the Castro, has just put an escargot burger on the menu. A petite slider served on a sesame bun, it’s garnished with parsley, aioli, cole slaw, tomato, caramelized shallots, and smoked Xeres sauce (a sherry reduction).
“This started as a special for one night and was so well received and requested that we couldn’t ignore the opportunity to add it to the current menu,” explains chef/owner Nicolas Ronan. He’s selling them for $10 each, with the option to add seared foie gras on top for another $10.
When I first got wind of this thing, my gut reaction was, “Oh, hell to the naw!” But then I remembered that Ronan is quite a good chef and that the slider’s diminutive size and relatively traditional ingredient accompaniments mean that it probably is not going to taste dramatically different from a classic plate of snails, which are beautifully meaty when cooked properly. So I think this has promise.
“Our guests love our traditional escargot dishes, they lick the plates clean!” Ronan says. “So I wanted to come up with a way to tie those flavors into a more playful dish. I experimented for two weeks with different ways of making the patty and flavor profiles. In the end I decided to stay true to the ingredients included in our original escargot recipe. The strong parsley flavors in the aioli was a must for me because it’s part of a traditional escargot dish. Then I added guindilla [pepper] for spice and a reduction of sherry vinegar to elevate the flavors.”
When it comes to outrageous burgers, San Francisco jumped out the window a very long time ago — and it got that much crazier when foie gras recently came back into the picture. Whether the controversial liver, bone marrow or duck fat, heart-stopping inclusions are de rigueur around here, as are animal patty variations from elk to kangaroo. This should have no trouble fitting in at all.
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Photo by Natalie Wayt
