Intercontinental San Francisco's Luce Is Not Your Average Downtown Hotel Restaurant
One Michelin-starred Luce, situated on the ground floor of San Francisco's Downtown Intercontinental hotel, is not your standard-issue Downtown hotel restaurant. The admittedly antiseptic aura to the clean and modern décor of the restaurant is not in the least mirrored by its comestible fare which one would venture to describe as deeply inviting.
What Luce lacks in warmth, it more than makes up for on its plates, which are diverse in their influences and showcase the prowess of a chef who travels for inspiration. After all, the 7 consecutive years Luce has spent on the Michelin list, including this one, proves that chef de cuisine, Daniel Corey, knows a thing or two about imaginative dinning.
Corey has crafted a menu that fuses his understanding of American fare with with international ideas and techniques resulting in dishes like foie gras ganache with strawberry, celery root, smoked pistachio, and warm brioche.
My nine-course tasting menu dinner featured quite a few standouts including the first course of Pacific blue prawns with espelette chile, lemon, pistachio, and brown butter that were cooked to such perfection that they melted in the mouth, and a tranche of "mi cuit" king salmon belly paired architecturally with a variety of citrus-colored melon cylinders to which a topping of grainy mustard seed provided an unexpected yet welcome contrast to the the supple delicacy of the fish. Of the two desserts, the raspberry basil sorbet with peach ice and a hint of basil hit all the rights notes of complex simplicity.
Given its location, Luce may look like a den for business dinners and hotel-dwellers too uninventive to seek out the city beyond their lodging but, assuredly, the case is quite the opposite: Corey's cooking is a refreshing departure from such longueurs and is as packed with flavor as it is marked by originality. Besides, if one must dine for business, such dinning should be a pleasure, and that's exactly what Luce is.