Common Ground: Spruce

March 2008 | Tastebuds

Spruce

For a true farm-to-table experience, Spruce is evergreen

By Alastair Bland

By eating out, one largely forfeits what seems to have become a shared Bay Area ambition: knowing where your food comes from, and how it was raised. While today it’s almost industry standard for restaurateurs to herald ingredients as local, organic, sustainable and fresh, at most dining establishments, ordering is still a leap of faith, entrusting a strange chef to serve you no less — and hopefully far more — than you would have at home.

But at least one place in town isn’t kidding around: Spruce. This seven-month-old California-French restaurant sources a good 80 percent of its ingredients from a five-acre farm just upslope from its sister restaurant, The Village Pub, in Woodside. Both businesses transport fruits and vegetables (as well as compostable food scraps) via a biodiesel truck that runs on the restaurants’ leftover cooking oil — a closed-loop system that elevates the duo into the highest ranks of social responsibility.

“We believed in this concept so much that we decided to put our money where our mouths were and stop just talking about it,” says Spruce chef and co-owner Mark Sullivan. But what Sullivan calls “the romantic ideal of the chef-farmer” doesn’t quite work out, he concedes, as the kitchen demands the vast majority of his time. Occasionally, though, the original vision materializes in perfect grace; Sullivan himself picks a tomato from the vine and pulls a beet from the earth and two hours later slices the produce into a salad, truly as fresh as the day is young.

The elegant dining room is marked by chic-industrial décor, with lofty ceilings, exposed steel beams and ventilation pipes evoking the space’s previous life as a Depression-era auto garage. A friend and I enjoyed an hour-long lunch last month at Spruce, beginning by skimming the 1000-label wine list and zeroing in on a glass of Joseph Swan Zinfandel ($14) for me and a Kabinett Riesling ($9) for her. With the wine came our cheese starter, a plate of Smoky Blue and St. George Cheddar (each $6). We worked on the appetizer and savored the spacious ambience for a moment, imagining disassembled Model-Ts and subsequent decades of auto-evolution.

In the second course, the Butternut Squash Soup ($10) featured brilliant orange squash, puréed, buttery and sweet, dressed with leaves of sage and crushed chestnuts. The bowl of Country Potato and Cabbage Soup ($9) deliciously realized the robust, underrated diet of a peasant, utilizing the simplest produce of the earth. We considered several revered Spruce staples — the Caesar Salad ($9) and the Spruce Burger ($12) — before we settled on two veggie-heavy entrees, the Seared Albacore Salad NiCoise ($18), a steak of mild tuna, lathered with olive tapenade and laid over a bright bed of garden vegetables, and the Spruce Chicken Waldorf Salad ($15), of endives, butter lettuce, grapes and the most tender chicken breast that’s ever melted in my mouth. We split a large chocolate chip cookie ($2.50), tasted three of the restaurant’s carefully sourced coffee roasts and with that departed on full stomachs.

It chanced to be election Tuesday, and I still puzzled over which democrat I would vote for. But unlike most Americans, I knew without a doubt where my last meal was grown.

Spruce, 3640 Sacramento Street, Laurel Heights. 415.931.5100. sprucesf.com
Open Monday-Friday,11:30 am to 2:30 pm & 5 pm-11 pm; Saturday-Sunday, 5 pm-11 pm

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