Red Dog Cafe

This stylish, easygoing establishment, with its industrial-style ceiling and its retracting, plate-glass front window, pitches itself to suburban fantasies. It should come as no surprise that, given its blend of neighborliness and easygoing urbanity, the kitchen should take its inspiration from the cuisine of Northern California, where Berkeley-crunchy meets Italian country. The surprise is that it’s the handful of entrees, not the starters, sandwiches, and pizzas, that tend to show the kitchen at its best. The cedar-plank salmon flakes beautifully, its orange-pink flesh offering up a subtly smoky, woodsy savor; it’s equally fine in a supporting role, turning up in a meal-size spinach-and-arugula salad that is bright and lively with rings of red onion, shaved fennel, and nicely balanced citrus dressing. The braised-duck salad boasts wonderfully mellow roasted grapes, port-wine vinaigrette, and thick, ropy strands of meat (“pulled,” barbecue-style, from duck that has been cooked just a wee bit past peak fatty lusciousness). Chicken roasted under a foil-wrapped brick—a Tuscan-style preparation—is almost confitlike, crispy and yet also soft and tender along the thigh and leg (though the breast is disappointingly dry). The ribs, thick and meaty, with a sweet, ketchupy glaze, are as hearty as it gets here: a blast of down-home, lip-smacking Carolina in the midst of so much Left Coast cool. Equally good are the mussels, which hit the table in pretty copper cookers fresh from the fire, sweet and plump and lightly smoky. But a good black-olive tapenade is nearly undone by its accompanying doughy wedges of house-baked focaccia with a pronounced Parmesan crusting, against which the sharp, briny flavors of the paste struggle to register. In the case of the artisanal goat cheese, a slowly melting mound surrounded by a moat of caramelized-tomato sauce, it’s the equally doughy garlic-focaccia wedges, meant for dipping, that get in the way of an otherwise tasty concoction. And the pizzas—minimal saucing, crispy, chewy crust—are still works in progress.
—Todd Kliman, November 23, 2005