Bacar - South Beach

This place rocks. A well done converted warehouse with attitude. Three floors, open floorplan, big booths, good food and a KILLER wine list. It all makes for a good time. Best part about this place? You can taste some SERIOUSLY expensive wine that is typically sold by the bottle only in smaller decanters. The FLIGHTS of wine rock too, try Italian, French, Californian, you name it.

Rose champagne, mmm, mmm good, and at $20 a glass it should be. Get at least two glasses.

The oysters are said to be some of the best and judging from the looks of the many plates of empty shells we believe it. Our designer friend Brian LOVES them. The pizzas are very, very thin and very very good. Hooray for lamb riblets and mesquite king salmon!

The place is always buzzing. Live music happens at night so after dinner go hang out at the bar. Great people watching too. We see Willie Brown in there from time to time, who doesn't? Does the man ever sleep?

HINT: If you want to go somewhere not too crowded and a bit more upscale before or after a ball game go here. It's too expensive for most of the "hot-dog & garlic-fry" eating fans who don each piece of clothing in the hues of orange or black, undergarments included, yuck.

Bacar
448 Brannan St. Valet
San Francisco, 94107
(415) 904-4100

Comments

[John]

Update time! OK, is B-A-C-A-R a jumble? I can almost scramble it around to spell 'C-R-A-P-A'. We've been pro-Bacar for years due to the extensive wine list and good 'za's, but the past few dinners here have been, well, ummm, uhhh, something you'd hear in Rappers Delight...'chicken tastes like wood' and all that. Wassup Bacar?!

Anyhoo, last week we took some friends from Chicago here - and witnessed a train wreck. No, not witnessed a train wreck...were front row on the locomotive going straight to dining hell.

Back in the day, you could not go wrong with the mussels. Swimming in garlic and white wine sauce, tasty little morsels. Even if you didn't care for the mollusk family, you'd like these babes. Well, GAME OVER. Should mussels be the size of softballs? I think not. And not a drop of that tasty wine/garlic stuff that they used to swim in. I choked down 4 out of sheer starvation-level hunger. Threw the other 10-12 back, poor things.

Next up? The Wild King Salmon. 'Excellent!' our server exclaimed. OK, you can't swing a dead Chinook in this town without hitting a chef that can cook it up right. Hell, I can! Well, guess again. Not fishy-bad, just 'is this from the Rubbermaid salmon farm?' bad. Eww. 2 bites. Even the stuff it sat on - some ratatouille blah blah stuff tasted like crap.

Janine and our other two freinds? OK, maybe they had slightly better luck than me, but we'd be grading on a serious curve to give anything better than a 'C'.

Soo, if you go - stick to the bar area. Order lotsa wine. Eat the pizzas. Order more wine. Leave happy.