RT Bistro is the third restaurant brand from San Francisco chef power couple Evan and Sarah Rich.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
The expansive palate at RT Bistro, which includes French, Italian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese influences, can be seen clearly in the Dungeness crab “thermidor” served with Shared Cultures miso and pomelo.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
RT Bistro is a strongly branded effort, from the red-colored “RTs” that adorn menu signatures to flourishes that stretch across multiple Rich Table restaurants, such as the porcini mushroom powder.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
Go on, get the burger at RT Bistro.
Nearly everyone in the building is either thinking about ordering it, eagerly waiting for its arrival or in the process of eating it. It’s stupendous, a burger that could easily have a modeling career, flaunting a shimmering, house-made milk bread bun freckled with sesame seeds and a thick, wood-fired 6 ½-ounce beef patty fully enrobed in a gooey, sharp blend of aged parmesan and cheddar cheese. More steakhouse than Shake Shack, the burger gets its satisfying weight from a custom beef blend made with short rib, brisket, chuck and dry-aged rib cap. This is easily one of the finest burgers in the city, worth every cent of its $30 price tag, which includes triple-fried fries dusted in the RT Restaurant Group’s proprietary porcini mushroom powder.
The burger captures the spirit of RT Bistro and its owners, S.F.’s premiere chef power couple, Sarah and Evan Rich. The third restaurant brand in the Rich operation — following Rich Table and RT Rotisserie — the Riches opened RT Bistro next door to their flagship in January in partnership with general manager Jonny Gilbert.
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The sweet potato tempura is a play on honey walnut shrimp, a staple of Cantonese restaurants, by RT Bistro chef de cuisine Bill Wang featuring saffron aioli and candied walnuts.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
It’s natural to compare the newer restaurant to its 14 year-old sibling. The burger is an illustrative difference: Once a culty, off-menu offering at Rich Table, it never quite fit into the restaurant’s highly seasonal cooking. But it fits right in at RT Bistro, where dishes, outside of market-driven toppings and garnishes, are meant to be reliable. Outside of a few snags, RT Bistro sees the Riches hit cruise control, which isn’t an indictment — think autopilot at 80 mph — as the restaurant leans into the duo’s strengths: exceptional, heterogeneous cooking complemented by world-class hospitality.
A bistro more in name than in substance, the restaurant offers contemporary reimaginings of French classics like duck à l’orange, here doused in sweet and sour sauce. “We don’t do traditional,” Evan said.
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“We really are sort of inspired by and driven by what we want to experience,” Sarah added.
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Identifying the Riches’ cooking style proves conceptually slippery, but Rich Table’s motto is a good place to start: “Go to the market, see what’s good and cook it.” It’s a little Californian, a little New American, a little mercurial. “Our biggest influence is San Francisco,” Evan said. But that downplays their deep background in haute cuisine: Evan and Sarah met while working at Bouley in New York City in 2002. They fell in love, married in 2007, then moved to the Bay Area a year later. In the 2010s, Evan worked at Quince, Sarah at the Michael Mina restaurant, before reuniting at Daniel Patterson’s lauded, now-closed Coi. In 2012, the couple opened Rich Table as a break from stuffier environs — a restaurant that put refinement on the plate instead of in the tablecloth, band tees welcome.
The dining room at RT Bistro features a redwood-paneled wall with carvings of a redwood tree and a topographical map of Kirkwood Mountain, where the Riches like to ski.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
Rich Table’s palate is expansive, if intentionally undefined, with dishes that riff on French, Italian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese cooking. RT Bistro paints with similar brushstrokes, though half of the menu calls out Asian ingredients, including shinko pear, wonton chips, miso and curry. That’s partly explained by chef de cuisine Bill Wang, previously the sous chef at Rich Table, who grew up in Taiwan and cut his teeth at Rustic Canyon in Los Angeles, but is also likely reflective of history and geography — the Bay Area has one of the largest Asian populations in the country. In the aughts and 2010s, when the Riches were cooking in New York City, Asian influences were becoming conventional at high-end restaurants following the rise of influential chefs like David Chang and David Bouley, who rallied behind Japanese cuisine.
The other crucial element to understanding the Riches’ style is a strong sense of branding that’s more apparent at RT Bistro than at previous efforts. That starts with the restaurant title and extends to the menu’s frequent nods to the larger RT ecosystem: more subtle in its persistent use of Douglas fir — infused into cookies, cocktails and condiments — less so in dishes like the remixed version of Rich Table’s signature porcini mushroom-powered doughnuts. (The fry seasoning at RT Bistro is also the same at RT Rotisserie, the operation’s casual chicken-focused shops.) And in case you forgot where you are, signature dishes are marked with “RT” in red lettering.
RT Bistro’s menu continuity with the expanded RT universe is more of a strength than a pitfall, since the restaurant draws from a stellar well. Certain menu items, though, feel like fan favorites made to wear cumbersome disguises, while entrees outside of the burger don’t always feel as essential as the smaller plates.
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You’re going to be doing a lot of snacking at RT Bistro. Start off the sweet potato tempura ($18), Wang’s clever interpretation of the Cantonese restaurant staple honey walnut shrimp. The potatoes nail the candy coating crackle of the original, while sweetened mayo is swapped with an aioli made of saffron, condensed milk and citrus. A kampachi crudo ($21) is dressed in a Taiwanese version of cocktail called five-flavor sauce: sweet and spiced with a gingery warmth; Wang cites a Taiwanese squid dish as inspiration. Vegan green curry, made with apples, coconut milk and a bit of miso — though more Thai than Japanese in palate — brightens roasted cauliflower ($18). Miso deepens a crab thermidor ($29) festooned in pomelos.
RT Bistro chef de cuisine Bill Wang, who grew up in Taiwan, previously worked at Rustic Canyon in Los Angeles was sous chef at Rich Table.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
If you’re feeling fancy, opt for the “black truffle” ($28), an homage to renowned French chef Alain Passard that consists of an egg filled with weightless, truffle-infused custard — it’s more enjoyable than the superfluous caviar service accompanied by doughnuts ($39). While the doughnuts are great, the accompaniments — a plate slicked with Douglas fir ranch, crumbled boiled eggs and dollops of caviar, feels tacked on. I’d much rather have the doughnuts without the extra steps.
One of Rich Table’s earliest dishes, olives marinated in preserved lemons given crunch by celery ($8), are back from retirement, and make for a remarkable pairing with the Fir Coat cocktail ($18), a Douglas fir-infused martini (notice the pattern?) offering hints of forest floor.
Nature design motifs are sprinkled throughout the dining room, such as redwood paneling bearing carvings of a redwood tree and a topography map of Kirkwood Mountain, where the Riches like to ski. Compared to Rich Table, RT Bistro is more intimate, with slightly brighter lighting, but an equally loose vibe. The dining room is populated with couples on double dates, ladies wearing big hats, young professionals in vintage Carhartt jackets and business dudes in suits who protect their backpacks — full of trade secrets, I imagine — like their lives depend on it. Many diners arrive by Waymo. The younger crowd tends to reach for cocktails, but they’re outnumbered by the older patrons drinking wine, perhaps a “burger pour,” red wine poured from a magnum.
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The RT Bistro burger, a remix of the off-menu Rich Table cult favorite, is made with a custom beef blend featuring 10% dry-aged rib cap; a mix of aged parmesan and cheddar; charred, dill-pickled onions; hot-sauce-spiked secret sauce and a milk bread bun.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
“It was never our intention to become a burger restaurant,” Evan said of RT Bistro. The restaurant sells 30 to 40 a night, and some patrons just come for that. I overheard one patron ask his table: “is that the best burger you’ve ever had?”
The majesty of the burger didn’t extend to all the entrees and pastas. I’m into the dry-aged funk of the toothsome New York strip ($49) steak and the croissant-like flakiness of the pomme-leek mille-feuille (think potato brick, but in a good way), but not the distractingly sweet prune Armagnac sauce. The pastas are largely unremarkable: the cheesiness of the rigatoni ($29) swirled with crab bisque muddles the bite of pickled ginger, while the truffle cheese and squash filling of the two-ply lasagna ($29) clashes with the sweet tang of the garnishing squiggle of truffle vinaigrette.
Sarah’s desserts continue to stun, as they have at Rich Table and RT Rotisserie. The most exceptional is the cheesecake ($15). It boasts the savoriness of a cheese plate, the silken center of a Basque cheesecake and the burnt sugar glass of a crème brûlée. It clarifies what the Riches do so well: intuitively bridging comfort and audacity to create wholly absorbing food. And RT Bistro has no shortage of those moments.
The Riches generally decline to define their cooking, but roughly half the opening menu at RT Bistro features Asian ingredients, such as shinko pear, which is shaved onto the endive Caesar salad.
Colin Peck/For the S.F. Chronicle
RT Bistro
205 Oak St., San Francisco. rt-bistro.com
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Hours: 5-10:30 p.m. daily.
Accessibility: All on one floor. Wheelchair accessible tables.
Noise level: Moderate to loud.
Meal for two, without drinks: $75-$100
What to order: burger ($30), crab thermidor ($29), black truffle egg ($28)
Meat-free options: cauliflower ($18), RT bistro salad ($23), cheesecake ($18), bread ($7),
Drinks: Full bar. Try the burger pour wine (half glass for $9) and the Douglas Fir cocktail ($18).
Pro moves: Order a burger, to share or not, and snack like there’s no tomorrow.