Uproariously rich bone marrow is back at Bay Area restaurants.
Equal Parts, a bar in North Beach with a “take me back to Tulum” vibe, serves beef bones split and roasted with a glinting stripe of marrow down the middle, accompanied by a toast and a vinegary herb salad. Ferry Building flagship Arquet pairs bone marrow with nori-infused buns and jam; perpetually crowded English pub Dingles in Hayes Valley swaps out toast for a flaky Guinness pie. As an add-on, for $10, Amado in Burlingame will throw it on an Australian Wagyu skirt steak taco, while Hungry Cow, the all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue joint in Fremont, allots a bone per person with its premium option.
Deep in my own marrow, I’m burned out on it.
While I enjoy many marrow preparations — at Copra, for instance, where it’s served with chukka masala and gravy — I lately find that it feels tacked on to a growing number of dishes, like a shot of bougie beef fat. The most egregious use I’ve encountered was at Sushi By Scratch, a speakeasy counter in Healdsburg, where cooks blasted a sliced bone with a torch until the marrow liquified and flowed over a unagi nigiri. It was greasier than an entire fried spider roll.
Bone marrow became a culinary fascination in the 1990s. Most modern permutations of the dish — bone + bread — riff on the form established by St. John in London, an icon of British nose-to-tail cooking, where the dish has been a signature for more than 30 years. Partly informed by the gastropub movement, bone marrow found its way onto countless American menus in the ’00s and early 2010s. From there, it migrated onto burgers, pasta, and even salsa. The particular brand of decadence of that era was arguably epitomized by the “bone luge,” invented in Portland, Oregon in 2010, where alcohol is poured along the empty marrow tract, straight into the participants’ gullet.
The popularity of the bone marrow seemed to diminish by the start of the 2020s, but it has re-emerged at the Bay Area’s buzziest restaurants, even as beef prices approach record levels. Perhaps it’s a symptom of the unceasing search for novel ways to signify luxury on the plate beyond the usual suspects of caviar, uni, and foie gras. Or maybe it’s just the tallow-slicked tenure of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It turns out that the upper crust of the Trump administration loves bone marrow, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and especially from Washington, D.C., restaurant Butterworth’s.
As during the previous trend cycle of bone marrow in restaurants, the “luges” have also made their appearance — I’m skipping those, too.