There have been a ton of restaurants on my list to try, and sadly it’s not always easy to get to them. Even more sadly now that we’re under lockdown, even though San Francisco is finally opening up for 50% indoor dining. That being said, I’ve been very interested in the fine-dining-at-home model that a lot of places seem to be doing. I had great success with both Avery and the Han So Won preview from Benu, as both sent meals with a little bit of prep at home and packed full of flavor, so I found Mourad to try out for our anniversary.
I must preface this with a disclaimer in that they changed the menu after I ordered it a week early. It would have been nice to know, as I probably wouldn’t have ordered it if I would have seen what the actual menu was because one of the dishes was just something I knew my husband wouldn’t like, so that was incredibly unfortunate. But I’ll try to be fair about everything.
Another fun thing though, is that they do also provide pantry items, so if you’re looking for some interesting speciality items, they provide quite a bit. I ended up ordering some lamb bacon (which I had never had and ended up making lamb bacon sliders out of at a later date), harissa chocolate chips cookies, pickles, chicken fat butter and a few other goodies to try out as well.
So the menu consists of your choice of protein and a bunch of sides. I really wanted to try the smoked duck, but it was sold out when I tried to pre-order. This was another issue as it was available later in the week after they changed the menu, but alas, it’s something that couldn’t be taken care of. Instead, I went for a beef short rib with cabbage. The sides were an heirloom tomato salad, couscous, kale and beans. There are also several sauces provided to have with the protein. Finally, there is a dessert provided, which turned out ot be a mecalef spiced bread pudding.
It was honestly the heirloom tomato salad which was the troublesome dish. While I’m okay with tomatoes and the addition of grilled peaches, pickled pluots and shishito peppers is definitely something that sounds great, the overabundance of tomatoes is just something that my husband is not a fan of. And to be honest, the tomatoes weren’t that flavorful. I’ve found it incredibly difficult to get decent tomatoes outside of Italy, and unless you able to import from there, it’s usually a safer bet to avoid a raw tomato based meal on a menu. I know it’s harsh, but I can really only count a handful of times I’ve actually been excited after eating a tomato salad in a restaurant.
The tomato salad was easy as it just involved plating, and unfortunately everything else was way more complicated. The rib took a good 35-45 minutes to just reheat and prepare which seemed kind of excessive compared to both the other meals at home. There was also a lot of reheating of the sides, so I felt like I used almost every pan in the house to reheat this meal to have at home.
Tastewise, the beef was pretty amazing though. It definitely melted in the mouth and the sauce was excellent. Couscous isn’t really ever that exciting, but it provided a decent foil for eating with the beef and sauce. I rather enjoyed the beans, but the sauce was quite tomato based as well. The kale was delicious.
Dessert-wise, it was an easy prep as it just involved reheating in the oven and topping with the caramel sauce and the preserved lemon bread pudding. I enjoyed the flavor overall, so I was pretty happy with the dessert, even if a bread pudding is quite heavy for the end of summer. We had the cookies the next day and they were pretty magical though, so I highly recommend them!
I have to say as a meal went, there was a lot of food, so it didn’t feel like I spent a lot of money and didn’t get much in return. The food was rather hit or miss with some really great things like the bread pudding and the beef, and some okay sides with a pretty disappointing salad. I might be more willing to go to the restaurant when things reopen to try again as it was there were some enjoyable flavors, but as a set menu goes, it didn’t really hit the spot like some of the previous places I had ordered from. I guess if you’re really into the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavor profiles, you’d probably be really happy with ordering Mourad at home.
Score: 3.5/5
Recommendation: Don’t order too early as the menu may change and make sure the whole menu sounds great before ordering! (Also the chocolate chip cookies if they are available)
Mourad
140 New Montgomery St #1
San Francisco, CA 94105
What crappy policies! I can’t believe they’d let you pay for one menu but give you something else, and not even let you change the main course to something that is available, when they originally told you it wasn’t…
Happy Anniversary, though! 😉
Were you disappointed with Dirty Girl’s dry farmed tomatoes? I thought they were excellent– Comparable to our homegrown. I know you were getting their farm boxes, at least at the beginning of the lockdowns. I haven’t ordered from them in a while but I’ve got a box coming tomorrow and I can let you know if the tomatoes are as good as they were during the summer.
I mean I didn’t even really know it had changed until I got home and there were different things in the bag. So I went online and saw the menu had changed, so that was unfortunate. I think it is just a matter of them not updating the menu online through the website you order from until the week before, which is again unfortunate. They should just not let you order until the new menu is out basically.
And thanks! I mean I’ve been way behind on writing, just live in lockdown really makes it hard to find motivation.
I got the tomatoes in one package! I really did enjoy them, but I had them mostly on sandwiches and stuff. I think as a tomato salad, they wouldn’t be that exciting, but they definitely were better than stuff I would get at the market. I guess I’m just picky when it comes to tomatoes, but not as picky as someone else we know! I haven’t actually ordered from them in ages either, honestly, I was getting kind of tired of getting a ridiculous amount of beans and no lettuce. I know that some stuff is seasonal, but someone doesn’t really care for green beans either, so it was getting difficult finding creative ways to use them. Salads on the other hand are always adaptable!
I did really enjoy the jarred tomatoes, it made excellent salsa.
Sorry to take a detour from the original post… But 100% on the ridiculous volume of beans from Dirty Girl! And I didn’t care for the cilantro flowers taking up so much space with the stems. That’s why we stopped too, but this week the box went back to almost all lettuce and root veggies.
Funny thing… We especially didn’t care for the tough purple beans, so they all went into our compost… Fast forward to now and because the compost wasn’t hot enough, ALL of the purple beans sprouted so now we have like 50 purple bean plant volunteers in the garden!
Oh nice! Yeah I never knew what to do with their beans! But I definitely enjoyed a lot of the other stuff! Maybe I’ll check out this week and order one if that’s the case.
Yeah what the hell do you do with cilantro flowers anyway? I never really knew. Once I chopped them up for a recipe I had for herbed turnips and used it as the herb. It didn’t really do much though.
Yeah the purple beans were weird. I guess some were supposed to be shelled and only the inside eaten? I roasted the purple ones and someone basically spent the entire meal popping the beans out of the shell. I ate the shell, but I wasn’t happy at all. I guess if you plant your purple beans then you’re going to have to find a way to eat them in the future!
And also I have a lot of posts to do, so I’m trying to be better and working on them instead of wallowing in a hole of covid sadness.
It sounds like they really handled the change and the later menu availability of your preferred choice badly. That’s unfortunate. That said, when I’ve dined at Mourad in-person in the past it has generally been exceptional. So I hope you do try it again when you’re comfortable dining in-person. Also a good cocktail program!
They seem to have adapted well! I mean it’s a great concept, I just was slightly annoyed at the menu change. Perhaps they’ve fixed things. But I would definitely go there at some point in the future to try it in the restaurant which would require much less effort on my part!
One nice thing about living in Santa Cruz is that I can get good dry-farmed tomatoes at any of the grocery stores I shop at (though Dirty Girl’s do seem to be better than other farms this year). Were the “tough purple beans” their “tongue of fire” shelling beans? or a purple green bean?
I think it was the shelling beans! My fault for not knowing what to do with some of the stuff I get.
I mean the tomatoes are nice, but they don’t give me that amazing burst of flavor that I’ve had from those Italian tomatoes!