Confession time: I drove bySalsipuedes the night before my reservation and was a little surprised to see a small neighborhood restaurant with just one communal table and a bar that puts you basically in the kitchen with the chefs. With all the pre-opening fanfare, I had expected a fancier joint, but this was a restaurant that belonged on the beaches of Ensenada, nestled smack dab in the middle of residential Oakland.
In fact, the name, which translates to "get out if you can," comes from a bay in Baja California and is a play on both the winds that trapped ships sailing north along the coast, and the area's habit of making residents out of vacationers.
A collaboration between East Bay power players Jay Porter (The Half Orange), Bradford Taylor (Ordinaire), and Luis Abundis, owner of artisanal ice cream shops Nieves Cinco de Mayo, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised. After all, with the recent addition of a beer garden to Fruitvale's The Half Orange, Porter is skilled at drawing crowds in underserved neighborhoods.
Indeed, Salsipuedes, the Longfellow neighborhood's first restaurant, was loosely packed when I finally stopped by on a Saturday night.
We opted for seats at the bar, where we got an up-close-and-personal look at Chef Marcus Krauss, formerly at the Restaurant at Meadowood, while he worked his magic. The menu, which is arranged into small and slightly-larger plates, features a little bit of California-rustic fare with prominent Japanese vibes and Baja California ingredients without traditional Mexican spiciness. Translation: there's a lot of seafood.
Roasted corn with nixtamal nieves, sea grass, and sea trout roe.
First out of the kitchen was a roasted corn side dish served with maize ice cream. While ice cream doesn't usually appear on menus before dessert, corn can do no wrong in my mind, and I enjoyed this refreshing dish on a hot summer night. The pork steak with charred cipollini onions and sourgrass chimichurri was next and served as a tasty and hearty alternative to some of the lighter seafood-oriented dishes. And while the messy, drowned fried chicken torta with wakame kimchi is something I could easily devour after a long day at the beach, I had trouble finishing it on a casual night out.
The real winner here? The melted octopus bao (pictured above). I would eat this every day for lunch if I worked from home (or if Caviar is reading this right now and puts it on their menu options— I would be forever grateful). The bao is fluffy and perfect and the salty octopus blends so well with shrimp, salsa verde, and crunchy chiccarrones that you'll want to order another round almost immediately. It is the perfect combination of everything this restaurant is trying to achieve, and it is not to be missed. Seriously.
Drowned fried chicken torta with wakame kimchi.
Also of note: the wine menu at Salsipuedes is amazing. A list that circles the globe from Chile to Australia, each of the glasses (and yes, I had more than one) went perfectly with the light beach fare being churned out by the kitchen. Curated by Bradford Taylor of Ordinaire Wine Bar, it'd be a shame to not walk away from this restaurant a little bit wine tipsy.
// Check out Salsipuedes at 4201 Market St., Oakland, salsipuedes.us.
