Recently, Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg tweeted something so succinct and deathly sharp, it was like a sashimi knife straight to the heart. She wrote out a list of what “every restaurant right now” seems to have as its menu template, including roasted carrots, beet salad, crudo and “cacio e pepe (many forms).” “Every restaurant” means your average hip 21st century North American culinary chill zone, of which we definitely have a plethora in the Bay Area.
It seems you can’t throw a golden beet in San Francisco without hitting a pasta spot that promises to be different from all the other pasta spots, and Itria is definitely one of them. Off the top of my head, I can name a handful of its peer institutions, new and not-so-new, where you can tuck into pasta and raw fish: Penny Roma, One Fish Raw Bar, Picco, Daytrip, for instance.
