Kookez Café
4123 24th Street
Between Castro & Diamond
San Francisco, CA 94114
Tel: 415.641.7773
Fax: 415.641.7774
Call for Reservations
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November 2007 - Best Brunch
Voted "Best Brunch in the City" San Francisco (4.5 stars). |
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Each year Citysearchers are surveyed about restaurant experiences in numerous categories. Kookez was voted "Best of" Brunch category with 4.5 of 5.0 stars possible. |
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CBS Review "Eye on the Bay" Broadcast Nov. 2006
Liam Mayclem - CBS Correspodent |
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Visit CBS Web Site |
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"Kookez is one of my favorite places... It's like home away from home with a special kids night and delicious meals from across the country. They feature terrific seafood and other recipes. Be sure to enjoy one of the delicious desserts or one of Lynn's famous cupcakes." |
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“Pick of the Week ” December 2006 |
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RESTAURANT Spotlight: Kookez Café |
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Route 66 takes you from Chicago, through St. Louis and Albuquerque. Kookez Café will do the driving for you... and will exit onto every connecting freeway along the way. Inspired by the chow-dah from B-aw-son, el caliente de Miami, and the slow-cooking of the Big Easy too, this café takes the diner from coast-to-coast with their spins on American cuisine.
Wake up in Sonoma with the Sonoma Skillet Cake bake with a crunchy top, juicy layered fruit inside with a brown-sugar sour cream sauce ($6.95). |
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Or for a chilly snack, try the Denver Double Cocolate Kahlua Cake with strawberry gelato ($7.95). For dinner, go south ya'all with the Bayou ButterBQ Dippin' Shrimp in spicy buttery barbecue sauce ($21.75). Reservations are not taken for brunch, so come early. During chilly mornings, try the Portland Scramble, eggs, brocolli, Jack cheese, potatoes and toast for $9.95. But during the warmer months, spice it up with the Albuquerque Scramble, which comes with beef, spinach, mushrooms, cheddar, chili Verde, sour cream and toast for $9.95. This place also offers the Kookez Kids Brunch, of which items like the Tahoe Baby Cakes, silver dollare cakes, butter and syrup, are recommended ($4.95).
Kookez Café is located on 4123 24th Street, between Castro and Diamond Streets. Make dinner reservations by calling 415-641-7773 or visit their website at www.kookez.com. They are open for dinner Tuesday-Saturday nights from 5:30-9:30PM. Brunch is served on weekends from 9:00AM - 2:00PM wiht lunch Tuesday-Friday 11:30AM-2:30PM. |
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“Unique flavors and great service” Summer 2006 |
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RESTAURANT Spotlight: Kookez Café |
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Kookez Café at 4123 24 th Street, between Castro and Diamond Streets, occupies a popular Noe Valley spot that has been both a butcher shop and a popular Sunday brunch spot. When you first enter, you notice the heavily beamed iron meat rack high overhead surrounded by a rich wood interior and flooring. The cozy booth seating areas and patio dining is part of the new landscape that makes up Kookez Café with a “dining at a friend’s home” feeling.
Featuring coast-to-coast American cuisine, the menu and food presentation remind you of flavors from vari9ous US regions. Owner Lynn Marie Presley comes from four generation s of chefs and inspired home cooks (a.k.a. Kookez) and i9s know affectionately as the Cooke Queen from her days as a private school principal, chef Deano Lovecchio is Lynn’s son and he adds that special sizzle to all the dishes, house made chutneys and special recipes. Traveling across the country and different continents, Bob Mack Peak continues to introduce exciting cuisine concepts, including a few secrets he manages to sneak out of the family recipe vault.
Imagine a café where young and old salivate over exciting desserts, neighborhood friends returned weekly with great anticipation to have a go at their second, third or fourth choice entrees from last week, compliments flowed daily about unique flavors ad great service, and couples and families share bites from each other’s plates, and you’d be at Kookez Café.
Anyone who’s traveled remembers those away meals with friends and family rich with regional flavors that linger on your taste buds. That’s the idea behind Kookez – to fill the yearning for outs tanding BBQ ribs from an old southern recipe, Orleans Shrimp, pork tenderloin and apricot chutney discovered in Kansas City, Seattle salmon with caper sauce and, oh, yah, the white chocolate banana cream pie from Buckhead, Georgia. Kookez not only delivers these flavors but br4ings them to a new level with their own special sauces, spices and preparation.
Prices range from $10.95 for Everybody’s Favorite chicken Pot Pie and House Salad to $18.50 for the tupelo Pecan Crusted Tilapia and $25.00 for the Topeka Ribeye Steak with balsamic port wine reduction. Sunday brunch is a special treat with more coast-to-coast recipes including pinwheel sausage biscuits and gravy to crab benedict and to-die-for coffee cake. Kookez is open for Dinner Tue-Sat 5:30-9:30PM, Lunch 11:30AM-2:30PM, and Sat-Sun Brunch 9:00AM–2:00PM at 4123 24 th Street, Noe Valley, San Francisco, CA 94114. |
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“The family stuff is the best” Summer 2006 |
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Crazy on You By Paul Reidinger Paulr@sfbg.com |
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Kookez looks like a name from The Epic of Gilgamesh, or perhaps the name of some lost city in ancient Persia – near Sharaz? – but really it’s a kind of phonetic or spoof spelling. Hint: Resist the urge, almost irresistible in this city, to see the word kook; remember that we deal in food and restaurants here and visualize… cookies! (No, not whirled peas.) For Kookez Café is, indeed, in part about cookies; they are the pride of founder, owner, and baker Lynn Marie Presley, and a selection of them, along with other tempting baked goods is on display in a glass case just inside the entryway.
But Kookez is about more than cookies. It is the successor to the long-running and successful Miss Millie’s (recently decamped to the East Bay) and accordingly has inherited the pole position in Noe Valley’s busy weekend brunch derby. It is also a cozy evening spot, serving “coast to coast: American comfort-food dishes – many with a decidedly Southern accent – in as appealingly old-fashioned a setting as you’re likely to find around town. The look is that of some venerable, family run café on a narrow lane in Paris or London; lots of warm wood, yellowish wall lamps, snug booths, and a small garden in the rear whose charms are, thus far in this indescribably dreary spring, hypothetical. Those with long memories will recall that the space, before becoming Miss Millie’s, belonged to a coffeehouse named Meat Market, which took its name from the butcher shop that once occupied the premises.
An overhead rail for hanging split carcasses is still mounted from the ceiling just in front of the small exhibition kitchen, where the chef, Air, goes about his business. When Miss Millie’s opened, in the mid-1990s, the original menu was vegetarian, and the rail was left in place as an ironic reminder, a kind of memento more for meat eaters, or maybe non-meat eaters. But Miss Millie’s later expanded beyond meat-less offering as the neighborhood changed, and as Kookez picks up the baton, the neighborhood continues to change.
Noe Valley is known as the city’s “baby belt,” and really you can’t go a block without encountering a baby stroller, a nanny, a pack of tots, or a young father carrying an infant in some kind of chest sling. The Kookez brain trust is on the case; in addition to the cookies, the restaurant offers a kids’ menu (cupcakes included), the waitstaff seems unfazed by strollers zooming to and fro inside, and the cards of fare are laminated. I unders tand the precautionary nature of taking this last step since children do have a way of spilling, scattering, smearing, and otherwise making messes with their food. At the same time, the menu card entombed in plastic does summon for some of us the ghosts of forgettable meals in chain restaurants near freeways at the outskirts of cookie-cutter cities in the heart of the heart of the country.
For the most part, Kookez pulls off its Comfort Food Nation conceit pretty nicely. The familiar stuff is the best: a bowl of New England clam chowder weighted with potatoes and bacon and heady with black pepper ($4.95); a chicken pot pie ($10.95) with a lovely golden pastry crust and pea-rich stuffing; an excellent hamburger ($8.50), subtly swabbed with chipotle aioli and served with a stack of garlicky home fries in need of but a sprinkle of salt to come to attention; an herb-roasted half chicken ($12.50), tender and moist and plated with garlic mashed potatoes (under-and perhaps unsalted) and sautéed zucchini.
The chilled tomato tower ($7.75) –basically a napoleon, layers of red and gold tomato slices buffered by disks of mozzarella and seasoned with basil and balsamic vinegar- would be a lovely dish in summer, when the tomatoes are soft, juicy, and deeply flavored. At the end of winter, one tastes mainly the chill. The mango quesadilla ($7.50) is a worthy attempt to dress up a possibly over familiar friend; the decorations include a nippy blend of jack and brie cheeses, the aforementioned mango, and slices of strawberry on top. The strawberry slices looked a little forlorn on the golden half disk, as if the door to a party had been shut in their faces and they were left to pace around outside. At the same time, their presence did suggest not just seasonality but the possibility of some clever innovation; How about pureeing them with some garlic, cilantro, cayenne, and lime juice into a kind of spring salsa?
One of the best of the Southern-inflected dishes is the bayou butter-BQ dippin’ shrimp ($21.50), eight or nine big sautéed prawns accompanied by three lengths of grilled fresh okra – a surprisingly appealing bit of exotica – and not one but two dippin sauces; a peppery bourbon-butter number and a fruity-sharp jam of ginger and chilies that’s reminiscent of something you might be served with pot stickers. I would say this dish is well worth its sticker price, while noting that the sticker price is slightly lofty for a neighborhood joint. And it isn’t alone in being on the high side of $20; two other dishes also wander above the tree line, while several more are in the upper teens. But… this is the new Noe Valley, the Beverly Hills of Googleocracy.
This can be a depressing line of contemplation and a ready antidote is the infantile pleasure of dessert; a slice of rich amaretto cheesecake ($7.95), way, with blood orange sorbet. Or just a cookie – maybe chocolate chip ($1.50) – if you’re not nuts about such a rich finish. |
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What People are Saying
Here's some of the quotes we hear from our customers:
"We're visiting our daughter and have eaten our 9 times so far... and this absolutely the best place we've dined in San Francisco "
"Best apricot chutney I've ever had... you should bottle and sell it"
"The BBQ ribs have really got a kick... they're great."
"I normally don't like cheesecake, but the Amaretto Almond with the blood orange sorbet was incredible"
"The tuna tartar with those wasabi wafers... wow!"
"The family couldn't make up their minds tonight, so we let our daughter choose and she said Kookez has something for everyone... and here we are."
"Best huevos rancheros in the city, man."
"Best chicken pot pie I've had anywhere... yummy sauce you use."
The BBQ dippin' shrimp is as good as Mr. B's Bistro in New Orleans... actually, with the okra and the thick sauce, it could be better than Mr. B's." |
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