The Other Critics

Kauffman Calls AQ ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘Impressive’

A house-cured sturgeon dish from the autumn menu.
A house-cured sturgeon dish from the autumn menu. Photo: Brian Smeets/Grub Street

Jonathan Kauffman is not short on praise for late-fall opener AQ (1085 Mission Street) calling chef Mark Liberman’s food “impressive” and saying that he succeeds in “articulating that new cuisine coalescing in San Francisco that is both modernist and seasonal.” He also calls the space a “gorgeous frame” for the food, and calls out a few specific dishes among many he loves, including a squid, avocado, and black sesame dish that we also liked, and mentioning a new “astonishing” winter dish of duck aged on the bone. He’s so enamored, in fact, that he’s frustrated by the limits of his column space and adds on the blog today, “Where some restaurants serve dishes that fit into neat sentences, each of Liberman’s plates is a paragraph, packed with prepositional clauses and rife with adjectives.” [SF Weekly, Earlier slideshow]

Kauffman Calls AQ ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘Impressive’