Rivoli

On April 3rd we suddenly found ourselves without the kids and Theric was able to get a reservation at Rivoli that same evening. Rivoli has been one of the Bay Area's top 100 hundred restaurants since 2004, so we both had very high expectations.

It's been a while since we were there but we will try to recall what we thought:

I had the "portabella mushroom fritters, aïoli, parmesan, arugula, caper vinaigrette" for my starter. It was so delicious and definitely my favorite thing from the entire meal. Should we ever return to Rivoli, I will be ordering this again, and maybe only this. The presentation was great too--I wish I had taken a picture. Theric had some sort of sea food bisque. He says that it was good, but wasn't very impressed.

Main dishes: I had rack of lamb. Very flavorful, tender and cooked to my liking (rare). My main complaint with this dish is that it is difficult to eat in a restaurant setting. You really need to be able to pick up the bones and chew on them a bit in order to get all the meat, which I did not do--it would have been inappropriate in the setting of this very nice restaurant. So, I felt like the portion on this dish was small because I had to leave a lot of meat on the bones. I was still hungry after finishing my lamb. On the side were perfectly roasted new potatoes--crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, seasoned with garlic and rosemary, delicious.
Theric got a slow braised pot roast with homemade buckwheat spaetzle and veggies. He liked it fine but wasn't overly impressed.  The roast was tender and flavorful, the veggies tasty. I thought the speatzle noodles were really delicious and kept stealing them off of his plate. 

We did not order dessert, but the offerings were very tempting. 

The atmosphere at Rivoli is very nice. The back wall of the dinning room is all glass and looks out onto a pretty garden filled with shade loving plants. The service was very attentive (my water was kept full, questions about dishes were answered in a friendly manner and they even brought us extra bread while we waited) and the presentation of each plate was lovely. Rivoli is fancier and far more expensive than most places we go out to--it would be a good place to go on a special occasion. 

Rivoli was very good, but, except for the portobello fritters, we were not overly impressed. We had high expectations and I would say that they were not met. Everything was very good, so I suppose the main problem was that Rivoli did not live up to their reputation. 

Theric's brief review: Everything we had at Rivoli was good but nothing we had at Rivoli convinced me it was worthy of being one of the Bay Area's top 100 restaurants. It was all quite good, but not impressive or overly interesting. I didn't feel like I got my money's worth.