Critics’ choice: Fine dining with few frills

Juni New York City

Shaun Hergatt is the king of the “willfully untrendy fine-dining experience,” said Adam Platt in New York magazine. His “feng shui–challenged” previous restaurant, SHO Shaun Hergatt, earned two Michelin stars despite being decorated like an airport hotel and located in a nondescript Financial District office tower. His new establishment, tucked into the ground floor of a Koreatown hotel, is about as welcoming as the inside of a bank vault. Hergatt also still practices the fading art of 1990s-style haute-fusion cuisine, but he excels at it. Both his agnolotti and his slow-baked black bass taste as if they’ve been “beamed in from one of the great gourmet capitals of Europe.” And his chicken “isn’t chicken in the usual ho-hum way: It’s gourmet poussin, deboned, gently poached, and garnished with an emulsion folded with crème fraîche.” Here on 31st Street, diners are finding him: Juni’s crowd is “an eclectic mix of older gentlemen enjoying discreet dinners with much younger women, groups of addled tourists, and curious food professionals in their sauce-stained coats.” 12 E. 31st St., (212) 995-8599

Holdfast Dining Portland, Ore.

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Can fine dining be a one-man show? asked Karen Brooks in Portland Monthly. At Holdfast Dining, a 10-seat pop-up that takes over a rentable commissary kitchen every weekend, 29-year-old chef Will Preisch is producing “some of the best food to be found in Portland” while handling every task associated with staging a multicourse dinner, including washing the dishes. Preisch, whose family operates a famed diner in Cleveland, apparently outgrew his mad-scientist phase this spring when he left his former perch and took off on a working tour through some of Europe’s best kitchens. With each dish he sets before his guests today, “flavor, not technical ambition, is the ingredient that matters.” Preisch’s wondrous tasting menus “careen from edgy to modern,” and “can swing from an otherworldly wasabi pea soup” to a slow-cooked rib eye to the “sublime” combination of a crisped pig’s ear holding a whiskeyed cherry. “Food is the focus here—high quality, highly personal, and casually ceremonial.” It feels like the “next definition of fine dining” that Portland’s been waiting for. holdfastdining.com

The Palace San Francisco

Eating at the Palace is “an odd, quirky experience,” said Michael Bauer in the San Francisco Chronicle. Located on a busy Mission Street corner, it “still has the feel” of the family steak house that operated in the same space through 2012. The napkins are paper, the flatware is flimsy, and the only waiter is the chef’s wife. But Manny Torres Gimenez is evolving into a chef to be reckoned with, and his new $50 five-course savory menu might be our city’s deal of the year. The first course typically features oysters, perhaps a Kumamoto topped with ginger foam. Lobster or fish prepared three ways might come next, followed by quail confit and maybe a goat sampler highlighted by braised shank on beet puree. An excellent steak always ends the meal, honoring the Palace’s past. If you pay a $20 premium, it’ll be a cut of American Wagyu so succulent it “tastes as if someone injected liquid fat into the flesh.” 3047 Mission St., (415) 666-5218