I had some time to kill on a random Friday and found myself wandering around the Financial District downtown. Specifically Kearny Street which is lined with small run in and or sit down restaurants that cater to the many day workers in the neighborhood. It's just past 11:30 am so things are not quite crowded yet so I stop in at Darn Good Food.
I'd heard some press about it some time ago and had wanted to try it out. Walking in I can tell you it's got that traditional industrial look--wood, metal, concrete--a phrase I feel I keep repeating these days with most of these new places.
With a name like Darn Good Food you are really setting yourself to try and live up to such a title. Especially when there website says they are "focused on quality made from scratch meals to meet the nutritional needs of fast-paced urban professionals and their families." Well that was a mouthful. After perusing the menu of course I'm going to try the pulled pork sandwich.
More specifically it's a 10 spice pulled pork with chipotle pepper sauce, braised greens, Swiss chard and kale on a ciabatta roll. Yes, it's another one of those $9 sandwich places but here that also includes a small green salad and some roasted potatoes so it gets a pass. What doesn't get a pass is that it wasn't exactly pulled pork, more like thinly sliced pork with Middle Eastern spice flavor as opposed to traditional pulled pork. Which I would be fine with if the pork is cooked well but this was not. It was a bit overcooked and little dry. And unlike the picture of it you see on the front of their website, it was not piled on the bun, there were more braised greens than anything. And if there was chipotle pepper sauce on here it was a whiff of it because I didn't taste anything but the 10 spice and a lot of that was buried by the slightly bitter kale and greens. The bun was nice and warm and soft though it would have benefited from being toasted with a little butter. When will sandwich places learn this little trick to add some flavor to their dull sandwiches? The "salad" was a standard mixed greens with a light vinaigrette and the few potatoes were room temp, but at least they were cooked.
So let's call this Darn M'eh Food. I feel like they've been open long enough to work out any consistency issues and when you feature a dish on your website it ought to be good and always the same for everyone, sadly in this instance that was not the case. Oh well, there are plenty of other places to try on this strip of Kearny.
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