At the end of a small alley near AT&T Park is Twenty Five Lusk.  A modern,chic, lounge/restaurant.  Twenty Five Lusk offers a good time, great drinks, and delicious food.  I was with a big party so I was able to taste lots of dishes.

As a table, we ordered a few appetizer plates to share.  One appetizer was a parsley root and celery root ravioli that was laying in a pond of aged sherry broth and topped with wild arugula, shaved parmesan and shaved truffle from Perigord, a region in France.  This dish was great.  The ravioli was al dente and the sauce was fantastic.  I could have eaten the broth as a soup.

Another appetizer was the grilled octopus with lobster, pickled sweet potato, shishito soubise, and a ginger emulsion.  This was decent.  The octopus didn’t seem grilled but it wasn’t chewy, which I liked.  The pickled sweet potatoes were very nice and were paired well with the cold lobster and octopus.

We were also each given a bite size portion of a mushroom cheesecake.  This was very nice.  The texture was that of a normal cheesecake but it had a slight taste of mushrooms.

The main courses were the main attraction to this meal.  I ordered the lamb chops.  Martin Emigh’s Lamb to be exact.  They were served over hedgehog mushrooms, fingerling potatoes, and bacon and sitting next to a pear and fennel coulis.  This was FANTASTIC.  The lamb was cooked medium rare and could not have been cooked more perfectly – the tender, cut like butter kind of perfect.   The jus from the lamb, however, was pretty rich.  Delicious, but after eating the whole meal I was slightly overwhelmed.  The bacon could have been a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the lamb jus but it was soaking in it and therefore was not a salty pair.  Delicious nonetheless.

For dessert, we ordered completely different dishes.  One was more different than anything I had ever seen.

First was a great salted caramel swirl brownie with mint chocolate chip ice cream and an anise meringue.  The brownie was fantastic.  The top was crusty but the inside was soft and gooey.  The salt sprinkled on top gave it that nice paring of salty and sweet that I love.  Mint chip ice cream is my favorite flavor of all time. Unfortunately, this mint chip did not live up to my standards for mint chip ice cream.  Not minty enough, not chocolatey-chippy enough, and not creamy enough.

No matter, though.  Our second dessert would take care of all expectations I had for any dessert.  It was called Textures and Chaos and that’s exactly what it was, but in the best way possible.

This is how it reads on the menu: sugar glass, exploding cocoa, passionfruit, and raspberry sorbet.  The sugar glass was hard and crunchy, the exploding cocoa was basically chocolate pop rocks that crackled and popped in your mouth for 15 seconds, the sorbet and passionfruit were smooth and to add to all that was a cloudy soft white cake torn into small pieces.  Different textures were in every single bite and it looked like chaos on a plate.  The finished product, however, was a masterpiece.

I definitely recommend Twenty Five Lusk.  It is definitely pricey (one entree is listed at $136) so enjoy it for a special occasion.