Haven Preview Dinners

I hate when Unilocal moderators combine reviews without any regard to content. If this was just a Plum dinner I would have put it there. This is a pop up and should remain so. Please stop munging the reviews when there’s no need to. In fact there are munged reviews that need to be fixed but no one is doing anything about that. Check Momofuku Ko in NY for instance. It’s quite clear that a lot of the Momofuku Noodle reviews are in there and a lot of them are dated before Ko ever opened. How about fixing that? Sorry for the rant… and back to the restoring the original review for this event.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
Chefs Kim Alter and Matt Tinder have started doing preview dinners at Plum in Oakland as a preview to Haven, the new restaurant by Daniel Patterson in Jack London Square. The first meal was aptly named the Pig Dinners which happened on 9÷26−27 with a 5 course set menu. Starting the week of 10/​17/​2011 they’ll be doing weekly services to continue through ¹¹⁄₁₅.
The late September menu had:

–Pâté Campagna: bloody mary, chicharrones
–Tomato + Bread Salad: pancetta vinaigrette, flatbread, crema, arugula and tomato
–Bacon + Egg: «salad lyonaise» braised bacon, fried egg, chicories
–Roast Pig: fork mashed potato, braised kale with apples, crispy piggy bits
–Pecan Pie: smoked lardo crust, bourbon vanilla ice cream
I liked the swine elements throughout the whole meal. It actually had a strong resemblance to the Sean Brock dinner which had a few months earlier. Chef Alter also was behind the scenes on the Smith dinners that Jeremy Fox was running at Saison while Josh Skenes was away. She’s definitely getting her chops ready again after leaving Plate Shop in Sausalito. As they shape their dishes until the final opening, Im looking forward to trying more of their contemporary food.