Food & Drink

Drama queen

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I did think about drinking myself to death, I admit, but it wasn’t a serious thought. I just thought, I can drink and drink and drink … but everyone knows I can’t. I fall asleep after one. Sometimes I don’t even finish it.

Still, you like to pretend, and there’s a certain mystique to drinking oneself to death, like Billie Holliday. Or working oneself to death, like John Henry. Or crying oneself to death, like lots of people.

Mystique is good.

I know what you’re thinking, but it won’t work. My stomach is cast iron, and very well-seasoned at that; my metabolism, miraculous. I have, in fact, a pretty incredible body to live in. If I have an Achilles heel — and the anatomy experts among us are going, "You do!" times two — but if I have an Achilles heel, it’s the roof of my mouth. Or, the insides of my cheeks and lips where I’m constantly cannibalizing myself, by accident, because I eat like a wolf.

I am prone to mouth ulcers. Hmm …

It’s decided! I am going to eat-only-acidic-things to death. Tomatoes. Vinegar. Hot peppers. Grapes. Orange juice. Lemons. Tomatoes. Reckless rebel that I am, I shall henceforth bite the pizza the moment it arrives at the table! I don’t care. Already the sides of my tongue hurt when I chew. The roof of my mouth feels gritty like an inside-out worm. Soon it will shred, then crumble, then fall away and I’ll die, on the floor, an empty jar of peperoncini next to my head.

And everyone will say, "Whoa, she peperoncini’d herself to death. How mysterious, exotic, and, and, mystique-y!"

There will be a rush on my books and albums, so I better get busy. Tell you something about life, real fast: It sucks. Everyone knows this, because it’s wired right in. Life sucks, and rocks. What you may not know is that the split is exactly 50-50. And I don’t need a very big chalkboard to show you the math. One plus one = two things: the miraculous kick-ass fact of your point-of-view, and the sadly inescapable fact of its total cessation.

Now, life happens off of the chalkboard. Thanks to the decimal point, one of our tiniest and most powerful inventions, there are an infinity of possible percentages between none and 100. If you would describe yourself as 51 percent happy, you are 1 percent kidding yourself, or deluded, or lying, or repressed; at 49 percent happy, you are 1 percent whiner. If you’re 100 percent happy, you’re a spiritually enlightened new ager or religious zealot. In which case you may not even eat bacon. End of conversation.

My goal is 50-50, because that’s where you laugh the hardest and cry the most, and therefore where bacon tastes best.

My sister asked if I thought it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. I said I sided with Alfred Lord, which is, to me, a no-brainer. Since loss is a given, you may as well love your socks and panties off getting there.

On a day when I never even made it out of my pajamas, I also talked for hours and hours with a friend in Bakersfield who is coaching me on dating married men. We knew each other only slightly and for about a year, many years ago. Apparently, we were sleeping with all the same guys at the same time, although I never knew this until she recently e-hunted me down and told me so.

I was, like, cool. A coach! Because, unlike me, she never digressed, and continues to this day to go for the enigma. Me, I digress. I have a problem, I know, and it isn’t depression so much as digression. Probably it isn’t even a problem. It’s just that —

Never mind.

Another person I talked to that day was my brother, who is in Ohio. I asked him if I was a drama queen and he hesitated.

My new favorite restaurant is Happy Garden because I didn’t get sick when I ate there. (I have high standards, huh?) Well, I have heard from neighbors of the place, in Oakland’s Laurel District, that pretty good meals could be had, but I went and got the salt and pepper oysters, and one smelled like shit. But, being me, I ate it anyway. No problem. Great place! *

HAPPY GARDEN

4112 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 482-3988

Mon.–Thu., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Beer and wine

MC/V

Daddy’s girl

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My dad was here, and, like a lot of daughters, I tried to impress him. Like a lot of fathers, he worries about me, his far out (and up and away) California girl. I just wanted to show him that, look, I’m fine. I’m doing well. No need to worry. All quiet on the western front.

I moved all my garbage from the front seat to the back of my crumbling, windshield-cracked, transmissionally-challenged vehicle, and went to get him at the airport, calling several times on my cell phone to let him know that, essentially, I had a cell phone. Finally.

I also have an iPod Touch, so before I left I tickled up directions to the airport, even though I knew how to get there, and I wedged this into my ashtray to resemble, as closely as possible, a GPS device.

On our way away from the airport, windows rolled down against the 100-plus degree heat, I made sure to mention quite casually that, although my 22-year-old, three-cylinder pickup truck gets better mileage than his Prius, I am saving money to buy a new car.

I took him to work with me, just for three hours, and while he wasn’t paying attention I quite quietly lost that job. Or found out that I will have, come November. To my credit, I didn’t start crying until much later, after midnight, in the woods, trying to fall asleep in the hammock.

On the way home we’d stolen a chicken from a backyard in East Oakland. My dad had held the flashlight, and I’m pretty sure he was impressed with the speed, dexterity, and fearlessness with which I snatched the beast from its sleep and stuffed it beak-first into a cardboard box.

I know he was impressed with my shack because he said as much. He said he’d pictured it much smaller. And he liked my stuff. He hadn’t taken me up on my offer to stop at a drug store on the way home, boxed chicken squawking between suitcases, and buy a shower curtain for my shower-turned-litter-box-slash-storage-space. He’d take his baths outside on the porch, just like me!

What a dad. Jetlagged and overfed, he fell asleep as soon as his gray hairs touched the pillow on my fold-out futon. I made love to Weirdo the Cat on the carpet for a while, and then grabbed my sleeping bag and went outside. It was too hot for sleeping bags. Luckily, and weirdly, it was too hot for mosquitoes, too.

I lay in the redwood-strung hammock, where I usually sleep very soundly, thank you, and I tossed and turned and sniffed and sobbed and howled, albeit very quietly, at the moon. The chicken, which I’d moved from the cardboard box to a cat carrier on an old rusty oil drum next to me, peeked out of its air holes and tossed and turned and pecked at the moon.

Between the two of us, we woke up squirrels, but not my dad.

Who, when he saw my woods and ways in the refreshing (to him) daylight, was even more impressed! He kinda liked bathing outside, and marveled at my outdoor desk, and complimented my apples, which I love but most people find too tart.

Most impressively, though, and he, being his daughter’s father, elaborated at some (if not chicken farmerly) length … the old man couldn’t stop crapping the whole time he was here.

"I seem to have that effect on people," I said. It’s true. I have friends who call me when they’re constipated. They claim the sound of my voice has a laxative effect. Which I take as a compliment.

My dad, who leans toward constipation himself, attributed it more to my healthy diet. His word: "healthy." What we ate: jambalaya with three kinds of meat and two kinds of seafood in it. Omelets. Barbecued eggs. Smoked chickens. Fried clams. Clam chowder. And a Zachary’s stuffed pizza with anchovies.

And if that’s all health food, you gotta wonder, kind of broken-heartedly, what people are eating in Ohio.

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My new favorite restaurant is Guerilla Café in Berkeley. They have a waffle-of-the-day, and on this day it was cardamom, buckwheat, and dates. Couple of fresh organic strawberries, three or four thin slices of pear, a bloop of crème, one pat of butter, thimble of syrup … bam! $7.25. And a $2 cup of Blue Bottle coffee with no free refill. Justice, Berkeley-style. Hip, righteous, artsy, and expensive, it’s immersion therapy for a chicken farmer come to town.

GUERILLA CAFÉ

1620 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 845-2233

Tue.–Fri., 7 a.m.–6 p.m.

Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–6 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

The Spanish table

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The waxing and waning of tapas fever reminds us, first, that it is in the nature of fevers to wax and wane. Today we love tapas — Spanish bar bites, basically — and tomorrow we will love American tapas, Cuban tapas, Peruvian and global tapas, tapas of every description, and soon enough we will be tired of all tapas. If this end-stage disillusionment hasn’t yet fully set in around here, the signs are building nonetheless.

An irony of the tapas craze is that tapas’ Spanish roots have been obscured by the boundless enthusiasm with which they’ve been elaborated. The word itself has slightly slipped off its foundations; in recent years we’ve spoken often of "small" or "shareable" plates as of tapas. Then there are the Mediterranean meze platters. Spain? What’s that? Did someone mention paella?

If Spain has a national dish, it would have to be paella, the rice-and-seafood stew (with chicken and, sometimes, sausage) that comes from the country’s southeastern Mediterranean coast and, ideally, is cooked over a wood fire in a special two-handled pan. (The word "paella" is thought to derive from the Latin, patella, meaning "shallow pan." In our time, patella is a medical term for the "shallow pan" of the kneecap.)
And the wood fire gives us a clue as to why Spanish cuisine, despite its many glories and nuances, has never been a runaway restaurant success in this country the way its near relation, Italian, has. Cooking any dish over a wood fire is tricky, and not many restaurants do it. A wood fire is a living entity, and managing it is an art not unlike that of snake charming. You can get bitten or burned, and the difference between a nice golden crust and a burned one at the bottom of your paella pan is the difference between a dish you can serve and eat or one you have to throw out.

It’s probably for this reason that most restaurant paellas seem rather cautiously prepared, on a better-safe-than-sorry principle. Restaurants don’t make money from burning expensive ingredients and putting them in the trash. In my experience, restaurant paellas never have a caramelized crust and always, for me, leave a slight pang of disappointment.

At Patio Español, perhaps the most authentic Spanish restaurant in a city that doesn’t have enough of them, the menu advised us that paella would be made to order and would take 25 minutes. These were encouraging signs. The paella then arrived in a proper paella pan — another encouraging sign — and was served tableside in the restaurant’s Old World, waistcoat style. But there was no crust of caramelized bomba rice at the bottom of our pan of paella valenciana ($21.50 per person, for two) — this version including slices of chorizo, the garlicky Spanish cured sausage, along with shrimp, clams, mussels, boneless chicken thighs, green peas, and red and green bell peppers — and our server rushed the pan away, as if clearing up an unfortunate spill.

I understood and forgave the hasty exit with the pan. We can’t blame restaurants for being careful about cooking a dish they really shouldn’t be cooking at all. Despite the lack of crust, Patio Español’s paella was tasty and convincing: plenty of seafood, nice color, the rice well-stained with saffron, the scale generous but not overwhelming.

It helped that just about everything else on the menu — along with several items not listed but brought to us anyway — was first-rate. The sourdough bread pulsed with gentle heat, and the tapas! Cold or warm, they were fine, beginning with a plate of chubby sardines in escabeche ($8.25). Escabeche is a preservation technique in which cooked fish (or other flesh) is marinated in a seasoned vinegar brine; the result is served cold and sometimes, as here, with an accompanying salad of slivered carrots, cucumber sticks, chunks of bell pepper, and microgreens. The word escabeche, incidentally, is thought to have a Perso-Arabic derivation, and that’s a reminder of the long Moorish presence in Iberia.

Pan a la catalana ($10) was marred, but only slightly, by the toughness of the tissue-thin slices of jamón serrano laid like bolts of carpet over a subfloor of toasted bread rounds. Better were the albondigas ($8.50), a clutch of buttery little meatballs in a garlicky tomato sauce. And then there was the roasted-garlic soup, which, despite its modest role as an opening act for the paella, was distinguished by a haunting richness similar to, but less sweet than, that of French onion soup. It was also lighter than its Gallic cousin, using a paprika-tinged vegetable stock instead of beef broth. As if to balance the twinkle-toed soup, the post-paella sweet, a chocolate torte ($8) plucked from the dessert cart, had an almost fudge-like denseness. To balance that: slices of kiwi and mango on the side.

The restaurant is part of the Union Español, a cultural center established in 1923 and resident at its present Excelsior District location since 1985. The building casts a strong spell; the main dining room has straw-colored walls, a cathedral ceiling supported by exposed beams, and a floor of earth-colored ceramic tiles. It’s handsome without straining to make a statement other than, This is a nice restaurant. Could there be a lesson here for us hyperactive and attention-seeking Americans?

The building was formally dedicated in 1987 by King Juan Carlos I, who bears the impressive surname de Borbón y Borbón. The Bourbons succeeded the Hapsburgs as rulers of Spain several centuries ago, though neither royal family can claim credit for kicking out the Moors. Note to the king and other prospective enjoyers of Patio Español’s roasted-garlic soup: chew a coffee bean.

PATIO ESPAÑOL

Dinner: Wed.–Sun., 5–9:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sun., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

2850 Alemany Blvd., SF

(415) 587-5117

www.patioespanol.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Sex and salad

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I was crying long before my cleaver touched the onion. The trick, when slicing onions for a salad, is to slice them so thin that they flop like fettuccini. I like lots, white and worming, in my salad. The onion, I’ve decided, is going to help me die.

A guy told me about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. On a date! I was going, mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm, and all the while I was thinking about onions. That will be the thing for me to focus on while I let go of my last breath. Probably in a cracked up car, or underwater, far from any real chance of salad. My eyes squeezed tight. The onion, hot and sad, on the tongue. There it is. Sexy, sweet, tearful, complex, layered … and out.

Whereas the best place to eat an apple is under the tree! Sitting down, hopefully, on a log, and alive. Very much alive, I was sitting on a log under my apple tree, eating apples. Just now, in the failing daylight, writing this in the dirt. Which never fails. The dirt. My apples, like me, are tart, juicy, and very green. They are wormy and temporary, also like me.

Today instead of being a writer I had online sex and phone sex, both for the first time. That I know of. I’m on OkCupid now. Imagine me — the chicken farmer — mixing it up with cool people and hipsters! They’re all polyamorous and spiritual and shit, and so far I have learned what "tats" means, and some other things, but I forget what. Mostly I don’t know what anyone’s talking about. What’s ttyl?

Here’s the context: a couple of pictures of the same penis from different angles, and the message, "here are a couple of pics for ya. ttyl." Um … T-Bone? Tabasco? You? Liver?

Tats means tattoos.

A married couple wants to do me. They’re into barbecue. Hey, me too! Then there’s this "generous" gentleman, also married. He wants to do me. And wants pictures. Of me … in lingerie.

I have lingerie. I have a camera. What does "generous" mean?

I’m going to meet all these people within the next week or two, and I’m going to do them, I don’t care. I already know that, like dirt. My profile clearly says: long-term dating, don’t need friends. Used to be a boy.

Nobody believes me, which is flattering, since my pictures are recent, and real. My strategy: to flush out all the too-cool-for-school hipsters and then school them. In chicken farmerology. They say they’re adventurous and open-minded. They think outside the box.

And I write them and say, "I have a box for you to think outside of." Bam! They are gushing over my hair, my smile, my sense of humor, and in one case my nose (?) … perhaps wondering (or not) about the faint scent of chicken shit. And onions.

Meanwhile, the really cool, really open-minded guys are contacting me. And they get it. And want it. Today I was just beginning a long-overdue e-mail to one of my many, many vagina-having girlfriends who wrote to ask me for Wine-Bottle Wiener’s phone number, and all of a sudden in the background, on OkCupid: Instant Message! Which — I just learned how to do this yesterday.

So, friend forgotten, me and this mister are typing back and forth, in my opinion setting up a check-you-out coffee date, when all of a sudden he’s, like, "What are you wearing?"

And I’m, like: What? You mean for coff — . Ohhhh … this is that thing. My first-ever what-are-you-wearing moment<0x2009>!

The truth: last night’s baggy hand-me-down pajama bottoms and a long-underwear shirt. It was 2 p.m.

"Just panties and a tank top," I typed. "It’s HOT up here." Lucky him, I’m a trained fiction writer. "What about you?"

When, eventually, my woodsy wireless connection failed us, we moved to the phone. And by the time his cell phone battery died, my actual clothes were all over the floor and I was crumpled on the bed, wormy and warm, craving a good, crisp salad and an even better cry.

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My new favorite restaurant is Saigon Cuisine. I needed a bowl of soup badly, to drown a very specific sorrow. Very specifically, the sorrow was that China Light, my old favorite restaurant in Santa Rosa, had closed. So instead of eating roast duck noodle soup, I ate pho. Great! I used all the jalapenos, and then a lot of hot sauce. And stopped crying almost immediately.

SAIGON CUISINE

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

320 W. Third St., Santa Rosa

(707) 528-8807

Beer & wine

MC/V

Elite Cafe

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› paulr@sfbg.com

How too perfect that we find the Elite Café smack in the heart of Pacific Heights. Since Pacific Heights is full of … well, you know. "Elite," I have noticed, is a word that has acquired a sheen of infamy in our demotic times and, along with its close relation, "elitist," is often spoken in a tone of hissing accusation, like "monarchist" or "communist." Yet there is no Monarchist Café, not even in Pacific Heights, and even if there were, its food would likely not be as good as Elite Café’s.

The Elite Café has been in business since 1981, but a few years ago it fell into the hands of Peter Snyderman and Joanna Karlinsky, who have each been a neighborhood force in recent years. Snyderman was a principal in the Fillmore Grill and Alta Plaza — once the last word in A-list gay bars — while Karlinsky was the owner (with John Bryant Snell) of the Meetinghouse, a marvelous restaurant that foundered in the aftermath of 9/11. Its atmospheric setting, a onetime apothecary shop, later became the home of Quince, but now Quince is moving downtown. Meanwhile Karlinsky, after tours at the Hotel Utah and, very briefly, Moose’s, has come back to upper Fillmore, bringing to the Elite Café the Meetinghouse’s wondrously flaky biscuits and signature shrimp-and-scallop johnnycakes.

More than 20 years ago, I had dinner at the Elite Café with a few friends and came away with the impression that it was basically a seafood grill in the old-line style of Sam’s and Tadich. Certainly it looked the part, with a long bar along one wall and, along the other, a train of remarkably enveloping wooden booths that conferred a strong sense of privacy. But according to the restaurant’s Web site, it was — and remains — a purveyor of New Orleans–influenced cooking. Possibly my younger self wasn’t paying proper attention. Yet today’s look, while freshened, is pretty much the same as it was then, and the menu, while unmistakably touched by the flavors of coastal Louisiana, still offers plenty of seafood options.

Karlinsky, the consulting chef, deals in (choose your label) modern or new American cooking, ingredient-driven and seasonal, which helps explain the presence of the biscuits ($4.75 for four) and johnnycakes ($12.50) — the cakes positively gravid with shrimp, festively piped with lime cream, and served with a coarse compote of roasted peppers. These dishes aren’t out of place on Elite’s menu, but they were just as nice on that of the Meetinghouse, whose accent was hardly southern. ("Meetinghouse," incidentally — or perhaps not incidentally — was the term used by colonial New Englanders for "church.")

But … Elite’s menu is replete with New Orleans–ish offerings you wouldn’t likely have seen at any of Karlinsky’s other restaurants. These range from standards such as jambalaya and gumbo — both solid — to a clever "fondue" of crab meat and puréed artichoke you scoop from the cast-iron pan with points of oh-so-San Francisco sourdough toast.

Let us begin with the gumbo, which can be had in three sizes. The smallest (at $10.75) is apparently a starter — the dish is listed among the starters as "California seafood gumbo" — while the bigger sizes are meant for bigger appetites. It’s possible that the largest, at $25.50, is meant for parties or family-style service, since the midsize version, at $21.50, was presented in a hemispherical bowl I could have dunked my head into. The gumbo was chockablock with shrimp, scallops, crab, and oysters — whose liquor added a distinct note of earthy minerality — but what was most notable (apart from the size of the bowl) was the broth, which was as rich and muddy as the Mississippi itself. Floating around in there, along with the seafood, were strips of red pepper and okra and grains of rice, but all this substance was somehow secondary to the tasty murk it was suspended in.

Jambalaya is also available in more than one size, but here the downsized version ($18.50) seemed rather niggardly: a small cast-iron pan filled with shrimp, chunks of andouille sausage, shreds of duck confit, and a token sprinkling of rice. I would pronounce this dish a disappointment were it not for the confit, whose dark and glossy richness was redemptive.

Blackened redfish ($26) — that Paul Prudhomme classic from the 1980s — is made with real Gulf redfish and is worth the carbon-footprint penalty points. There is a local fish, sold under the name red snapper but actually a kind of rockfish, that also has reddish flesh and is sometimes substituted in these sorts of dishes, but it’s no match for the buttery intensity of the Gulf variety. The kitchen does give the dish a distinctly California elaboration, though, with a salad of fennel ribbons, quartered artichoke hearts, fresh green peas, salsify, asparagus, and roasted red-pepper coulis.

Cajun fries ($4.75) could have been a little crisper, I thought, and were underseasoned, but they were served with a chipotle mayonnaise that was like silky fire. Even simpler were spicy collard greens ($5.25), slow-cooked to a deep, gleaming green and deeply satisfying. This might be the most authentically Cajun dish on the menu and also, in its direct simplicity, the most Californian.

Despite a long presence (the restaurant’s predecessor, Lincoln Grill, opened at the Fillmore Street location in 1928) and an attention-getting name, the Elite Café seems slightly anonymous at the moment. When people think about New Orleans food in San Francisco, they think about other, newer places, and more power to them. Let the Elite Café remain a secret for the happy few.

ELITE CAFÉ

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 6–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 6–10:30 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

2049 Fillmore, SF

(415) 673-5483

www.theelitecafe.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Identity crisis

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My answering machine almost always has a message on it for Brent Casserole. It’s another machine, talking to my machine, and it says, in its robotically female voice, "This is a message for … Brent Casserole. If this is not … Brent Casserole … please press two now."

Clearly, I am not … Brent Casserole. Even I know this. And so the first time I heard it I picked up my phone and started pressing 2 2 2 2 2. Five times because nothing was happening. Nothing was happening because, of course, as anyone but me could have told me, the message had been recorded hours ago, when I was not there. It was way too late to press two. I had missed my chance to not be … Brent Casserole … so the machine on my machine just kept treating me as if I were … Brent Casserole.

There are problems associated with being an open-minded, free-thinking, and completely unhinged chicken farmer. The one I’m thinking of is that you can only be called … Brent Casserole … so many times before you start to wonder if, by some odd turn of events, you are … Brent Casserole.

I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror looking for clues, some little crack in the glass of my perception, something I’d missed. It’s not like me to owe anyone money. Brent Casserole does, according to the rest of the message on my answering machine, and he had better call the following number or else (and this part is only implied) he’s going to have his head bashed in by robots.

Kind of like mine.

My therapist can’t see me until October. I already tried the chickens, but they were no help. My friends all have kids, and, therefore, anxiety disorders of their own. Weirdo the Cat just looks at me as if I were … Brent Casserole? She’s so hard to read sometimes.

That leaves you. I’m going to have to work it out with you, dear reader, because you’re all I have left. Sorry. And we’re going to have to move pretty fast because, on my way to work this afternoon, I need to stop at the feed store and pick up a live chicken for my employer. Then I need to stop at the junkyard that has my stupid Saturn and wrestle either the car or a check for $1,650 away from them. Then I have to stop at the grocery store and buy ingredients for jambalaya because that’s my job du jour, changing diapers and making jambalaya — which I’ve never made before but people seem to think I can because I used to be married to someone named Crawdad.

I have no idea how to make jambalaya, so add that to my list: learn to make jambalaya. And then, while it’s gurgling on the back burner and the baby (oh please oh please oh please) is napping, I need to figure out a 75-word way to say that the worst-ever nightmare taqueria where I had the lousiest burrito ever made in the state of California is actually my new favorite restaurant.

Which …

Hey, wait a minute! Do you see what I did? By accident, by reducing myself to, essentially, the minutia of my day, a grocery list, a chicken farmerly litany of Leoneness, or impending failures, I have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am not, no matter how many machines might think otherwise … whatshisname. There can only be one person with that exact list of Things To Do: Me!

So the moral is that we are what we eat, and buy, and cook, and do, and in my case write, and we are not what we owe. Or even what someone else owes. It doesn’t matter how a machine on your answering machine addresses you: we are the sticks, the stones, and the bones. Not the names.

And you say, "Duh."

And I say, That’s easy for you to say. You’re … Brent Casserole. Hit the delete key if you’re not.

—————————————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is La Villa Taqueria in Berkeley, on the strength of how bad they are. Unlike hippies, I enjoy a little hatred and anger in my mix, and La Villa deserves credit for making easily the worst burrito I’ve ever eaten. Crusty, dry carnitas, bland beans, and the lamest pico de gallo ever to tap my tongue. At least it only took a half hour to slap this crap together! My friend was next door deciding on and buying a piano, and she got done first.

LA VILLA TAQUERIA

2434 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley

510-843-0112

Daily: 7 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

MarketBar

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› paulr@sfbg.com

We have the other white meat and the other woman, and in the Ferry Building we have had, for the past five years, the other restaurant, the Not-Slanted Door. Of course I mean MarketBar, which is pretty wonderful and surprisingly not pricey, and how often do you find yourself thinking that when you’re in or near the Ferry Building?

The Slanted Door has held the pole position in the Ferry Building since that venerable structure’s rebirth as a food mecca and the restaurant’s arrival therein by a hop-skip-and-jump route that began at its birthplace on Valencia Street in the mid-1990s and continued to an interregnum spot at an Embarcadero location previously held by Embarko and, later, La Suite. Those were nice digs, but the Slanted Door’s Ferry Building set-up is nonpareil: it’s huge, with huge windows looking on the water and a reputation that draws the building’s flocks of food cognoscenti like ducks — perhaps roasted with five-spice powder — to june bugs.

If the Ferry Building is the manse of a grand food family, then MarketBar is the younger brother who got the bedroom over the garage with the smaller closet. The restaurant looks not onto the bay but the Embarcadero itself, a much-beautified roadway but a roadway nonetheless, a swirling parfait of cars and streetcars and pedestrians. Yet the trade-off isn’t a bad one. While the Slanted Door enjoys Zen-tranquil water views, it can be chaotic inside; MarketBar looks upon the urban circus but is just far enough removed from it to remain peaceable.

A large part of the restaurant’s magic has to do with its immense sidewalk-side patio, set with large umbrellas and discreetly but firmly fenced off from the madding crowd. The Parisians are masters of this arrangement, but you don’t see it much here, maybe because the weather is less favorable or because our city doesn’t have the sorts of public places, like the Place de la Bastille, that Paris does. Many of our al fresco efforts are impromptu: a few flimsy tables and chairs teetering at the brink of the curb. MarketBar, by contrast, is built around, and seems to exist for, its patio.

There’s an inside too, a mirror-backed bar flanked by dining rooms like the wings of a big house. The colors are the reassuring ones of the earth, the look is classic San Francisco, and although no one is whispering, the noise is not insane. But what is everyone whispering about — the prix-fixe menu? Probably, since MarketBar has a good one, three courses for $29.95.

Usually I find a prix-fixe option to be irresistible. But chef Rick Hackett’s regular menu, a Mediterranean-inflected mélange, is chockablock with temptation: lively dishes at competitive prices. Some are little more than nibbles: a bowl of spicy peanuts ($3.75), say, with a nice balance of salt and sweetness; and fresh-cured green olives ($4.75), large, round, and vivid green — if you’ve ever been curious about fresh olive fruit, these orbs are close — draped with shreds of pickled red onion.

Some are big and substantial enough to be called sides, such as a warm salad of chopped romaine leaves and fresh fava beans ($5.75), simply dressed with a little shallot, olive oil, and salt. It made a nice starter; my only criticism is that it was too green, nothing but green, like a Monet painting of a lawn, bordered by shrubbery and surrounded by leafy trees.

As a rule I don’t have pasta much in restaurants, since I make it so often at home, but I was curious about MarketBar’s meatballs and pasta in broth ($14.75). I expected, more or less, a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, with more than the usual amount of sauce, but what I got was basically an Italian version of pho: a deep bowl filled with an herbed broth in which bobbed a half-dozen or so meatballs (rather beefy, I thought), along with several ravioli discs stuffed with spinach.

The prix-fixe menu includes first and main courses along with dessert, and there are choices within each of those categories. A simple salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese reflected the lusciousness of this year’s tomato crop — the fruit has been intensely juicy and flavorful even in the early going — but while red tomatoes are handsome, so are the yellow, orange, green, and pink ones, and a little color play never hurts any salad.

Main dishes tend toward the straightforward and hearty: grilled veal rib eye with quartered new potatoes, morel mushrooms, and English peas; a swordfish filet striped with artichoke aioli and laid atop braised Swiss chard and spring onions. Desserts, as befits the restaurant’s name and location, are largely seasonal, and in berry season you naturally end up with marriages between berries and pastry, as galettes and little pies. But there are other sweet possibilities available, including an orange-soda float ($7.50) — "like a Dreamsicle," one of my companions said, except in liquid form and presented in a sundae glass. Creamy, but mighty sweet, as if Orange Crush and not Orangina was used.

The wine list is diverse and offers a fair number of choices by the glass, but these are pricier than the food would lead one to expect, with many costing well into double digits. Still, that’s a manageable splurge if you just plan to sit with a friend under the umbrella on the patio, sharing a bowl of spicy peanuts while watching others, many, many others, go about their business.

MARKETBAR

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–5 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

One Ferry Building, Embarcadero at Market, SF

(415) 434-1100

www.marketbar.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Revenge

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Cut to wide-awake eyes in a moonlit room. In the dream, he could drive my funny little car that no one else but me can drive. He knew how to sweet talk it into first gear, and fearlessly came to complete stops at stop signs. Marveling at his confidence, and competence, I leaned into his big soft arm and he leaned into me, then pulled over and parked and miraculously, as happens in dreams, the stick shift didn’t get in the way.

There’s another guy, way out in Railroad Flat, who calls me to talk car talk, and who tells me, by way of flirtation, how many future–fried chicken hearts he keeps in his freezer. And I don’t have the chicken farmer heart to tell him it’s the livers I like.

The one up in Lake County, he doesn’t call. But when he did, we talked for hours about all the people he’s going to sue, including his neighbor who puts out food for deer and squirrels, and who punched him when he pointed out that it’s against the law, and nature, to feed wild animals.

The big wet spot on the bed next to me has nothing to do with my bladder, so you know. I sleep with hot water bottles on cold nights, and this one sprung a leak. It’s just water. But it might as well be urine, or blood. That’s how freaked I am. And, unlike the other two or three times in my long life that I have nibbled on the earlobe of insomnia, this has nothing to do with dread of death.

The guy driving my car in the sex dream, he may well have accomplished what no amount of religious upbringing or adult talk therapy has managed: helping me wrap my brain around my impending point-of-viewlessness. And on our first date! By accident, by reminding me about onions! Christ, he was so cool, and good.

So, instead of lying awake last night worrying about death, I was lying awake worrying (more like knowing) that I was never going to see this great, cool, good driving man again. Hold on a second. Let me check my e-mail …

Yep. Wow, that didn’t take long. He slept on it, unlike me. Apparently didn’t have the same dream I did, and very succinctly decided friendship yes, romance no. So, let’s see, that makes 1,439,187,009 really really close, loving friends. And exactly nobody to hold me at 4 a.m. when I forget about onions. Or I should say, nobody to snore and grunt and roll away from me at 4 a.m. when I forget about onions. (It’s best not to ask for too much, with odds like mine.)

Merle Haggard has a song where a woman breaks his heart and he’s going to get even by breaking every heart of every woman he sees. Some day I’m going to get me a boob job and break the heart of every man who lays eyes on me, or on them. However that works.

As for deerkind, I exacted my revenge with a big pot of venison chili last weekend, courtesy of the refrigerator and garden of Johnny "Jack" Blogger (Robert Frost’s Banjo) and Sister Mary His Wife, my favorite Catholic ever.

Gardens are good, in Idaho. I don’t know if a pot of chili ever was made — until this one — without opening one single can. Lard be praised, I hardly even had to shake anything into it. There were five kinds of peppers, all fresh-plucked from the garden, at least three varieties of tomatoes, tomatillos — all from the garden. Onions and bacon fat were the only things not grown on the premises. Oh, and the venison. I wish I could say that it was hatchet-ground, but that would be hatchet-grinding the truth, and I prefer just to stretch it.

The deer was courtesy of a wonderful and talkative woman from Portland, Ore., who’s husband (lucky us) has an unadventurous palate. Which drives her crazy, and would me too. So they fight. I’ve met this guy, and he’s a great guy. But if he doesn’t learn to eat new things, I’m going to get a boob job and break his fucking heart.

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My new favorite restaurant is Mi Lindo Yucatan. It’s a lot cheaper at lunch time, though, so if you find yourself in Noe Valley between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.: Platillo Mi Lindo Yucatan is a mixed platter of … let’s see, there was a shrimp ceviche tostada, some salad, a tamal, a cheese empanada, chicken this, pork that. But my favorite was a couple of barbecued ribs. Nice place, interesting menu.

MI LINDO YUCATAN

Daily: 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

4042 24th St., SF

(415) 826-3942

Beer & wine

MC/V

Epic Roasthouse

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› paulr@sfbg.com

For bay views, it’s hard to beat Epic Roasthouse, the Pat Kuleto and Jan Birnbaum collaboration that opened in January along the Embarcadero at the foot of Folsom Street. Over the past decade or so, the Embarcadero has become something of a paradise regained: down came the earthquake-damaged freeway, in went the streetcar lines, up went the ballpark, along came the Ferry Building food Valhalla, and suddenly the waterfront, once an isolated wasteland, became a gorgeous urban amenity.

Epic Roasthouse and its next-door neighbor, Waterbar, are among the gaudier jewels in this crown, and certainly the views they command, of the water and the far shore, with the Bay Bridge soaring through the ether like a steel rainbow, are unmatched. But they are, alas, reserved to patrons, while strollers along the public esplanade outside now find their own views blocked for the length of two sizable buildings. I have often noticed a similar phenomenon at Lake Tahoe, much of whose scenic shoreline was apparently sold to the highest bidders, so what might and maybe should have been a public asset is now largely walled off by the private homes of the rich. Or, as a friend said as we waited … and waited … for the Epic Roasthouse service staff to bring us menus, "This place should never have been built here."

But it was, and the building is quite splendid in its way. The interior reminds me of the big dining room in the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park (which, with its wooden beams and huge stone fireplace, would have made an excellent Hall of Fire in the House of Elrond, I thought) — distinguished mainly by faux-industrial details like big ducts and valve wheels. There’s even a homey hearth on one side of the main dining room. For a Kuleto restaurant design, this is all tastefully restrained, if artificial, since the building is utterly new and has no past.

From its first days, Epic Roasthouse seemed to function smoothly, which made me wonder about the prolonged wait for menus — and an equally prolonged wait for bread and water — on a more recent visit. The breads, when they finally arrived, were interesting enough to allay some irritation: a torpedo of savory-sweet cornbread, a cheese puff, a slice of sourdough, one each for everybody at the table. But it wasn’t as if the breads had been baked especially for us and rushed to the table still warm. Like the menus, their path was a desultory one.

The restaurant has a warm, understated glamour I associate with places such as one might find in Aspen, and the prices are Aspen-like. The hamburger, for example, is $25 and is very good. A side tray of goodies, including bacon bits, sautéed mushrooms, and whole-grain mustard, suggests an attempt to add value, which implies a certain awareness on the restaurant’s part that value is an issue. It is. Most of the starters and small plates are priced in the teens, while the main dishes rise quickly through the $20s into the $30s and even $40s. Of course many of us are aware that inflation, having been subdued for a generation, is once again a powerful reality. Food costs a lot more than it did just a few years ago, and the kind of food Epic Roasthouse serves, heavy on the meat and dairy, particularly costs a lot these days.

Still, prices at these levels catch your attention. And while you can pay as much or more at lots of places around town now, the issue, properly framed, is whether the food is good enough, the wider experience exhilarating enough, to justify the price. Some very expensive restaurants are worth the coin. Epic Roasthouse is handsome and luxurious-looking, and the food is quite good. It’s about as transit-friendly as a Bay Area restaurant can be. And yet, and yet …

I liked my maple-glazed pork porterhouse steak ($26), I must say, in part because of its awesome size. The meat itself was overcooked and a little tough, though still juicy; it was seated on a pad of whipped potatoes, topped with purple-pink shreds of pickled cabbage, and napped with a startlingly good coffee-bean sauce. For absurdly sentimental reasons, I almost never eat pork and regard it as a huge treat when I do, but this was a pork dish that would have been competitive even without the meat.

The fancy burger was a little dry — wonderfully consoling bun, though — while the macaroni and cheese ($9), served in what looked like a small paella pan, was runny. Caesar salad ($10) featured romaine spears of a crispness that would have passed a military inspection, with plenty of whole, plump anchovy filets thrown in. Duck rillettes ($13) arrived in what looked like a small ossuary; the shredded meat was a little too cold to be fully flavorful but was spread easily enough (with dabs of whole-grain and Dijon mustard) over grilled bread spears. Soft-shell crab ($18): deep-fryer crispy, with a gigantic carbon footprint. If there is a signature dessert, it’s probably the beignets ($10), a slew of football-shaped doughnuts dusted with confectioner’s sugar and suitable for dunking in a tall glass of bicerin café au lait, a potentially addictive combination of coffee, chocolate, and steamed milk.

Restaurants with views are reliable producers of oohs and aahs — not to mention, presumably, revenue — and no restaurant in town has a more impressive view than Epic Roasthouse. The question is whether that view is worth paying (a lot) for, or maybe whether some views should, after all, be free.

EPIC ROASTHOUSE

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

369 The Embarcadero, SF

(415) 369-9955

www.epicroasthousesf.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DISC/MC/V

Muffled noise

Wheelchair accessible

Cheap eights

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS On my way home one morning from another night of urban debauchery followed by very little and very disturbed sleep, I happened to glance at my little pickup truck’s odometer at the exact moment it turned to 88,088. You want to mark these moments, if you’re me, but of course you can’t. At 60 mph, you have, what, one minute to revel in the numerological significance of the big event?

Well, guess what? One minute is enough time to realize that, hey, the day was Friday, Aug. 8, or 8/8/08! Which I very quietly celebrated for 12 seconds (two-tenths of a mile) before going, Hey, I wonder what time it is? Because I left the city at 6:45 and I’m on Stony Point Road, approaching Pepper, so…. No way!

Yes way. It was 7:52, exactly, by my cell phone, which never has enough signal for meaningful conversation but always stays connected to the sun. Or however they do that.

So, to summarize, at eight minutes to 8 a.m. on 8/8/08, my car’s odometer read, 88,088, and just like that your chicken farmer truly had herself a new favorite number.

Yeah yeah yeah, but what did you eat that day? Well, since you asked, I ate oatmeal with blackberries for breakfast as soon as I got home and picked me some blackberries. Then I ate a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich with a pile of home fries for lunch. And then I ate some chicken soup with lots of hot sauce for dinner.

In-between meals I ate the first couple apples off my apple tree, and I ate some sunflower seeds, and popcorn of course, and a poached pear. Poached in the sense of I stole it off someone else’s tree. Oh, and I ate a cucumber salad. All these things I ate. Since you asked.

And notwithstanding all this eating and eight-ing, it was an unremarkable day. In fact, an unlucky one. I had planned to stay home all day to sign for my new laptop, which never came because FedEx couldn’t find my house. Which is what I get, I suppose, for living in a shack.

Come to think of it, eight was my first favorite number. Thanks to Ray Fosse, whom I was in love with. For no apparent reason. I remember that, thanks to Ray Fosse, eight was my first big-deal birthday. Which (for the record, by the way, so you know) I turned on May 21, 1971. Or: 5/21 (5+2+1), ’71 (7+1) … and … oh, I’m just fucking with you now.

I mean, it’s all true, and my math, I believe, is good. But I’m a reasonable chicken farmer. I have a level head and square shoulders and two flat feet on the ground — except, I guess, when I’m flying over fences with a hatchet in my hand, chasing deer. Which I do, if you believe everything you read in the paper.

Anyway, like I was saying, new laptop. As you know, I finally broke down and got an actual cell phone. Plus my first-ever iPod. I am totally geared and gadgetized now for a serious bid to re-enter the world as most people I know know it. My chickens shudder at the thought, but I am even looking to move back to civilization — not so FedEx can find me so much as that’s where I work now. In civilization. With people and everything! At least part-time, but I haven’t had me even a part-time job since the late ’80s. No lie.

I’ve been buttering my bread and bringing home the bacon as a musician and a writer, respectively. And all along, as you know (if you’ve been paying attention), my true ambition has been to work in the service industry.

Is feeding kids, changing diapers, and cooking dinner the service industry? If so, I am almost there! Last week I opened an actual savings account. And I know what you’re thinking, right now, if you like Cheap Eats and Eights. You’re thinking, "Don’t quit your day job."

I won’t.

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My new favorite restaurant is King Sing Chinese Cuisine because its name is practically a song. At lunchtime on a Sunday there was nobody there, and the weirdest show ever on TV instead of the Olympics. Some kind of Chinese reality variety show with fire-jumping, sleight-of-handing, and iron-cheffing. Plus cute cute girls and hot hot guys. Both waiters were standing in front of the TV with their hands behind their backs, mesmerized. Wanted to ask for an explanation, but asked instead for the fish fillet with tender greens.

KING SING CHINESE CUISINE

Sun.–Tue. and Thu.–Sat.; 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

501 Balboa, SF

(415) 387-6038

Beer

MC/V

Cava22

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If, like me, you occasionally succumb to the temptation to judge a restaurant by its name, you might suppose that Cava22 is some kind of champagne bar … all right, a cava bar, cava being the word the Spanish came up with to describe their méthode champenoise–style sparkling wines. And you wouldn’t be completely wrong; the place, opened last winter by the Valle brothers (Ramón and Samuel) and Roger Magaña in a cavernous Mission District setting that had previously been the home of Bahia Restaurant, does offer a token selection of sparkling wines, including a rather wonderful espumosa de muscatel from Reymos ($7 a glass): a bit on the fruity-sweet side, but not cloying.

But despite the name, the big deal at Cava22, booze-wise, isn’t the selection of cavas and other sparkling wines. The big deal is tequila, of which several dozen varieties from the different age groups (blanco, reposado, añejo) are offered to purists and aficionados by the (shot) glass, mostly for less than $10 each. At least in this sense, then, Cava22 is the Mission’s answer to Tres Agaves in ballpark yuppieland. And since non-aficionados can be found all over town — even writing pieces like this one — the drinks menu also includes an array of margaritas and infused tequilas, along with a smattering of concoctions made with other liquors. Or you can simply turn the sheet over to find a nice selection of beer and wine. Many of the wines are from Spain and Argentina, several are available by the glass, and all are reasonably priced.

If I’m making Cava22 sound like a gigantic bar, this is because in many respects it is. Certainly it’s gigantic, a box with a high ceiling supported by a line of wooden pillars marching down the middle of the room. And certainly there’s a bar, lit by a line of bordello-red ceiling lanterns and complete with a television mounted over the door so bar patrons can watch fútbol matches on Telemundo. But there’s also chef Roman Beltran’s food; it’s good food, a sort of Spanish-Mexican amalgam, and fairly priced. That, plus the drink, plus the large number of tables, means that Cava22 is a good place to know about if you’re flying out the door by the seat of your pants, hoping to indulge one of the great pleasures available to the urban diner: that of just drifting along with friends until a suitable place presents itself, complete with an available table.

The guacamole ($5.50) disappointed me, I must say, notwithstanding the generous allotment of deeply crisped tortilla chips. It was too oniony. (I have been making guacamole often in recent weeks, and my version includes, in addition to avocados, just some minced garlic, a pinch of cayenne, a squeeze of lime juice, a pinch of salt, and some chopped cilantro. No party-crashing by onions!) On the other hand, we loved and devoured a plate of roasted garlic cloves and fig compote ($6.50) — a clever variation on the classic Spanish quince paste known as membrillo — suitable for spreading over grilled bread spears with some cambozola cheese. The cloves themselves looked a little drab, like old rubber fittings the plumber might be replacing, but roasting gave them a mellow sweetness and an almost buttery spreadability. Cambozola cheese, incidentally, isn’t as fancy as it sounds; it’s an industrial German product, with a manufactured name meant to make us think of two of its more storied relations, camembert and gorgonzola. Still, it’s tasty enough and a good value. It’s also vegetarian-friendly, as are the empanadas ($6), a pair of corn-dough canapés filled with squash and peppers and napped with a sharp-edged tomato sauce.

But this is not a vegetarian restaurant. Meat is the motif among the main courses, although there is a paella on offer along with a sizable list of seafood dishes. Typical of the meat possibilities is the Argentine milanesa ($11): thin slices of beefsteak that are breaded, fried, and served with beans and rice. The name refers to Milan, of course, Argentina having substantial Italian ancestry. In a small irony, the Italians themselves call breaded, fried filets (usually of fish or veal) "all’inglese" — "in the English fashion." So, fingers pointing in every direction here. Cava22’s milanesa steaks are profoundly breaded and fried indeed; by the time they reach the table, they’re nearly geological in their earthy crispness and twisted shapes.

Camarones à la diabla ($12), also known as prawns in spicy sauce, is one of those preparations you see on menus all over the place. Here the shrimp are peeled, which is certainly a blessing for the person eating them, and the tomatoey-looking "devil" sauce packs a real wallop. I can’t recall having a more boldly chilefied sauce in any restaurant, and I liked it. Seafood dishes include a choice of sides — beans, rice, roasted potatoes, a few others — and these are on the good side of ordinary.

Service is knowledgeable and efficient, although the dining room is so big that sitting at one of the window tables is like being near the end of a bus line: it takes some chugging to move things from kitchen to table and back again, and you can see your server coming from quite a distance. Luckily the table linens are well-starched and the street spectacle is unending: a human parade dressed every which way and heading in every direction, with many posses making stops at Papa Toby’s Revolution Café across the street, possibly to make inquiry as to the whereabouts of an interesting new tequila bar and restaurant they’d heard about.

CAVA22

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m.

3239 22nd St., SF

(415) 642-7224

www.cava22sf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Wine and deer

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS A man with a penis the size of a wine bottle told me you can shoot a deer out of season if it’s decimating your vineyard. We live in wine country. We’re neighbors. He had set a bar of post-coital dark chocolate and a bowl of cherries on the coffee table for me, and was making us tea. I like the taste of wine, but would rather live in beer country, or, I don’t know, hot sauce country. Wine bottles hurt.

This morning at the kitchen sink, grinding my Sweet Maria’s, I looked out the window and saw a small nuclear family of deer looking in the window at me, like, "What the — ?"

I opened the window.

"It’s a kind of coffee," I said.

I didn’t have to holler. The deer were right there — and, perhaps not surprisingly, completely weirded out. I admit I don’t always look exactly sexy in the morning, let alone easily categorized. If they didn’t bolt — and they didn’t — I attribute it more to their being surrounded by chicken wire than any headlight-like radiance on my part. Like most animals, including human ones, deer have an easier time getting into situations than getting back out of them.

The chocolate and cherries were a nice touch though, I thought. The tea was a nice touch. The talk of deer, and vineyards? Nice touch. Very neighborly. Our neighbor, my neighbor told me, shoots deer in his vineyard and can’t be bothered with the rest of it, the gutting and dripping and butchery, so he digs a hole with his backhoe and buries his deerly departed.

I don’t like dark chocolate.

My neighbor said his neighbor calls him first, sometimes, to see if he wants the deer.

"Do you?" I said.

He said he can’t be bothered.

I was eating the chocolate anyway, so as not to seem unladylike, sipping my tea in a manner most dainty. Then, being essentially a cartoon character, the chocolate bar turned into a strip of venison jerky, and the hot tea into a cold beer. Not sure if this would qualify as ladylike or not, but I gave Wine Bottle Wiener my number and said, yo, if anyone ever calls him again with any large game or anything, have them call me.

I just love venison. Steaks. Sausages. Liver. I love venison. So does Mountain Sam, and he has sharp knives and can help me, I figure. What I need, my dear alternative-weekly PETA-supporting readership, is a rifle.

Hey, I have grapevines to protect. Check that: I have grapevine. One. I don’t make wine, but me and my chickens eat a few handfuls of grapes every fall and enjoy them very much, thank you. Now the deer have been sneaking into the chicken yard in the middle of the night and helping themselves. And then mangling, tearing, eating through and sometimes just bowling over my elaborate fencing system by way of saying goodbye.

A farmer wearies of mending fence.

I slowly closed the kitchen window, tiptoed across my shack to the door, which I opened and closed soundlessly, and, in my bare feet still, and pajamas, I snatched my hatchet from the wood pile, jumped the fence myself, and damn near got me my first deer ever, chicken style.

After fixing the fence, I went back inside and drank my coffee.

The phone rang. It was him. And he didn’t have a deer for me; he had a bottle of wine. His deep voice was all want, with maybe chocolate and cherries in it, for me.

"I like cherries," I said, and then I didn’t say anything else. He waited very patiently, but I can never find my way out as gracefully as I found my way in. The man was going to need a smaller dick, was the thing … or a bigger woman. "I like grapes. I like deer," I said. My big toe was bleeding and Weirdo the cat was sniffing me like I was piss, but I could not hang up. "Coffee," I said. "I love coffee."

—————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Pho Vietnam, in Santa Rosa. These folks do the biggest bowls of noodles I’ve ever seen. I’m talking about the bun, or vermicelli, but I’ve also had the pho, and it’s great too. The place used to be all soulful and divey and crowded and dirty, like I like, but then it moved next door into what might have been a pancake house, with big, soft booths, a posh counter, and carpeting. Funny. Fun. Great food.

PHO VIETNAM

711 Stony Point #8, Santa Rosa

(707) 571-7678

Mon.–Sat. 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.–7:45 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

Goat Hill Pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

While the denizens of Washington, DC must nourish themselves with Capitol Hill Blue, we of the Blessed Realm have easy access to Goat Hill Pizza, and although there aren’t any goats on Potrero Hill any more, in blue or any other color, the views are still magical, the pizza is pretty good, and a longtime spirit of San Francisco abides, despite the passing of a third of a century and the ebb and flow of various funny-money economic tides.

Goat Hill is more than a pizzeria with a view (though a better view you won’t easily find), more than a place long famed for its Monday night, all-you-can-eat pizza dim sum extravaganza (though a better deal you won’t easily find): it’s a kind of community center, a locus of mingling, with the restaurant’s co-owner, Philip De Andrade, serving as mingler-in-chief as he moves from table to table, chatting and checking. The restaurant’s long walls are regularly hung with paintings for sale, and, on certain warm weekend afternoons, the place becomes a kind of art gallery that smells of linguica and cheap red wine — just the sort of environment in which to stumble across a surviving Beat writer or unheralded master painter.

Goat Hill is a still-glowing ember of a bohemian San Francisco where life’s riches were enjoyed but neither obsessed over nor paraded as status symbols. If, in a sense, it’s an ambassador from the past, it’s an envoy that’s survived a host of Bible-worthy plagues, from earthquake, disease, and fire to the dot-com boom-bust (in with the Porsches, out with the Porsches!) and the long adventure in misrule that began with a stolen election and will eternally bear the name of the unbearable George W. Bush. The little man will be gone soon, holding hands with Dick Cheney in one of their undisclosed locations while Mesopotamia burns, but Goat Hill will still be there, packing them in on Monday nights.

While a wait for a table is generally an annoyance for people who are hungry to eat dinner, the Monday-night wait at Goat Hill is rather festive, especially in mild weather. Clots of people loiter on the sidewalk and in the street near the door, chatting and flirting and occasionally taking the long view down the slope of Connecticut Street to the city’s luminous skyline, which seems close enough to touch. Of all the skyline views I’ve observed over the years, only those on the eastern slopes of Russian Hill are the equal of those on the north face of Potrero. With a view like that, who needs food? And yet, from time to time, the host does emerge from the restaurant to call out a name, and a party of people — maybe a twosome, but just as likely a sixsome or even more — eagerly marches inside.

The dim sum comparison is as old as time, but it isn’t quite apposite. (Visitors to Goat Hill’s arriviste location in the SoMa flatlands will find the all-you-can-eat deal in effect every day.) Whenever I’ve had actual dim sum at a Chinese place, the servers check off little boxes on a tab when we’ve chosen items to eat, so the final bill varies. At Goat Hill, you pay a flat fee (at the moment $10.95 per head), which buys you unlimited access to the salad bar along with unlimited access to the pies that emerge regularly from the kitchen. A pie arrives; its topping is announced, and, as at a Sotheby’s auction, you point or mumble or in some other way indicate an interest, and you are given a slice. But step lively, because the next pie could be just seconds behind. Or, minutes might elapse, an interval in which you can thoughtfully chew your crust rinds. Some of these can look a little scorched.

The toppings themselves show signs of being drawn from the culinary equivalent of an auto dealership’s parts bin. There’s pepperoni, of course, and also pepperoni with sausage, and sausage with mushroom. (No pepperoni with mushroom.) How about ground beef with green onions ("Italian hamburger"), or spinach with tomato and feta cheese, or chicken with sun-dried tomatoes? Green bell pepper makes repeated appearances, as does pineapple, with ham or with sausage, with or without chunks of jalapeño pepper.

Linguica — the garlicky Portuguese sausage — is underrated as a pizza topping; its flavor is every bit as potent as pepperoni’s, but (at least at Goat Hill) it’s richer and less salty. This last is always an important consideration for the pizza eater who is beyond 30 years of age. I love pizza, and I retain an affection for the sort of pizza gluttony Goat Hill enables, but the older you get, the more likely you are to be sorry the next day not to have exercised more restraint in enjoying your pizza. (The pizza crusts, incidentally, are sourdough and find a nice middle ground between crackery and bready, but the rinds nonetheless have a way of piling on paper plates around the tables. Only across the way, at a table filled with avid men in their 20s, did I notice the crust rinds being efficiently dispatched. It was like watching bright-eyed jackals polish off a wildebeest carcass, bones and all.)

The salad bar, amid all this crust, is not an afterthought. Although it has the look of something you’d find at Howard Johnson’s, complete with sneeze shield, it does offer a broad range of non-bloating items, including kidney beans and chickpeas, tomato slices, mushrooms, lettuce, grated cheese, beets, pepperoncini, and, of course, choice of dressing, to be ladled from big crocks. There’s even a view, at no extra charge.

GOAT HILL PIZZA

Sun.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

300 Connecticut, SF

(415) 641-1440

www.goathill.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noise does not preclude conversation

Wheelchair accessible

Under the skin

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS To be honest (which is one of my two favorite ways to be) … I never very much liked ratatouille, or rat-a-tat-tat-ouille, as I have sometimes called it, to be difficult. Nothing against eggplant. It’s just that there are, at any given time, 9,999 other things I’d rather be putting in my mouth, at least one of which, at any given time, is a whole roasted chicken rubbed with black pepper and garlic, strips of bacon stuffed under the skin.

The only reason I mention ratatouille is because there’s a movie that, like most movies, I never saw. Called Ratatouille. But I don’t much go for ratatouille, so why would I want it in italics, with a capital R?

Plus I am the least movied person alive. That’s why I so seldom know what anyone’s talking about. I do see movies, occasionally, but only as a vehicle for popcorn. Home or away, I pop my own. Not that I can’t afford movie theater popcorn; I just like mine better. As it turns out I — famed appreciator of Two-Buck Chuck and Dollar-a-Thing Chinese fast food — am a popcorn snob.

I get my kernels at Rainbow Grocery, so we’re talking organic, free-range, home-schooled, non-HMO, white corn popcorn. And, in one of those cool turnabouts that makes life soupy and worth living, it’s cheaper than Orville fucking Redenbacher and Jolly goddamn Time. Oh, and every kernel pops — for real, Orville. I can prove this in a court of law. I know how much oil to use, so the salt sticks too. No butter. Just salt.

People are always almost beating me up in bars. And not for the normal reasons, either. Most recently it was a matter of my not having seen Ratatouille, the movie. I forget who it was, but it wasn’t the one person in the world who’d have "probable cause" for beating me up in bars for not seeing Ratatouille — the badass biker babe I know who actually worked on that film.

Whoever it was, they were berating, abusing, and downright poking me over never having seen Ratatouille. I didn’t dream this. I know it wasn’t a dream or else it would have been the badass biker babe.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: no butter? Did you just say no butter on your popcorn? You, Chicken Farmer? Butterer of everything, singer of songs about butter, and placer of bacon under chicken skin? No butter on your popcorn?

Well, first let me say that it was Crawdad’s idea to put bacon under the chicken skin. I was 100 percent behind the idea, yes. But ultimately I was, like so many ruiners of life and meals before me, "only following orders." It was her kitchen.

We both knew that the bacon stuffed under the skin and into the cavity would never get crisp, nor exactly palatable to most palates, save mine and maybe the dog’s. But I figured, well, we could always put more strips of bacon on the outside of the bird. To eat! The bacon-inside idea, I imagined, would lasso all sorts of holy cows at the dinner table. It would melt into the meat, and leave an extra layer of pretty pure fat under the skin, essentially turning chicken into duck, and consequently turning us, me and Crawdad, into Nobel lariats.

There’s a word for this. It’s either hubris, dumbass, or joie de vivre … depending where you come from and what kind of mood you’re in.

Speaking of Frenchness, I borrowed Ratatouille from Crawdad that night — something to watch with my bedtime popcorn when I got home.

Got home, popped my corn, salt, no butter, opened the box …

No disc. No Ratatouille. Still going to get beat up in bars, etc. Except: the following night, last night, at Yo-Yo’s, cat-sitting, out of pure boredom, I swear, I touched the "open" button on her DVD player. I’d already scanned her shelves, nothing I wanted to see. And you’re not going to believe this, because Yo-Yo and Crawdad haven’t seen each other in years…. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you.

—————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Cactus Taqueria. There’s one in Oakland and one in north Berkeley. That’s the one I like, because that’s where I lunched with a one-year-old after a grueling five-minute birthday shop for another one-year-old. Best thing about nannying: you always have someone with you to help finish a burrito. And if it’s Clara de la Cooter, she’ll finish all your hot sauce too. We were googy over the carnitas.

CACTUS TAQUERIA

1881 Solano, Berk.

(510) 528-1881

Daily: 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Beer & wine

DISC/MC/V

B Star

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you run a successful restaurant on Clement Street, apparently you face a terrible temptation to open another restaurant on Clement Street — across the road, perhaps, or on the next block. And the new place should appeal to a different socioeconomic stratum. For grand Clémentine, this formula resulted in the opening, about four years ago, of Bistro Clement, an earthier and less formal sibling that trafficked in traditional French bistro dishes.

Now the Burma Superstar people, just a block or so to the west of Clémentine, have borrowed a page from the Clémentine script and, in early May, opened their own companion venture, B Star. In a small, or not-so-small, irony, B Star occupies the space held by Bistro Clement before it went under. If that is a bad omen, let’s consider some favorable ones: unlike Bistro Clement, B Star represents an upmarket, not downmarket, move. (Burma Superstar’s lofty reputation has to do with its food, not its ambience) Also, the menu is, of course, Burmese (-ish), and the new place is on the same side of the street as the parent restaurant.

If you’re on foot, in fact, you’re not likely to miss B Star. It’s the mid-block spot with would-be patrons idling and swirling on the sidewalk and in the doorway. Yes, the crowds have already descended, apparently drawn by alluring whiffs of upmarketry and innovative Asian cooking. That formula has been working at nearby Namu, and now it works at B Star, though the two are hardly interchangeable. While Namu is of the night, B Star has the look of day: knotted pine floors, creamy yellow walls, globes of soft light dangling from the ceiling, and a fair amount of lush greenery. If Namu is an ersatz nightclub, then B Star has a certain gazebo quality, even in the evening.

The menu card adverts to "simple and wholesome Asian-style comfort foods." Never have so few syllables signaled so much to so many; they make me think of meatloaf tataki. B Star doesn’t offer that (does anyone?), but the kitchen does turn out dishes all along the innovation spectrum, from a fabulous, if traditional, platha ($4.50) — a disc of pastry-like flatbread, cut into quarters and presented with an irresistible curry sauce for dipping — to a heart-shaped potpie ($14) filled with Thai-style salmon, carrots, red peppers, zucchini, and snap peas awash in a green curry coconut milk sauce that doesn’t lack for chile punch.

Most of the dishes strike a reasonable balance between familiarity and wildness. Care is taken with putf8gs and other small touches, and the ensemble of crockery, rich in eccentric shapes, has a museum-of-modern-art feel that subtly elevates the food it carries. Also, the kitchen is keenly attentive to the matter of texture and to the value of crunchiness, in particular. We detected a definite crispness in a vegetarian samusa soup (a $7 bowl was plenty for two), whose delights included cabbage, lentils, potatoes — worthies all, though soft — and falafel. I love falafel but had never before enjoyed it in any other form than wrapped in a pita or lavash. Here it resulted in a soup that went crunch, and we only wished that the murky, curry-scented, slightly metallic broth had been a little less harsh.

"It’s missing something," my companion said. Salt? Salting helped but did not cure. Something freshening or fruity, maybe?

Additional crunch turned up in kau soi ($11), a large, shallow bowl filled with noodles, bean sprouts, pickled mustard greens, and ground chicken, each in its place, which made the bowl look like a 3-D map of some ethnically fractured island. It fell to the diner to mix and mingle (as with the Korean beef salad known as bi bim bop), and one of the first things this diner noticed was that the chicken — more shredded than ground, I thought — was wonderfully crispy, in contrast to the soft-focus players. If any dish at B Star manages a rustic sophistication, it’s this one.

Since the menu offered no meatloaf tataki, we settled for a spicy-tuna version ($8.50). The fish had been crusted with crushed peppercorns au poivre-style, seared, cut into slices, and served with a gingery mush dotted with bits of jalapeño pepper and flecks of cilantro. It was also quite chilly, which suggested pre-preparation but also brought a cold-flash counterpoint to a parade of dishes that ranged from warm to scorching.

A nicely balanced dish, in this respect, was the duck lettuce cups ($8). The lettuce consisted of long spears, crisp and cool as an early spring in morning; they were on hand here so we could scoop up the duck, a pile of cooling but still warm shredded meat (like the pork in mu shu pork) perfumed with five-spice powder and laced with a mince of red bell pepper, carrots, celery, and scallions. Our only complaint was that the lettuce spears were not particularly useful as scoops; the regular lettuce cups (of broader and more pliant butter-leaf lettuce) would have been better.

Just as it must be hard to be the child of a famous or accomplished parent, so it must be difficult to be the offspring of a restaurant that uses "superstar" for part of its name. Expectations are bound to be stoked. "Star" is at least more modest than "superstar," particularly when it’s denoted by a symbol rather than spelled out as a word. And B Star does have glints of something special: the best dishes are memorable, the look is appealing, and the staff is as young and energetic as the crowd. A B is good, but give us an A !

B STAR

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

127 Clement, SF

(415) 933-9900

www.bstarbar.com

Beer, wine, soju

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Dive in!

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/bob/2008/food.php@@

Reliability

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Most expensive thing I ever bought was a shiny, concert-quality, made-in-Trinidad steel drum which, in its case at the head of my futon, makes an excellent back rest while I’m reading books. The drum I play and love and cherish is a rusty, junky trash can, hammered out by some white guy with a stutter in Mendocino. He used it as his beach drum for a while, then left it out in the rain for a winter, then gave it to me for $100 and it sounds like butter. Whereas my $1,600 Steel Island special, crafted by Tony Slater and fine-tuned by the great Bertie Marshall himself, sounds like paper clips in the laundry. But, hey, back support is very important. Without it, I would constantly be hitting my head on the floor.

Last fall, for the first time in my life, I started driving a reliable car. It was less than 10 years old (a first for me), had air bags (a first for me), a door lock clicker (a first for me), and three state-of-the-art cupholders. In March, the engine blew up. Cost me $1,649 to fix it, and it’s still not fixed. In the past four months my reliable car has spent more time with my mechanics, Larry, Curly, and Moe, than it has with me.

Luckily, it shit the bed so fast I hadn’t yet got rid of my ’86 3-cylinder pickup truck. So that’s what I’ve been driving, Old Reliable — only when I say reliable in this case I mean it. No tongues, no cheeks. My old truck may take many tries to go into first gear, but it will, eventually, go. And once a month it is going to leave me sitting on the side of the road somewhere, broken down, for exactly 52 minutes.

I know that nice guys in nicer, bigger trucks than mine will stop and noodle around under my hood, try to get it going, give up, tell me I need a new this or a that, and offer to give me a ride somewhere. And I will sit there and smile and say, "No thanks, but thank you though." And sometimes right in front of their disbelieving eyes, if 52 minutes has passed, I will turn the key and it will start — and run for exactly another month. That’s what I call reliability.

I’m trying real hard to get legit. I’m a part-time nanny now, and kids and parents are counting on me. So I got a cell phone. My first! Now, for $40 a month, I pretty much always know what time it is. This is a first for me too, since I’ve never been a watch-wearer. And even though I am invariably out-of-signal when my car dies, I can sit there and look at the time on my cell phone and know exactly when 52 minutes is up.

For 10 years I wrote on an old Gateway dinosaur. Then, a year and a month or so ago, I bought a shiny new MacBook with a one-year warranty. As a visual joke, a twist on my farmerly aesthetic, I set up the Gateway outside next to the chicken coop. When it rains, I put a tarp over it. But in any case it is generally covered with dust and feathers and shrouded in salty coastal fog. Every now and then, on a nice day, I turn it on, and am always pleasantly surprised that it boots.

In fact, I’m writing on it right now because my MacBook died — not only mere months out of warranty, but on the exact day the new iPhones came out, assuring I would not be able to see anyone at any Apple store for at least a week.

So I took it to MacMedics. Their estimate: $960. How much I paid for the new computer one year and one month ago: $950. Do they sell new Macs? You bet!

While it’s still Poo-Poo Pride month, I would like to dump a figurative pile of stinky, steamy, corn-dotted, meat-eaterly chicken farmer shit all over Apple Computer, Saturn, Steel Island, and AT&T — only in AT&T’s case I don’t exactly know why yet. Forty dollars a month is more a trickle than an explosion. Still, I hold my cell phone like a hand grenade.

——————————————

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria La Nueva, and not just ’cause I work right up the block. Although that helps. The al pastor burrito is wonderful, the carnitas less so. And it’s kind of inconspicuously tucked away on an odd corner of Foothill in Oakland. They have to put a sandwich board out in the street — not the sidewalk, in the street. Yes yes yes, we’re open open open. Right here. And still there’s never anyone there. Four-fitty gets your burrito, chips, and some great green salsa. That’s old school, and that rocks, in my opinion.

TAQUERIA LA NUEVA

Daily: 9 a.m.–10 p.m.

5324 Foothill, Oakl.

(510) 698-4036

No alcohol

AE/DISC/MC/V

Orson

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If there was ever a doubt that Elizabeth Falkner had a thing for Orson Welles, her new restaurant — named Orson — should lay to rest any lingering uncertainties. Falkner’s first venture, a bakery called Citizen Cake, first appeared in the late 1990s in a northeast Mission District space (near Rainbow Grocery) now occupied by Chez Spencer. After a few years it moved to considerably posher quarters in the performing arts quarter while retaining its Wellesian moniker.

But even the upscaling of Citizen Cake, including its expansion to a full-scale, full-service restaurant, could not begin to prepare people for the strange wonder of Orson. (Orson is a fine name, but am I alone in being reminded first not of Orson Welles but of Orson Bean, the character actor who’s turned up in all sorts of movies and TV shows over the years?) The restaurant’s design doesn’t offer much in the way of clues, either. It’s very au courant SoMa: large and lofty, with a huge wall of exposed concrete, a mezzanine, swaths of industrial carpeting on the floor, and a persistent hiss of ambient sound, as if a huge white-noise machine in some hidden corner had been turned up to "loud" but not "very loud." The noise doesn’t preclude conversation, but, like cigarette smoke, it’s impossible to ignore. Perhaps this is the new standard.

So we have a SoMa restaurant with a whimsical name, bearing a general physical resemblance to other SoMa restaurants with whimsical names and run by a woman whose reputation is rooted in high-style baking and what we might call classic California cuisine. And we find, on the menu of that restaurant, a dish called parmaggiano pudding ($5), an ivory-colored custard presented in a crock. The idea of a savory flan made with parmesan cheese might seem like plenty of cleverness for one dish, but Orson’s kitchen, under the guidance of Falkner and chef de cuisine Ryan Farr, isn’t likely to be called complacent. They are full of wild and wacky ideas, such as lacing the parmesan pudding with cocoa nibs. The wonder is not that a few of these gambits fail — they do, spectacularly, like some of those early space shots in which the rocket collapses in flames or whizzes off in the wrong direction — but that so many of them so sensationally succeed. The parmesan pudding is only one such success.

The only dish on Orson’s rather complex menu I would describe as a total flop is the foie bonbon ($5), a chocolate truffle filled with a buttery pâté de foie gras. One by one, the faces around our table wrinkled in distaste after a nibble, and while I didn’t hate the bonbon, I did think it was a bad marriage between incompatible elements that had nothing more than richness in common.

On the other hand, the jolt of espresso in the potato cream bathing the short ribs ($15) was, like the cocoa nibs, a cunning bit of counterpoint, adding depth, mystery, and a little smokiness to what might otherwise have been an ordinary soupy sauce. (Leaves of braised spinach brought some color but were texturally uncooperative; they reminded me of sails left in choppy water by a capsized sloop.) And the egg atop a pizza ($14) of tomato, crisped guanciale, chile flakes, and robiola cheese was less out of place than it looked — and it looked quite out of place, as if there’d been some kind of head-on collision in the kitchen. But the yolk drained nicely across the pie (imagine flooding a rice paddy, in miniature, with yellow paint) and added a nice note of velvetiness to what was otherwise a rather brash Neapolitan pizza.

Not all the food is eccentric. A boudin noir pizza ($14), for instance, was topped with (in addition to the blood sausage), arugula, oregano, and thin slices of potato — a perfectly genteel combination you might find at any number of places. Garganelli ($11) — pasta tubes that looked like mottled cinnamon sticks — were tossed in a simple sauce of basil and splinters of summer squash. A sprightly kimchee ($5) was festooned with throw pillows of fried tofu. Chicharrones ($5), a.k.a. pork rinds, arrived in a tall cup looking like twisted French fries suitable for dipping in the shallow tub of barbecue sauce on the side. And a chicken beer sausage link ($14), although accompanied by flecks of nectarine, whispers of frisée, and a hint of pistachio, was satisfyingly all about the sausage.

Some of the exotic touches were discreet to the point of being unnoticeable. Actual French fries ($7) were cooked in duck fat and presented with a small ramekin of browned butter béarnaise, a subtle aioli alternative. Tongue ($5), never an easy row to hoe, was transformed into a golden-crusted, nicely rectangular croquette and served with cherries and what might be one of our most underappreciated greens, purslane.

Does all this sound like the stuff of DIY tasting menus, a sequence of memorable bites? The glory of DIY is the randomness of it — we’ll have a few of those and one of that — but for more orderly types, Orson does offer four formal tasting menus that consist of three to five courses and cost from $50 to $65. One is vegetarian, another pork-based. Caveat: your whole table must participate. Tables for two have several additional "for two" options, though Orson doesn’t really strike me as a restaurant for couples. Its pulsing energy is that of a crowded club for the young and the restless, whose packs are forever rearranging themselves. It’s easy to picture them talking about movies. But do they talk about, or have they even seen, Citizen Kane?

ORSON

Dinner: Mon., 6–10 p.m.

Tues.–Sat., 6 p.m.–midnight

508 Fourth St., SF

(415) 777-1508

www.orsonsf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Fairly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Home field advantage

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Bars are wired for weird times. I know that. The combination of amplified music and vodka makes for surreally truncated, garbled conversation (if any). Which in turn makes for strange looks, nods of unknowingness, flights of fancy, and colorfully elaborate misunderstandings. Then the next day you have to e-mail everyone and say, "Christ, what happened?"

Restaurants are wired for romance. Coffeehouses are wired for wirelessness. That’s why you get coffee on first dates. If they don’t show up, you can check your e-mail. Second date, dinner. Third date, drinks and dinner — then hopefully more drinks, then hopefully breakfast. But you don’t just drink until after you are bored with each other, or are at least married.

I was not on a date. My date, the dumb fuck, cancelled on me. It would have been a second date, so I would have had dinner. As it turned out, I did have dinner with a good friend instead, so it was actually enjoyable — if not romantic — and then we went to see another friend’s band play and everyone was there.

Now, if you’re me, all your friends are in love with all your other friends, with the possible exception of me. And all their relationships are always at various stages of disappointment/dissipation, in which case they may want to confide in you, or else they are on Cloud Nine, in which case they may want you to confide in them.

It might be the same mechanism that makes people rubberneck car crashes or turn into drooling zombies in the glow of the Disaster Channel. They could be safe, held, and accounted for, but some rare, blissless part of them misses loneliness and/or craves the vicarious ache of your dumb fuck dates and serial dicklessness.

And some not-very-rare but raw part of you wants to talk, and tell, and hear, and feel, so this all works out very nicely, or would except that you’re in a loud bar with a lot of strong drinks in your hands. And the next thing you know, if you’re me, all your friends have left, some having said good-bye, some not … and you live an hour and a half away, have keys to several neighborhood couches and crawl spaces, but miss Weirdo the Cat and are in general very, very confused.

It’s late it’s dark you’ve had at least a drink you’re a lightweight you’re afraid to go let yourself in to any of your many oddly departed friends’ apartments because they are probably all in bed with each other, making happy, sexual, slurpy noises.

How did this happen? You trade your unfinished drink for a cup of coffee to go and, replaying the strange night in your head, you drive home on the verge of tears and, more dangerously, sleep. You feel hardly understood, hardly understanding, in broad daylight on solid ground, outside. Let alone at shows.

You remember saying to someone back at the bar: "I think I might try dating younger men, since older ones strike me as disappointingly immature. With younger ones at least I won’t be disappointed. And there will be hope. Insane hope, but hope."

What they heard, between guitar solos and microphone feedback: "I think the fire was in the bedroom, since something something scintilutf8gly immature. With young rum the peaches won’t be disappointing. Something something. I’m insane! Ho ho ho!"

Little wonder they looked at you sideways and left.

Fuck bars. Fuck restaurants. Fuck coffeehouses. From now on I’m going to stay home, in the woods. If my friends want to see me, they are more than welcome here. And I will feed them. Complete strangers too. If they want it to be a date, I have coffee!

We can sit outside, and the only interference to our clear, body-boggling verbal connection will be birds and squirrels, and/or the sizzling of chops and chicken. Inside, the sound of a clock and the smell of bacon. This is called home field advantage.

Which … I think I could use me some.

———————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria Guadalajara. You know how I know? I had just bought about 15 pounds of Flint’s barbecue for my band, and Little Him showed up with a Guadalajara burrito. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, ribs, brisket, and chicken notwithstanding. This burrito was eight-feet long and weighed 420 pounds. Next chance I got, I went to Guadalajara myself for about three solid meals’ worth of al pastor, and was not disappointed. Open late, and pretty nice inside, too.

TAQUERIA GUADALAJARA

Sun.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–3 a.m.

3146 24th St., SF

(415) 642-4892

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Tres Agaves

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you’re one of those people who’s always on the lookout for the next big thing, and you think the next big thing might be tequila bars, you might feel a pang about Tres Agaves, the brick cathedral of tortillas, margaritas, and fun that opened about two and a half years ago in the ever-more-crowded environs of AT&T Park. Tequila is, at its best, a New World riposte to the single-malt scotches and fancy brandies of the Old World: a carefully made and indigenous essence worthy of thoughtful appreciation. Its source plant is the agave, a succulent that is often supposed to be a kind of cactus but is really a member (along with garlic and onions) of the lily family.

Tres Agaves does have a tequila tasting lounge, and maybe tequila geeks really can get some pondering done in there — but maybe not. Tres Agaves isn’t about cozy spaces or nuanced discussions of a pedigreed drink; it’s a huge party full of sports whoops, big plates of likable food, and plenty of semiblitzed people. As parties go, it’s not bad at all. True, prices are on the high side; some of the dishes are ordinary; and most of the tequila goes into margaritas, which, for all their many innovations, are basically fruit drinks to get plastered with. But if, like me, you have a vestigial fondness for Chevy’s, Tres Agaves will seem pleasantly familiar.

The sense of déjà vu makes itself felt early, once you’re through the front door and past the host’s station, which is screened from the rest of the immense dining room by a half-wall that reminded me of an oversized ant farm, with stones instead of grains of sand (and, presumably, very large ants). The restaurant opens out around you like another country: a rolling plain of tables bounded by a line of booths, another dining area behind that, and, to the left, another province of tables. Far in the distance: a wall of exposed brick rises two stories high.

Now that the airlines have decided to start charging passengers for water, we must be extra grateful for those freebies that remain, such as chips and salsa in Mexican restaurants. Tres Agaves’ offering is especially good here: fresh, delicate, still-warm chips (as good as Chevy’s) along with two kinds of salsa, tomatillo and chipotle. The latter was deliciously smoky and bristling with chili heat but perhaps too salty. When we vacuumed up the first bowl of chips, another was swiftly brought, no questions asked.

Much of the food is exactly what you would expect to find in this kind of setting — guacamole ($8), for instance, served in a pestle-like bowl and notable not only for its price but for a freshness that goes a long way toward justifying it. The guac was a wonderful bright green (avocado flesh begins to turn a gray-brown on exposure to air, so color is an important index of freshness) and carried a definite chili kick. Queso fundido ($9.50) — a shallow bowl of melted white cheese suitable for scooping into warm corn tortillas or up with chips — was dotted with chunks of pork rather than chorizo, and while I love chorizo (in both its Mexican and Spanish guises), it can be overbearing. The pork here was better-behaved.

At $19, a plate of chiles rellenos seems a little pricey, but at least you get two peppers (poblanos) — big, fresh, and a vivid green — stuffed with corn kernels, mushrooms, zucchini slivers, and melted white cheese. Like Newfoundland dogs, the poblanos look formidable but are quite mild-mannered (i.e., no discernable chili heat). They’re also charred and peeled, not batter-fried, which makes them less caloric and greasy-looking.

A few of the dishes were news to me. One, costillas ($9.75), consisted of pork knuckles braised in an ancho chile broth, and the result was something like a spicy osso buco. (The meat disappeared considerably faster than the broth, which we mopped up with a trayful of warm corn tortillas.)

Another, carne en su jugo ($17.50), turned out to be a kind of beef and bean stew traceable to the Mexican state of Jalisco (which is, not coincidentally, the heart of tequila country). The meat was obviously an obstinate cut that was going to require some serious tenderizing; it had been carved into ribbons, then simmered with red beans in a broth of lime juice, cilantro, and onions, almost like a cooked beef ceviche. The final product was puckeringly flavorful and nearly too salty — I almost never say such a thing — but was redeemed, in the end, by the acidity of the citrus.

A common experience in Mexican restaurants (at least for me) is to have done so much front-loading on chips, salsa, and the sundry delights known as antojitos at the beginning of the meal that, approaching the end, the mere thought of dessert becomes unbearable. Particularly if the dessert is flan, which it often is. Mexican flans aren’t bad, but I’ve never had one to compare with a good crème caramel or panna cotta. A simple solution to this problem, if it is a problem, is to offer something else, and Tres Agaves does, several times over.

Nonetheless, we didn’t quite warm to a chocolate-cinnamon cake ($6), despite its reasonable price and its attractive disk shape. The cake appeared with suspicious swiftness after we’d ordered it, leading us to suppose it had been sitting around for who knew how long, just dying to be summoned — like an anxious junior-high-schooler at a dance. And it was dry — from undue refrigeration? My kingdom for a flan! *

TRES AGAVES

Dinner: Mon.–Wed., 5–10 p.m.; Thurs.–Fri., 5–11 p.m.; Sat., 3–11 p.m.; Sun., 3–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

130 Townsend, SF

(415) 227-0500

www.tresagaves.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Erraticism

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Rube Roy’s gonna enjoy this … That sweet bluegrass kitty I wrote about? We got in an argument and I was the one who had to go to the hospital. It bit me, the little love, and drew blood. Just a couple a drops, but still, I’m a stickler for details. I called the advice nurse to see if I should bring the poor, exposed kitten in for a blood test, since probably some of my cells got left in its mouth, and it might have had a small cut or cold sore in there, for all I knew.

Ironically, the nurse was more worried about me! In her opinion, since this was technically a wild animal, albeit a cute one, I was at risk for rabies, kitten scratch fever, and sundry heavy metal maladies. Infection … who knew kittens could be so dangerous?

"Are you behaving erratically?" the advice nurse asked. To be fair, there were other questions too, but this was the one that impressed me. Was I behaving erratically?

I had one of those blink-of-the-eye moments, where a sudden shift in perspective allows you to see your life objectively and with absolute clarity. No time passes, yet you take instantaneous and discerning stock of your entire past, present, future, and (if you’re me) present perfect progressive.

Four years I’ve been living with my insane cat in this falling-down shack in the woods next to my homemade falling-down chicken coop. I’ve been driving a perplexingly sporadic little blue pickup truck that isn’t a pickup truck and only sometimes has a horn, or headlights, or first gear, and also only sometimes goes.

I’ve been lying outside in my junkyard bathtub, plucking my boobs and wearing a cowboy hat. There’s a black rubber ducky with anarchist slogans floating between my feet, a jar of piss next to a bowl of popcorn outside the tub, and on a beautiful Tuesday morning, to give just one example, while folks half my age and even probably one or two people twice my age are stuck in offices being productive members of society, here I am in said tub talking on the phone with you, Ms. Advice Nurse, because I tried to help a kitten.

"Me? Behaving erratically?" I said, more than a little miffed at her insinuating tone. "I’m a consistent character, if you don’t mind! Did I bite a kitten? No. A kitten bit me. Am I behaving erratically? What about this little nefarious bastard?"

My chickens were lined up on a log, just 10 feet away, looking at me and screaming. Inside our shack, Weirdo the Cat was jumping up onto and off of our chair, repeatedly, trying to bat down song lyrics that were hanging like laundry on my indoor clothesline, swaying in the wind because the windows were open to air out something I’d done.

"What’s that noise?" the advice nurse asked. "And what was that word you used?"

"Chickens. Didn’t I tell you? I’m outside, in the tub," I said. "What? Nefarious? It means wicked, or evil."

"Hold on a minute," she said, and she went away and came back nine seconds later and said I had to go see the doctor. As soon as possible. I guess because chicken farmers don’t normally use the word nefarious.

So, well, so I was erratic. And scared now too, so I called in "bit" from work, and did go see my doctor. I hate heavy metal music … and am susceptible to suggestion. Even dumb ones, like I could die from this horrific kitten wound, which was on my index finger and looked like a little dot, or freckle, only smaller.

My doctor laughed her ass off. She did give me a vaccine shot against tetanus, whooping cough, and something else — not because I got poked by a kitty, but because I work around little baby human infants and shit, in addition to chickens, chicken wire, and nefarious wildlife. So here’s why I love my doctor, and not advice nurses: while I was there, I showed her some warts I have and she said, and I quote, "Put duct tape on them."

————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Cable Car Pizza. And if you believe that, I’ve got a cute little kitten for you. This place kinda sucks. Only reason we went was we had a band to feed, and Arinell wasn’t open yet. I started foaming at the mouth when they rang me up. Georgie Bundle said $26 was the going rate for a large with a couple of toppings. If so, they might consider putting that price on their board, which apparently hasn’t been updated since the 1980s. It took four people to take our order.

CABLE CAR PIZZA

Daily: 11 a.m.–3 a.m.

535 Valencia, SF

(415) 431-8800

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Millennium

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Considering that San Francisco is the center of the vegetarian universe and home to one of the country’s first, greatest, and most durable vegetarian restaurants — Greens — it has long seemed faintly odd to me that we don’t have more Greens-like places: restaurants that reconcile the vegetarian impulse (with its complex ecological and ethical components) and high style. We do have Millennium, at least, and maybe its sustained excellence has scared off would-be copycats and competitors.

Millennium isn’t as old as Greens, which turns 30 (!) next year, but it’s been around the block a few times — in fact, it’s even changed blocks. The restaurant opened in 1994 in a modest Civic Center setting; its neighbors then included, a few steps away, Ananda Fuara, a cheerfully plain spot whose curry-scented asceticism embodied what many people might have thought was a fundamental quality of vegetarian restaurants. But about five years ago, Millennium moved into much more sumptuous digs in the Hotel Savoy (now the Hotel California) at the edge of the theater district. In doing so, it displaced a French restaurant I’d long liked, Brasserie Savoy, but this sin can be pardoned, if only because there are plenty of good French restaurants in this city, but only one Millennium.

Millennium is special — but why? The setting is handsome, certainly — and not too different from its Brasserie Savoy days — but it doesn’t call attention to itself beyond a gracious spaciousness, gently partitioned with drapings of gauze and lit by netted cylinders that dangle from the high ceilings like hemp hams being air-cured. Noise is carefully controlled despite the hard tiles of the checkerboard floor. The space tells people: this is a nice place, a serious restaurant, and we want it to look good, but we spend most of our resources of money and energy on the food.

And the food is marvelous. It is elegant, nuanced, interesting, and is the kind of food you would be sorely tempted to offer to a meat-eater without disclosing there’s no meat in it — nor butter, eggs, cream, or any other animal product — to see if the meat-eater noticed. (My bet would be, probably not.) It’s also the kind of food you’d never make at home, even if you knew how; the wealth of emulsions, purées, essences, and flavored oils is a triumph of saucing and reflects an investment of time and skill that make the best restaurant kitchens what they are and reminds us that some gastronomic experiences remain unique to restaurants. (Millennium’s chef, Eric Tucker, has been running the kitchen from the beginning.)

One of the few dishes, perhaps the only one, I might have had a hope of recreating at home was a platter of seared romano beans ($5.75) — flat green beans — sprinkled with a mince of sundried tomato and dabbed with a rich black-olive tapenade. The gnocchi ($10.25), too, might just be within reach; these swam (with a cohort of similarly sized white beans) in a creamy morel mushroom sauce, with swatches of whole mushroom laid on top. (Morels are often described as resembling honeycombs, but they can also have the look of tiny brains.)

On the other hand, I would never attempt a dish like the black bean torte ($10.25), a disk-shaped layering founded on a whole-wheat tortilla and including caramelized plantains, a ladling of smoky black-bean puree, and some cashew sour cream. Rolling away from the torte’s front door was a carpet of habañero-pumpkin salsa verde, while a salsa of strawberries and jicama completed the ensemble. At last, somebody using the tartness of seasonal strawberries in a savory rather than sweet sense!

As at many places around town lately, Millennium’s menu offers excellent mix-and-match possibilities: you can make a nice little dinner for yourself with a couple of the smaller courses. But the main dishes do not disappoint; they’re substantial and satisfying, and because they don’t rely on meat, they’re neither heavy nor oversimple. While the best meatless cooking, for me, involves dishes that traditionally don’t have meat and don’t bother with substitutes, we were impressed by the meatiness of spice-rubbed tempeh torpedoes ($22.95), blackened and plated with smashed potatoes and a mélange of summer squashes in a lemon-caper sauce of cashew cream. Also good was a napoleon ($22.95) of polenta-crusted zucchini spears, surrounded by white beans, braised baby carrots, and a corn-zucchini hash in a coconut-milk sauce.

The flavor palette draws on a world of influences. The kitchen has been known to use zatar, a spice blend common in the Middle East, and the value of seasoning practices from south and southeast Asia is certainly recognized. But the dominant flavorings are from the Mediterranean basin. This is particularly true of the dessert menu — but this is particularly not a criticism of the dessert menu, since making any sort of dessert at all without cream or butter is a formidable undertaking, and making a dessert that would be exceptional at any restaurant is nothing short of astounding.

Millennium offers such a dessert. It is the lemon trifle ($8.25), a slice of rum-soaked walnut cake, topped with lemon cashew cream and capped off by a helmet of basil ice cream (also made with cashews) that reminded me of a pesto that had died, gone to heaven, and been reincarnated as a sweet. Its strange and alluring radiance half-obscured an equally worthy panna cotta ($8.25), a pearly disk of coconut milk and rosewater served with raspberries, an intense apricot emulsion, and a pat of chocolate-raspberry sorbet.

The patronage is surprisingly and pleasingly heterogeneous in age and affect. Having developed a mild case of hipster fatigue from Mission restaurants, I was relieved to see even younger people dressed nicely but unaffectedly at Millennium. They, like we, came for the food, stayed for the trifle, and left happy.

MILLENNIUM

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

580 Geary (in the Hotel California), SF

(415) 345-3900

www.millenniumrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Catlady

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Every year the feral cat no one can catch has a litter of kittens and one of them winds up knocking on my door, so to speak, saying, "Well? Am I cute, or what?" And before I can answer — answering rhetorical questions being one of my favorite pastimes — the little outcast (who is of course the very definition of cuteness), falls into a feigned faint on account of starvation, obliging me to go get milk.

Now, I’ve listened to plenty of bluegrass music in my day. Between mandolin and fiddle solos I have absorbed the important lessons of the frozen girl, the paperboy, and others like them. Orphaned outcasts require bowls of milk, a crust of bread, and/or blankets, or else they will be dead on your doorstep come morning.

And nobody wants that, except maybe music publishers. I myself am not a moral, nor even an ethical, person. If I live by a code, it’s my own, and it’s odd, idiosyncratic, and inconsistent. Nevertheless, mercy for those less fortunate than myself, provided they show up on my doorstep no later than the second verse, starving or freezing, and preferably with a slight wobble, the back of their hand to the forehead … this is programmed into my cells as surely as one, four, five.

Plus: kittens are cute. They just are. Case closed. And I say this at the risk of offending a large portion of my readership, Rube Roy Perrotta, a.k.a. Shortribs Mosel, my old-time barbecue and buffet podner back in Ohio. He hates when I write about children and bunnies and shit. Speaking of which, there will also be fallout from the four or five people who have written, over the years, in support of Poo Poo Pride Month.

Which this is.

I’m sorry. I still listen to punk rock. I still like to look at, talk about, and journalistically record my scatological masterpieces. It’s just that I have also come to be an unabashed appreciator of cuteness. Sensing that, kittens come to my door.

I can tell that this will be the defining challenge of the second half of my life: how to die without first becoming a cat lady. All the elements are in place: aloneness, eccentricity, poverty, slanty one-room shack in the woods, disorderliness of mind, unrefined tastes, shortness of grace, pretty big bluegrass collection, and a weird, open heart.

Against that mountain of impending insurmountability, there stands one ally in my corner, and it is, ironically, a cat. My cat. Weirdo the Cat, whose legendary disdain for all carbon-based life forms, even orphans, is most vehemently expressed when the life form looks a little like her. As long as I have Weirdo the Cat, I reckon, I am absolutely protected from catladyhood.

Weirdo is 14 or 15. That means she likely will only live, I realize, for another 15, 20 years tops. Yes, I know that’s twice as long as cats generally live, but I’m factoring in her supernatural capacity for cantankerousness and tenacity. Some people are just too frickin’ pissed off all the time to die, and Weirdo the Cat, believe me, is one of those people.

How lucky is that? Without any question of me taking in one or 10 of these adorable outcasts my big-hearted self, I can get on the phone and start making calls. I know a lot of people with kids. I know a lot of musicians who know a lot of bluegrass songs. I know a lot of bighearted people without Weirdo the Cat in their corner.

Ate a lot of salad last night, as always, with my chicken soup, which had even more vegetables in it. Peas, celery, carrots. I ate a mango. Popcorn goes good with books, too, then a midnight bowl of Flakes & Flax cereal. For breakfast: oatmeal with sunflower seeds, strawberries, and blueberries.

Coffee.

Do you, like me, like balance? Don’t you wish this cute column came with a picture? Do you? Close your eyes.

———————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Pho Hoa Lao #2. You know how I know? Because I ate there! Big, bright, empty place. The service is terrible, especially considering that there was no one else to serve. But the imperial rolls were pretty good, and both bowls of soup — the rare beef and beefball pho and the chicken soup — were very good. And it’s cheap, so …

PHO HOA LAO #2

333 10th St., Oakl.

(510) 763-8296

Daily, 8 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Jardiniere

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Fizz, like buzz, is evanescent by nature, so I was not totally surprised to see that the champagne-bubble lights that once hung in the air above the bar at Jardinière were nowhere to be seen when we stepped inside on a recent evening. Had they been removed as a discreet way of acknowledging the rapid defizzification of American life? Or just switched off? Yet whether the bubbles be gone or merely darkened, the dome overhead remains; it was originally meant to suggest an inverted champagne cup (itself a suggestion of Marie Antoinette’s breast) but, in its bubbleless state, it now suggests a classical aura. One thinks of the Pantheon or some venerable bank building — a structure whose design is meant to radiate confidence, strength, and maybe a hint of transcendence.

Jardinière (the name means "gardener" in French) turns 11 this fall, and while that’s hardly a pantheonic number, the restaurant for the most part has aged well. It helps, surely, that Pat Kuleto’s interior design was one of his more restrained; the elements of whimsy, such as the wavy ironwork railings that line the sweeping staircase to the balcony, are subtle, while the largest of those that originally weren’t (i.e. the bubbly dome) have been tuned to a lower frequency. The biggest star of the design was never frivolous, anyway; I refer to the cheese chapel on the main floor. Its glass door is still conspicuous behind the bar, and although the cheese course has become commonplace over the past decade, Jardinière was one of the first restaurants other than the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton to offer one, and still does.

Blessed are the noisemakers, for they’ve gone someplace else to eat, leaving Jardinière reasonably quiet and conversation-friendly. The restaurant’s floors are mostly carpeted, which is a vast asset in maintaining a livable balance between bustle and din. The balcony, furthermore, is a motherlode of richly upholstered booths that line the outer walls and are cozy little havens in which talk is easy, if not cheap.

Did I say not cheap? Nothing is cheap at Jardinière, and since we’re talking about one of the city’s premiere restaurants, we wouldn’t expect it to be. Nonetheless, prices for many of the main courses have risen into the mid–$30 range now, and that’s a lot more than just five or six years ago. On the other hand, it’s a lot less than what they’d be at a comparable place in New York City. How strange to think of San Francisco as being a relative bargain.

The blow-out-minded might spring for the chef’s tasting menu: $125 for seven courses, plus another $65 if you want the wine pairings. (The executive chef these days is Craig Patzer, and Reylon Agustin is chef de cuisine.) But one can make do quite nicely with the à la carte choices. There was an around-the-horn consensus in our little booth that a spring-into-summer soup ($10) of white corn, braised chard, shreds of duck confit, and tiny cubes of garlic crouton was undersalted, and our server seemed slightly startled by the request for a salt shaker. But the shaker was brought swiftly, therapy was applied, and the soup — made with a rich, almost geutf8ous chicken stock — came to life.

No such issue clouded a lovely salad of little gem lettuces ($10) whose bright green nooks and folds were laden with buttery avocado slices, radish coins, filets of anchovy, and crumblings of hard-boiled egg under a green peppercorn vinaigrette. It reminded me of an Easter-egg hunt, with delightful surprises tucked here and there.

In earlier years, the des Jardins cooking style made ample use of cream and butter, but those luxurious accoutrements seem less in evidence these days. Butterfat was definitely used to smooth the pat of mousseline potatoes that accompanied the Devil’s Gulch pork ($36) — two slices of roasted loin, two slices of garlicky sausage — along with a pair of deep-fried okra knobs and some braised baby carrots and pearl onions. But slices of Liberty duck breast ($37) were fanned out over a bed of plump farro grains enriched not with butter but slices of nectarine and a five-spice gastrique (which also formed an elegant glaze at the edges of the meat).

And a sautéed filet of bluenose sea bass ($36) came to rest like a piece of tender driftwood on a bright beach of crispy sunchokes, Lucques olives, and almonds lightly bathed in a lemon emulsion — possible butter there, but in a modest amount. The saucings generally suggested lean sophistication, and, in a mild anomaly, the main courses struck us as being at least as inventive and nimble as their smaller precursors.

The dessert menu has a greatest-hits flavor, with a strong subtheme of seasonality. Ingredients are immaculate and execution flawless. It’s hard to find a dessert menu now that doesn’t offer bread pudding; Jardinière’s ($10) was made from brioche and plated with a pat of muscat sorbet (which had a singular and haunting flavor) and an almost impossibly fine dice of candied white peaches. Chocolate mousse tarts, too, are hardly unusual, but Jardinière’s elongated wedge of hazelnut marjorlaine ($10) was distinguished by a smooth, dark-chocolate intensity subtly enhanced by espresso oil. For a seasonal touch, there was a cherry tart ($10), about the circumference of a golf ball and complete with latticework; it was escorted by a scoop of Tahitian vanilla gelato and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

In an important sense we know sublimeness, like art, by its flaws. One of our water glasses was cracked, and the service staff, while attentive and knowledgeable, occasionally seemed overeager to remove plates we weren’t sure we’d finished with. Jarring. I wondered if there were a connection.

JARDINIÈRE

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.; Sun.–Mon., 5–10 p.m.

300 Grove, SF

(415) 861-5555

www.jardiniere.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Well-muted noise, especially upstairs

Wheelchair accessible

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