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Restaurant Review

Pizza Place on Noriega

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Surfer dudes are people too, and they get hungry just like the rest of us. Surprisingly, San Francisco has such dudes; unsurprisingly, they tend to cluster at the city’s western edge, a land whose great highway is the Great Highway. Just beyond the Great Highway is the beach, pounded by surf, and surfer dudes (of any and all sexes) love the surf. Fog? This is irrelevant. Surfers have other issues to contend with, such as great whites.

The far Sunset District has its mild and fogless days, anyway — a blessing for those of us who sometimes bumble in from more sheltered corners of town, expecting the worst and swaddled in woolens — and the prosaically named Pizza Place on Noriega has been laid out with such beatific weather in mind. Although the restaurant’s glassy face peers north, its huge windows (including transoms) are filled with the light of the westering sun on spring evenings, and the woody interior (rather ski-lodgey, I thought) glows at this golden hour. Of course it rains in the Sunset too, and is foggy, and in these abysmal conditions we would have to trust to the warmth and perfume of the pizza oven, which dominates the unconcealed kitchen in its far corner of the double-width storefront space.

In my increasingly remote youth, pizza meant a visit to Shakey’s, whose amusements included a player piano. PPoN doesn’t have a player piano, but it does seem to attract small children — evidence that the city’s baby belt now extends well beyond Noe Valley. Despite the abundance of little ones, the restaurant doesn’t offer a kiddie menu; the tone throughout, in fact, seems pitched for young adults, from the jokey sign (courtesy of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer) just inside the front door — "I only eat pizza on days that end in ‘Y’" — to the huge cardboard profile of a Chevy Caprice mounted on the rear wall, with spinning tires that happen to be pepperoni pizzas.

Pabst is available on tap, which isn’t something you see too often out here, as opposed to in Milwaukee. And while the menu doesn’t offer pepperoni pizza per se, such a pie can be created from the list of DIY toppings. Pepperoni does turn up as a member of the ensemble in several of the house specialty pies, among them the Dimitri (with sausage, garlic, and mushrooms) and the Meathead (with sausage, salami, ham, and red onion).

We, however, could not resist the Spicoli ($15.99 for a 14-incher), topped with sausage and double cheese and named for — no, not an obscure pasta shape or a type of cured pork, but Jeff Spicoli, king of the surfer dudes and high priest of stoned slackerdom, as brilliantly depicted by Sean Penn in the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Spicoli is the simple declarative sentence of pizzadom: a nicely crisp crust that’s a bit thicker than vogue, plenty of fennel-scented sausage chunks, and a lava flow of melted cheese. I love cheese as a birthright and hesitate to say that there can be such a thing as too much of it. But, post-Spicoli, I wonder.

The kitchen also turns out some interesting side dishes, including cauliflower florets ($5) roasted with black olives, orange zest, chili flakes, and parsley for a real Mediterranean, even Sicilian, flair. Then there are the sweet potato steak fries ($7), their faint sweetness resembling the fried yucca root you sometimes find in Brazilian restaurants. To broaden their appeal, PPoN presents the fries with little cups of blue cheese dressing and buffalo sauce (tomato-based and sweet-hot, though more hot than sweet), along with piles of baby carrots and celery stalks. A family of dunkables.

And since even pizzas less cheesy than the mighty Spicoli can be overwhelming, the midday snacker can find an attractive array of sandwiches to choose from. These are called grinders and are available from noon until four in the afternoon. Perhaps their best characteristic is the bread they’re served on: torpedo-shaped, wonderfully soft rolls from Amoroso Bakery in Philadelphia.

The rolls are like focaccia rolls except not olive-oily. They’re also discreetly absorbent, an important consideration if one’s grinder is the housemade meatball version ($6.50). The meatballs themselves are veal-inflected, to judge by their subtle texture, and they’re bathed in plenty of tomato sauce, which could easily get all over everything but doesn’t because most of it settles into the bread. Some melted provolone provides an additional seal.

More complex is the uncomplex-sounding roast turkey grinder ($6.25). Plenty of meat here, along with mayo, mustard, and provolone — but also a puckery zing provided by slivers of red onion and chunks of pepperoncini. We’re a long way from sandwiches made from Thanksgiving leftovers.

As for the crowd: surfer-dudish, though a little older than Jeff Spicoli, and no sign of Sean Penn, but plenty of the aforementioned kids, dangling like chimps from chairs and the edges of tables. The surfer-dude community has discovered family values, apparently.

The pizzeria is just about a year old: a whippersnapper with sharp new wood flooring and, over the roof, a tell-tale curvy exhaust flue, in a faded part of town. It’s not yet the equal of the Richmond’s Pizzetta 211 and maybe it doesn’t mean to be. But friends and acquaintances of mine who live in the western Sunset (some surfer dudes, some regular dudes) are certainly eager for renewal in the restaurant scene — if not fast times, at least ambulatory ones.

PIZZA PLACE ON NORIEGA

Wed.–Thurs., Sun.–Mon., noon–10 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., noon–10:30 p.m.

3901 Noriega, SF

(415) 759-5752, www.pizzaplacesf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Cheerfully noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Loló

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The turkey is native to Mexico and one of the few animals to have been domesticated by the Indians. Turkey is central to Yucatecan cooking in particular — and by "turkey" I of course mean the bird, the roasted star of so many Thanksgivings, not the country east of Greece. No turkeys there (though plenty of lamb) or really any other connection to Mexico. Which makes Loló difficult to explain.

And what is Loló? A kind of soda? A male stripper? No, it’s a restaurant that opened last fall in the old Vogalonga (and before that, La Villa Poppi) space, with an important addition: the annexation of the storefront immediately to the east. So now, instead of seating fewer than a dozen, the place can accommodate … well, not mobs, but a couple dozen at least, if you factor in the bar. I loved the intimacy of Vogalonga and La Villa Poppi; eating in them was like having been invited into somebody’s home for dinner; only the nearby Gravity Spot was cozier. But Loló does breathe more easily with the added square footage. And the second dining room is done up in newspaper broadsheets that give the Mexican lottery results in mind-bending detail. This is the Mission the way it ought to be: sophisticated but playful and even a little silly, with whimsical improvisation more important than money and all the overdesigning money can buy.

A further point of interest is that Loló serves a kind of hybrid cuisine (I decline to describe it as "fusion") that adds Turkish flourishes and grace notes to what is basically a pan-Latin or nuevo Latino menu. The marriage might be an arranged one, but it reflects the realities of the restaurant’s ownership (the principals are Merdol Erkal and Jorge Martinez) as well as a surprising harmonic convergence between cuisines and cultures that would appear largely unrelated. A Turkey-Mexico combination might be something you’d expect to see in a World Cup soccer final, not on your plate. It’s worth remembering, however, that Mexico’s mother, Spain, was not unfamiliar with the Ottoman Turks. Their relationship might be described as peppery.

Pepper is a binding agent at Loló. The food as it emerges from the kitchen doesn’t lack liveliness, but if you want to do some tweaking, you’ll be given a small dish of crushed black Turkish pepper to brighten up the party. Even if you don’t feel the need, you’ll find plenty of pepper on your plate anyway — in the oily sauce ladled over octopus tiradito ($8), a version of carpaccio. The combination of pepper flakes, lemon juice, and olive oil lent this dish a real presence, and the slices of octopus were too paper-thin to be tough. But the dish was served a little too cold to be fully awake. It was as if it had been plated well ahead of time, then grabbed from the refrigerator.

Just right, temperature-wise, was a handful of what the menu called "dumplings" ($8): fried, empanada-like pockets filled with a mince of huitlacoche (a truffle-like fungus that grows on corn) and served with a pot of thinned ricotta cheese for dipping and a few ribbons of roasted yellow pepper for color and a slight smoky sweetness. An arugula salad ($7) was a flea market of colors, tastes, and textures, a jumble of apple slices, pine nuts, shreds of cherry and crumblings of feta cheese, all drizzled with a deep-voiced orange muscat vinaigrette.

The bigger plates aren’t quite full-size, and — here is a sizable difference from typical Latin-American restaurant practice — they aren’t stuffed to the rafters with starches, either. The only starch on a plate of "three meat bites" ($12) was the trio of grilled bread spears the meat patties were seated on. Those patties, incidentally, were the most purely Turkish items we were able to find on the menu. They could easily have passed for kofte. The accompanying mushroom side sauce seemed neither Turkish nor Mexican — French, if anything.

Seafood sopes ($13), on the other hand, did seem Mexican. This dish consisted of a pair of sopes — disk-shaped corn cakes with a lip, like shortcakes from strawberry-filled summers of yore — topped with a mélange of sautéed bay scallops and shrimp and pipings of guacamole and sour cream. The Mexican bistros we don’t have enough of could probably survive by offering not much more than this dish alone. The braised shreds of red cabbage on the side were a bracingly vinegary, colorful bonus.

The chocolate fondue dessert is a staple at fondue restaurants, where many of us tend to eat too much anyway. Loló, in keeping with its trim-waistline philosophy, takes a quasi-minimalist tack; its version ($7) consists of a modest amount of good dark chocolate melted in a chafing dish, and a fistful of blueberries, raspberries, and squares of banana bread for dunking. Because fondue can’t be gobbled down but must be eaten rather painstakingly, jab by jab, one has the impression of eating more than what is actually being eaten — and is satisfied accordingly. At the end, we were given two spoons to finish off the remnant of the chocolate — about a spoonful each, like a kiss goodnight before heading off to dreamland, where sooner or later we all win the lottery.

LOLÓ

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

3230 22nd St., SF

(415) 643-LOLO (5656)

Wine and beer

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

L’Ardoise

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The French love their chalk, and no wonder. Chalk makes possible some of France’s most prized wines, from the sparkling cuvées of Champagne to the wonderful, minerally whites of the Loire Valley. It’s also useful for writing on chalkboards, which tend to be ubiquitous in French restaurants and on sidewalk sandwich boards outside of same. One of the great pleasures of Paris is scanning these boards while strolling the city, pondering the plats du jour and formules as mealtime approaches.

The French word for "chalkboard" — actually, "the chalkboard" — is l’ardoise, and, in a slight slap of irony, there is no sandwich-style chalkboard on the sidewalk in front of L’Ardoise, which opened late in the winter in the old Los Flamingos space in Duboce Triangle. There are no sandwiches on the menu either, for that matter, which isn’t surprising since the restaurant only serves dinner. There is, however, a sizable chalkboard inside, hanging on a wall not quite opposite the bar. The board lists the day’s specials, and if it’s too awkward to crane your neck so you can read it, you can count on your server to report its offerings with efficiency.

The cheerful starkness of Los Flamingos has given way to the look of a fin de siècle literary salon. The floors are covered in claret-and-gold floral carpeting; the walls are a throbbing red, and the furnishings emphasize dark wood. It would not be difficult to imagine Proust in the next room, scribbling away. Of course, there is no next room. There’s just the kitchen, presided over by Thierry Clement, whose pedigree includes a recent stint at the enduringly fine Fringale. If his first menus at L’Ardoise are more neighborhoody than Fringale’s — which is, after all, a city-center restaurant with a broad and venerable reputation — they do as ably answer the urge to eat.

L’Ardoise, then, is the comfy local bistro this arboreal part of town has been waiting for. Its obvious near relations are Le Zinc (in Noe Valley), Le P’tit Laurent (in Glen Park), and Zazie (in Cole Valley), and it certainly matches up well against any of them. It helps that bistro cooking is a well-established culinary genre, and Clement knows the drill. But I did wonder why there was no pot of Dijon mustard to accompany the otherwise appealing, if mainstream, charcuterie plate ($9): an array of two squares of pâté (one made with liver), a shower of oily, garlicky saucisson coins, and a jumble of green and black olives, cornichons, and caperberries. The lack of mustard wasn’t fatal, but it was noticeable.

Better was a shallow bowl of tiger-prawn ravioli ($10) in an herbed cream sauce. Cream can be a silent killer, like being smothered by soft white pillows, but here the prawns were big, sweet, and juicy enough to assert themselves through both the butterfat and the free-form drapings of pasta.

Seafood gratin ($19) was very much like a seafood stew or even a bouillabaise, only less moist. The oblong serving crock swelled with sea scallops, prawns, halibut cubes, and diced potatoes, all of them toe-deep in a broth of white wine and herbs enlivened by a broad anise hint of Pernod (or some other kind of pastis). A sprinkling of bread crumbs had been baked on top for the gratin effect. What gave pause wasn’t the dryness but the undersalting; Chief Many Phones had to apply several jolts from the table shaker to revive the patient.

Steak frites is a bistro standard, but Clement’s kitchen isn’t above having some fun with it. The steak here turned out to be a chunk of seared Black Angus filet mignon ($27), plated with a heap of confit potatoes (basically homemade chips), a woodpile of steamed green beans (too broad to be proper haricots verts, so Blue Lake, perhaps), and some nicely dressed mésclun. Despite the reassuring nomenclature, I had doubts about the beef before it arrived; "filet mignon" is a grand name but often dry and tasteless in fact. Not this time.

Our side order of sautéed spinach ($5) reached the table in a miniature Le Creuset crock, red enamel on cast iron, complete with top: a nifty flourish in the manner of Fleur de Lys, and the spinach was well-seasoned, although whenever you’re eating low-fat spinach you can’t help but think wistfully about the times you’ve eaten creamed spinach.

Pears: as much as I like them fresh (at least if they’re crisp), I am left disappointed by most pear desserts. Pears poached in red wine? Pass. I would rather have a glass of Poire William (the pear eau de vie), or, better, armagnac. But L’Ardoise’s kitchen has come up with a splendid use for the pear: It’s the star of a tarte tatin ($7), a disk about the size one of those single-serve cheesecakes, with the pear slices caramelized to a voluptuous amber. They’re neatly arranged atop (or, originally, underneath, since tartes tatins are baked pastry side up, then inverted for serving) a layer of pastry we found to be undistinguished even beyond its thinness. Pastry should be flaky, not tough. But at least there wasn’t much of it, and the pears were absolutely winning.

L’Ardoise doesn’t seem to have suffered from the lack of sidewalk sandwich boards. The place is already jammed in the evenings, with well-dressed groups of thirty- and fortysomethings waiting just inside the door for tables. The door has an annoying way of flopping open, so if you’re averse to drafts, ask for a table well inside. It’s nice and toasty under the chalkboard.

L’ARDOISE

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.

151 Noe, SF

(415) 437-2600

www.lardoisesf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Muffled loudness

Wheelchair accessible

Prana

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Prana has a soundstage look of the sort we haven’t seen in restaurants around here since the late 1990s, when Entros and Mercury lived their firefly-brief lives. The main dining room is a vast hall whose ceiling is supported by two parallel columns of whitewashed pillars. With some flagons of mead and a clutch of bit actors in Viking period costume, it’s easy to imagine a scene from Beowulf being filmed there — maybe an early moment in which the warriors are sleeping one off while Grendel comes creeping from the bog.

But no. Prana, despite dim lighting and shadows high in the corners of the great room, is too festive for such gory spectacle. Its incipient energy is that of a nightclub or discotheque, and late at night it actually does become a club called Temple. This isn’t surprising, since the space for more than a decade was home to DV8, a haunt of international reputation. (A few years on, toward the end of the millennium, it became Mercury, an unforgettable hall of glass and mirrors that lasted only a few weeks despite serving pretty good food.)

Chef James Jardine’s cooking, pan-Indochinese with a dash of Filipino, is elegant, stylish, and imaginative. It also tries harder than it needs to; it’s overachiever food, determined to be stimuutf8g at all times. Perhaps the kitchen feels it’s in competition with the relentlessly antic setting. Prana starts tugging at your sleeve and winking at you before you even get inside; the main doors are a set of funhouse mirrors that make you look skinny going in and fat going out. Once inside, you’ll find the music thumps steadily and rather loudly from clusters of huge speakers mounted overhead. As if that weren’t enough, there’s a huge display screen mounted behind the bar. The whole experience seems to be tuned for restless young people with short attention spans who might panic at any interruption in the stream of external sensation.

In such an environment, we can’t really blame the food for raising its voice a little. And it does, practically from the first moment, when the server appears with a basket full of deep-fried wonton skins and toasted pita triangles, along with a trio of chutneys: chipotle, cilantro-mint, and tomato. Certainly there’s more drama here than we would expect in a simpler, more traditional presentation of bread and butter or olive oil, and we found the chutneys to be excellent. But neither the wonton skins nor the pita triangles were of much use in dipping or sopping, and the result, for us, was a tablecloth decorated with dribblings ("It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting," my friend said) before we’d even ordered.

No spattering marred our enjoyment of spicy peanut soup ($9), weighted with basmati rice and shreds of roast chicken and amended with a pesto of vanilla bean and habañero chili that talked a big game but didn’t bring much. It didn’t need to; the basic soup was irresistible in a satay-sauce way, and a sprig or two of cilantro would have been an elegant, less effortful, finish.

The kitchen also cannily reinvented the lumpia ($10) — a Filipino cousin to the egg roll — by stuffing it with ahi tuna and serving it with a dipping sauce of garlic vinegar softened by açai, the Brazilian rainforest berry renowned for its antioxidant properties. Here the berry contributed mainly a pretty bluish-red color, while the tuna’s creamy sweetness made an attractive contrast with the deep-fried skins of the lumpias.

Cooking a lamb shank ($22) in a Filipino adobo marinade of vinegar, garlic, soy sauce, and peppercorns was another fine idea executed with high skill. The resulting meat was lightly crisped at the edges but tender enough to fall off the bone. The shank was plated with a disk of forbidden rice, like pebbles of porphyry arranged into some kind of monument, and a heap of baby mustard greens for discreet healthfulness.

Vegetarian choices are lively. A curried vegetable potpie ($16) was a shade sweet for my taste, though the pastry itself, with its Shar-pei folds and Hershey’s-kiss spire, was spectacular. The filling’s sweetness was cut a bit by the sharp salad of peppercress and halved cherry tomatoes on the side.

Better-balanced was a portobello mushroom "scaloppine" ($16). The cap of the fungus had been coated with rice flour, which turned an appealing crunchy gold in the sauté pan. The heat released the mushroom’s juices, as if it were a piece of steak. The cap was presented as a fan of slices, and the juices mixed with the chili-lime butter to make a slightly thickened sauce. The rest of the story was a small hedge of grilled Chinese broccoli and a neat square of polenta, wearing a strip of nori like a prize ribbon.

No matter what hoops a kitchen has set itself to jump through, there are certain dishes that don’t need to be tinkered with, and one is crème brûlée ($7). But Prana tinkered, on a theme of bananas, and this turned out to mean not a banana-flavored custard but three thin strips of banana laid over the custard in lieu of the standard cap of caramelized sugar. Taste: good, but the banana strips were tough and unwieldy. More texturally pleasing was a shortbread tart ($8) filled with lemon curd and topped with a royal flush of ripe mango slices. They were soft, and soft was good. Now about the music …

PRANA

Dinner: Tues.–Fri., 5:30–10 p.m.

Sat., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

540 Howard, SF

(415) 978-9942, ext. 319

www.pranasf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Alembic

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If Cheers had served good food instead of cheap beer and persiflage, Dr. Frasier Crane might never have fled to Seattle to start anew. Also, the place might have come to resemble the Alembic, a smallish installation along upper Haight that has been distilled from that nearby citadel of suds, Magnolia Pub and Brewery, now an institution. Unlike Cheers, the Alembic isn’t in a basement; it occupies a storefront that was most recently home to Maroc. But, like its distant sitcom relation, it does have a bar scene that radiates human energy, not to mention a bar that looks the way a bar should: busy and used.

The bar is a spectacle, but it isn’t there for show. The bottles arranged on the high wall shelves aren’t all perfectly turned so the label faces outward, and they’re not all in immaculate rows. This is because the bartenders are constantly reaching for them, then reaching for measuring cups, strainers, napkins, and glasses for the whipping up of various libations, from simple to complex. (There’s wine too, and if you’re a fat guy named Norm, you can even get a beer.) The action is blurring but precise, and Sam Malone probably wouldn’t last five minutes under the strain. Like so many other food industry jobs, bartending is a game for the young.

Speaking of the young: there are tons of them at the Alembic, and not just behind the bar. The clientele has a modern Mission District look, yet the Mission, for all its cultural variety, has no street to match Haight Street, no comparable collection of goofballs, edge-dwellers, hustlers, dropouts, and misfits prowling the sidewalks, or just sitting on them. But that’s outside, and inside … well, out is out and in is in, as Kipling might have put it, and never (or at least hardly ever) the twain shall meet. Getting to the Alembic can be an excellent adventure, but once you’re inside, you might as well be at 16th and Valencia streets.

Because the front of the small space is dominated by the shrine-like bar, it’s possible to overlook the dining area toward the rear. Here people are eating food, and it’s surprisingly sophisticated food — sophisticated for a bar, sophisticated for the Haight, which despite or because of its international reputation is a little short on interesting places to eat.

Let’s say you were interested in a dish with truffles, for instance, and you could only look on Haight Street. You might try RNM, which is probably the best restaurant on either Lower or Upper Haight. But the Alembic has truffled dishes; one is the macaroni and cheese ($9), which carries the definite black-earth perfume of truffles as relayed through infused oil. The mac and cheese is also made with Gruyère (another discreet flash of toniness) and, we thought, a bit of bacon or pancetta for some meatiness. If the truffle is an incitement to class warfare, how clever to put its essence in dish that’s the very picture of Middle American modesty.

Truffling the gnocchi ($9) might be riskier — the word is harder to pronounce, for one thing. But the truffle infusion goes nicely with the hedgehog mushrooms nestled next to the gnocchi pillows themselves, while splintered asparagus stalks bring some green and speak of spring.

The menu is notably vegetarian-friendly, even beyond the gnocchi. The kitchen performs discreet wonders with that revolting winter beauty, the beet, by turning both red and yellow examples into carpaccio ($6) and topping each slender, glistening, geutf8ous coin with a dab of goat cheese and sprig of watercress. And let’s give some extra credit for the presentation, which is on a slightly concave porcelain rectangle like those used for serving sushi rolls. (All the plates and platters are handsome, incidentally. Very unbarlike.)

Then there are the little snacks, or nibbles, among them slightly sweet nuts roasted with sage ($3) and a cone of excellent herbed frites ($5) spiked with lemongrass and accompanied by with a small tub of chipotle aioli. We found the nuts underpowered; they could have used some salt and maybe some chili heat to balance the sweetness. But the fries were svelte, crisp, and sublime.

They also went nicely with one of the menu’s handful of meaty dishes: Moroccan-style sliders ($10), halves of a beautifully juicy, medium-rare lamb burger served on toast points, with harissa aioli, roasted peppers, and tapenade. The burger doesn’t come with the fries, but you might think about having them together, in part because burgers cry out for fries, and if you’re interested in a burger you’re probably pretty hungry, and this burger isn’t that big. A man in full dinner mode could easily eat three, and that would put the tab at a Manhattan-ish $30.

If that seems a little(or a lot) steep, you could go to Plan B: dessert. No one would ever mistake the Alembic for Sweet Inspiration, but the kitchen does manage to turn out some respectable confections. A strawberry beignet ($7), for example, turns out to be an actual freshly fried doughnut, complete with a tight hole in the middle, but the strawberry refers only to the pat of strawberry ice cream on top, which was a pretty pink but too sweet. Better balanced are the troika of s’mores ($7), with homemade marshmallow, lengths of fresh banana on top, and a chocolate hazelnut sauce slithering around the plate. The sauce is tasty but difficult to eat, since the s’mores themselves aren’t very absorbent and have a way of disappearing in a single, gratifying bite. A smaller s’more need not be a lesser s’more.

ALEMBIC

Dinner: nightly, 5 p.m.–midnight

Lunch: Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.

1725 Haight, SF

(415) 666-0822

www.alembicbar.com

MC/V

Full bar

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

CAV Wine Bar & Kitchen

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› paulr@sfbg.com

You could, if you were inclined, step into CAV Wine Bar & Kitchen and do nothing but drink wine. The establishment opened on mid-Market in 2005 as a wine bar, after all, and the wine list is so extensive that it’s actually presented as a bound volume. I’ve seen less impressive Bibles. But you could also, if you were inclined, step into CAV and eat food while not drinking wine, and you wouldn’t necessarily think you were missing out. Of course, the people at CAV don’t want you to sunder food and wine, since the whole point of the restaurant is to bring them together — with wine first among equals, for once. But it’s a tribute to chef Michael Lamina’s kitchen that the wine-friendly food can stand on its own. This is a nice corollary to one of my own cherished postulates: that many food-friendly wines are quite good on their own.

The name suggests a certain Iberian romance. It falls just one letter short of cava, the Spanish word for Spanish sparkling wines made in the méthode champenoise and also for "dig," with an implication of caves and candlelight. There is no dinner quite so atmospheric as one held in a candlelit underground chamber at a winery — and unfortunately CAV isn’t underground. It is narrow and deep, though, with a zigzag floorplan and a large multilight window at the very back of the rear dining room. The view through that window is of the famous alley where Zuni Café (which is next door) used to do its charcoal grilling nearly 30 years ago.

And the food does have its Spanish touches. The wine-friendly cuisines tend to come from the wine-producing parts of the globe, and this means, heavily, the Mediterranean basin and its California cousin. But we mustn’t forget Germany, which produces many lovely, if floral, white wines and some reds too — not to mention spaetzle, the butter-fried noodle squiggles that, in CAV’s rendition ($6) are so delicious that we actually asked for seconds, long after we’d run out of other dishes we might have spooned the spaetzle alongside. Spaetzle would go very nicely with some grilled bratwurst, but at CAV it also makes a fine starter or share plate or just a little something extra to fill in the corners.

As for Spanish accents: we noted them in baby octopi ($13) expertly braised (meaning neither mushy nor tough) in a smoked-paprika broth littered with shavings of fennel root and fried chickpeas. Smoked paprika is possibly the most distinctive of the Spanish flavorings, whether in the cured pork sausage called chorizo or in a seafood dish, as here.

There was also a Castilian note in a salad of arugula leaves ($9), tossed with sections of satsuma mandarin oranges, almonds, shavings of Zamorano cheese (a hard, Parmesan-like sheep’s-milk cheese produced on Spain’s central plateau), and saba, a balsamic vinegar–like dressing. (Bear in mind that Italy and Spain spent centuries ruling parts of each other.)

In keeping with CAV’s wine-bar roots, portions are not huge, and even the big plates, such as beef tenderloin ($25), are on the modest size. But for any number of reasons, this is fine; it helps restrain both expense and gluttony, it encourages exploration and sharing, and it tends to keep food and wine in balance. The tenderloin, a boneless but juicy piece of meat, had been pan-roasted to the rare side of medium rare, plated in a pool of jus-like marrow foam (foam! reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated) beside little heaps of blanched haricots verts and black trumpet mushrooms, then topped with a purée of caramelized onion. Earthy would be a succinct description of this dish; also autumnal — perfect in a city of eternal autumn.

Not all the culinary influences are Mediterranean-derived nor otherwise associated with the lands of wine. We came across a plate of sashimi ($9) made from tai snapper (a sea bream from New Zealand), arranged atop a set of kohlrabi-stuffed spring rolls that looked like Tiparillos, and, for some color, slivers of kumquat and squirts of arugula puree. Beer would have been fine here, but so was a small glass of Schmelz grüner veltliner. (As is the case at several other wine-intensive spots around town, wines by the glass are available as 2.5 ounce tastes or 5 ounce glasses. Two cheers for sobriety.)

Desserts were startlingly good and not pricey by recent standards. There was a sniff of disdain from across the table at the prospect of a butterscotch tartlet ($7.50), since there are those who don’t care for butterscotch. I’m not one of them; I’ve always responded to what seems to me to be a simple and irresistible blending of vanilla into caramel. The creamy butterscotch filling of the tartlet was that, yes, but it also had … liquor breath! Someone had discreetly spiked it with Scotch whisky, and eating it was like giving a peck on the cheek to a boozy but lovable old aunt on Christmas Eve.

The chocolate–peanut butter cookies ($5 for three) arrived on the wings of higher expectations, and they did not disappoint. They resembled Oreos, except with an intense peanut-butter mousse as a filling rather than the sugary white stuff in the commercial kind. And as if that weren’t enough, the kitchen threw in a bonus: a scattering of candied peanuts, like peanut brittle without the brittle. We dug that.

CAV WINE BAR & KITCHEN

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–11 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., 5:30 p.m.–midnight

1666 Market, SF

(415) 437-1770

www.cavwinebar.com

Wine and beer

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

SPQR

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If all roads lead to Rome — or once did — what does this tell us about the Eternal City? That it has terrible traffic? Yes, eternally — since ancient times. That the city was and is an international city? Yes, again, though more so in yesteryear, when the imperial Romans called the Mediterranean Sea mare nostrum and grain grown in Egypt was shipped more than a thousand miles by boat to feed the capital’s million or so citizens. In our locavore times, it is startling to think that a metropolis two millennia ago depended on such a sprawling foodshed.

At SPQR, a restaurant that opened late last year in the old Chez Nous space on Fillmore, the Roman feeling is more intimate — and maybe that means more modern, since today’s Italy no longer has its fingers in a host of imperial pies and Rome itself owes its international stature largely to its position as seat of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, the city is an Italian city, and its food is Italian food, with bits and influences taken from here and there across the peninsula. (The letters of the restaurant’s name, incidentally, stand for "Senatus Populusque Romanus," meaning "the Senate and people of Rome.")

SPQR’s powers that be, including executive chef Nate Appleman, have applied to the new restaurant the ethic they successfully introduced at their first one, A16 in the Marina. The ethic involves, in true European fashion, elements of preservation and innovation; A16 brought the flavors of Naples and Campania, including first-rate pizza, into the space once occupied by Zinzino, a creditable ristorante-pizzeria in its own right, and now SPQR succeeds Chez Nous, a pioneer in global tapas (with a slant toward Provence and the Maghrib), with a Roman-inflected menu that’s very heavy on fabulous small plates. They’re not called tapas, and since tapas fatigue set in some time ago around here, this is probably a wise choice.

These small courses are the heart of the menu and are arrayed under three rubrics: cold, hot, and fried. If ordered separately, they’re $7 each, but you get three for $18 and five for $28, and because they’re uniformly excellent, these bulk deals are good ones. (By small, by the way, I mean to imply "shareable," not "tiny.") The only small dish I found even slightly submemorable was a plate of crostini served with ricotta cheese and a pooling of peppery olio nuovo; the overall effect was gentle, with some crunch from the bread rounds and a hint of bite from the olive oil, like a teething puppy working a pinkie finger, and those little stimuli probably would have been enough if the other dishes hadn’t been so impressive.

Fried means, in several cases, "deep-fried," and this can be among the guiltier of pleasures if it gets out of hand. Deep-frying didn’t hurt bocconcini, gumball-sized blobs of mozzarella cheese, but it didn’t add much, either, beyond producing a likeness to the risotto fritters known as arancini; the spicy tomato sauce for dipping was more tomato than spicy, but it carried a sufficient voltage of tartness to help cut the fat.

Chicken livers, on the other hand, benefited from the same treatment. Deep-frying helped moderate their blood-iron gaminess. (The Romans are said to be organ-meat aficionados, but I would say this is true throughout Italy and the rest of Europe, where for centuries meat has been expensive and hard to come by, and all parts of a food animal were and are appreciated, honored, and used.)

While beans are most closely associated with Tuscany, they turn up throughout Italian cooking, and if it turns up somewhere in Italian cooking, sooner or later it will turn up in Roman cooking. SPQR offers cellini beans — a broad, white variety, similar to cannellini — topped with a reddish soffrito of ground pork that resembles a cross between (Mexican) chorizo and Bolognese sauce. The kitchen also handles a pair of problem children with considerable skill: black kale is sautéed to tenderness — but not mushiness — with broccolini, golden garlic slivers, and enough red chili flakes to make a real entrance, while Brussels sprouts are split like baby artichoke hearts and flash-fried with garlic, capers, parsley, and plenty of lemon to tame the cabbage beast.

The signature Roman pasta sauce is amatriciana, which is typically a combination of onions, tomatoes, smoked pancetta, and a suggestion of chile heat, and it is usually tossed with fat, hollow string pasta, either bucatini or perciatelli. SPQR’s version ($12) uses red instead of yellow or white onion, substitutes guanciale (cured pork cheek) for the pancetta, and leaves you to choose either spaghetti or rigatoni (both housemade) as your pasta. Choose either: you will be happy. The sauce is intense but civilized. If you like your pasta sauces creamy, you’re also likely to be happy with the carbonara sauce ($12), made with guanciale, crushed black peppercorns, and pecorino cheese. Like gelato, it draws its richness from egg yolks.

Since Italian food isn’t known for its spiciness, I was struck by the heat of the kale and amatriciana dishes. But, duly struck, I was less surprised by the "spicy chocolate" dessert ($7.50), chocolate mousse studded with Calabrian chiles and presented in a hot-chocolate cup under a dapper cap of whipped cream. The chile effect was mild, not much more than a tingle, but it did enhance the chocolate — maybe just through simple stimulation.

A similar enhancement: the spooning of sugared bitter-orange zest over a thick slice of ricotta torte ($7.50) with crema fresca. The torte and its cream shawl were rich but a little shy, while the zest on its own would have been too sharp. But together, they are a simple symphony.

The restaurant doesn’t take reservations. So: expect big crowds, of friends and countrymen, if not Romans.

SPQR

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1911 Fillmore, SF

(415) 771-7779

www.spqrsf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Piqueo’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When Carlos Altamirano opened his first restaurant, Mochica, on a drab block of Harrison Street in SoMa more than four years ago, I thought: well, Peruvian, that’s interesting, but how good could it be if he had to put it there? Then I went and found out how good it could be: way good, extraordinary, probably the best Peruvian food in the city. Few pleasures are as exquisite as that of finding one’s expectations exceeded.

And yet, in unlooked-for success, danger can lurk, too. If your first restaurant turns out to be marvelous, people will expect your other restaurants to be marvelous, maybe even more marvelous. The word, from two summers ago, that Altamirano would be taking over the original Moki’s space in Bernal Heights to open a Mochica sibling wasn’t surprising, but it did lead me to suppose that the new place would be at least as good as the older one and, at the same time, wonder if and how it could be. Would it be disappointing if Piqueo’s, the new restaurant, were only as good as Mochica, not better?

One way out of this gilded conundrum might be to serve a slightly different sort of food at each locale. Altamirano describes the menu at Piqueo’s as "contemporary" Peruvian cuisine — "traditional" Peruvian, "with a California twist." (Mochica, incidentally, serves "fusion Peruvian cuisine," according to the Web site.) The description is fair enough in that vague, diplomats-having-frank-discussions way, but it does not begin to capture the wonder of the sauces, which, in their variety, sophistication, and vividness, are so good we actually requested glasses to drink them from, once we’d run out of sopping and soaking material. If you associate sauces with a certain sort of snooty French cooking, you will find revelation at Piqueo’s.

The menu card itself is an unwieldy artifact. It’s oversized — it could pass as a modestly shrunken reproduction of the Declaration of Independence — and like that worthy document it’s filled with text, in small, difficult-to-read lettering. One evening we had to whip out our Peepers (those wallet-size magnifying glasses, so no, it’s not what you think) to be able to read the menu. Rarely do you see so many choices except at Chinese restaurants, and when a kitchen must turn out such a broad range of dishes, you wonder if it isn’t trying to spread too little butter over too much bread.

But you don’t get bread at Piqueo’s: You get little dishes of crispy, spicy chickpeas, tossed with scallion mince and some mild white vinegar. They’re no good for sauce reclamation, but they are addictive. You empty the dish and another soon appears, and by the time you’ve emptied that, you are presented with a platter of seviche, maybe the mixto version ($17), an embarrassment of peeled shrimp, sea scallops, mussels, yam chunks, kernels of Peruvian corn, and a few slivers of fresh ginger bathing in a glow-in-the-dark sauce of lime juice and two kinds of chili pepper, rocoto and aji limo. The sauce was almost like a distillate of V-8 juice, and when the seafood was gone, we poured the remnant into a cordial glass and made a small toast to the next course.

After such puckering heat, a bit of aromatic sweetness is indicated. How about a salad of quinoa ($9) — the grain of the Inca — perfumed with mint? I was expecting something like couscous, but the salad was a real salad: a bowlful of mixed greens, with the cooked quinoa scattered like cheese crumblings over the lettuces and a lively but well-mannered supporting cast of halved black olives, red bell pepper julienne, and more Peruvian corn kernels tossed into the mix. Vinaigrette: lush and balsamicky, a hint of caramel sweetness.

As familiar as Peruvian corn (a.k.a. cancha) may have become in recent years, at least to those who haunt Peruvian restaurants, its appearances have remained confined (in my experience) to off-the-cob bit parts. But Piqueo’s offers cancha steamed on skewered cobs ($9) in a fabulous, turmeric-yellow aji sauce. The corn itself was a little bland (though it doesn’t stick in your teeth the way the ordinary kind can), but the sauce was so good that we pleaded for, and were brought, a plate of toasted baguette rounds to clean it up with.

Bread recurred (in a kind of late-inning rally) as part of a fried-smelt sandwich ($9) enlivened by sprigs of fresh cilantro. Smelt is a fresh-water fish not often seen in restaurants around here — I associate it with the Great Lakes and early-spring fishing expeditions by night along Chicago’s lakefront — but there is a variety native to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, so it’s not necessarily an exotic delicacy.

Also not exotic delicacies, but delicious all the same, are calamari tubes ($19), closed off at one end like pastry piping bags, filled with chorizo, and grilled. The tubes (which look like elongated dreidels) are plated with broad, flat white beans, a jumble of watercress, and yet another wondrous sauce, this one called chupe.

If there is a slight letdown, it has to do with the dessert menu. Many of the usual suspects can be found here, from alfajores (the little cookies) to suspiro to passion-fruit mousse. After some squabbling ("Gentlemen, draw your Peepers"), we settled on the chocolate cake ($10) with ice cream. The ice cream, made with lucuña, a tropical fruit native to Peru, was a pretty orange-pink color but disappointingly granular, which suggested it had melted and been refrozen. The cake, on the other hand, a disk held within a rim of crushed nuts, was outstanding: a mousse cake, smooth and dense as night. No sauce needed.

PIQUEO’S

Daily, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

830 Cortland, SF

(415) 282-8812

www.piqueos.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Pacific Catch

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When a service station is torn down to make way for an art gallery, we cheer. When the art gallery folds and is succeeded by a restaurant, we shuffle our feet uneasily. At least they won’t be tearing the building down to bring back the service station — but art galleries are harder to find than restaurants.

Pacific Catch is a pretty good seafood restaurant in a neighborhood already chockablock with restaurants. The prices are moderate, the service is friendly and efficient, the food is good, and the look is handsome in a not-overbearing way. But those who remember that the space was home for several years to the Canvas Gallery — a blend of art forum, café, restaurant, and meetinghouse, with a general university-town flavor — won’t recognize much when they step inside. The interior floor plan has been heavily reworked: the central coffee and pastry bar, once surrounded by naves hung with paintings and photographs, has been replaced by tables, chairs, and booths. There is also now (at the far side of the restaurant as you enter) a shiny and bustling exhibition kitchen, along with a bold color scheme of red and blue, and light fixtures that look like clusters of bottomless Bombay Sapphire gin bottles. All that remains of the original layout is a smaller dining room along the building’s north face, looking across the busy street at Golden Gate Park.

Still, there is a nice irony in the transformation of a filling station — or indeed any other urban eyesore — into a haven of civilization, whether it’s a locus for art or food, and to have a seafood restaurant on a site that once reeked of gasoline fumes must be accounted an improvement by any standard. I only wish Pacific Catch weren’t a nascent chain; there’s a tiny sibling outlet on Chestnut in the Marina, another (of unknown scale) in Corte Madera, and a general sense, as a friend of mine put it, that still more Pacific Catches can’t be far off.

The food is accordingly mainstream, with tweaks and tunings that reflect sensibilities on either side of the Pacific, trending sometimes in an Asian direction and at others in a Latin American one. Among the great Mexican seafood dishes must be the fish taco, and Pacific Catch offers several versions ($4.25), all creditable on their beds of shredded cabbage: Baja, with chunks of batter-fried halibut or cod; grilled mahimahi, slathered in the restaurant’s ubiquitous avocado-tomatillo salsa; and barbecue shrimp, enlivened by little flares of fresh ginger (a nod across the Pacific there). Side dishes enhance the south-of-the-border aura; black beans ($2.95 for a sizable crock) are well seasoned and sprinkled with crumblings of queso fresco, while grilled corn ($2.95) — still on disks of cob — is suitable for dipping into accompanying pats of chipotle butter.

If Pacific Catch can seem like a cantina in Cabo San Lucas, it can also present itself as a sushi bar on Maui. A variety of sashimi is offered (as is its New World cousin, seviche), along with a selection of sushi rolls and — for that Hawaiian touch — poke ($8.50), cubes of lightly seared ahi drizzled with soy sauce and served atop a Fritos-like mélange of rice chips. The poke is temperamentally well suited to share table space with wakame (seaweed) salad ($3.95), a staple of sushi bars and notable here for its considerable size. The salad is plenty for two and could even satisfy four if other treats were on the way.

The grilled salmon ($19.95) — a deftly grilled filet — had been organically farmed in British Columbia, which relieved some of my unease at having it, since farmed salmon is usually a big no-no. The so-called California presentation itself was pleasant if unremarkable and consisted of a huge scoop of brown rice, several stalks of steamed asparagus (with basil aioli for dipping), and under the fish, a confit of tomatoes and lemon.

Even if Pacific Catch is mostly a seafood restaurant, you don’t have to have seafood. You could have grilled skirt steak ($18.95), glazed with miso, cut into tender slices, and plated with a huge scoop of white rice, a salad of picked cucumber threads, and a pile of deceptively pale kimchi that packed a real and thrilling wallop of garlic and chili pepper. My only complaint about these large plates is that they did look like subcompacts coming off an assembly line: this one got an extra cup holder from the parts bin, that one a CD deck in the dashboard — but otherwise they heavily resembled one another in a bolted-together way.

Dessert tends to soothe complainants of most stripes, luckily, and Pacific Catch has at least one quite good dessert: a sundae ($6.50) built on a macadamia-nut brownie. The brownie isn’t a doodle or add-on here, an extra calorie payment stuffed into a sundae glass with gobs of ice cream, as is so often the case with brownie sundaes; instead, it’s like Huck’s raft, sprawling and commodious, and the blob of macadamia-nut ice cream on top is almost a condiment. Other condiments include twin oozings of hot-fudge and caramel sauces.

There’s one element of the mix that hasn’t changed much in the metamorphosis, and that’s the crowd. It remains young and collegiate- or postcollegiate-looking, although the noise level has risen noticeably. In the old art-café days, people tended to keep even their more intense conversations at murmur level; now, without the elevating presence of art beyond some paintings of fish on the walls, there is a tendency to hoot and bray, if you catch my drift.

PACIFIC CATCH

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

1200 Ninth Ave., SF

(415) 504-6905

www.pacificcatch.com

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Conduit

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› paulr@sfbg.com

First impressions are often false impressions, but some first impressions are so overwhelming as to transcend such mundane terms as false and favorable. When I first crossed the threshold of Conduit, I had the impression of having stepped inside a pipe organ. The restaurant (which opened late last year on a once-desolate stretch of Valencia near 14th Street) is a labyrinth of copper and steel tubing, so dense in its gleaming geometry as to become a kind of metallic fabric. The tightly arranged pipes make up part of the ceiling and help divide the dining room into sections, and if you think all that metal must feel cold, you’re not factoring in the burnished glow of the copper — so reminiscent, for foodheads, of the copper pans that once hung in Julia Child’s Cambridge, Mass., kitchen — or the gas fireplace that sits just inside the front door, as if in a warming hut at a high-end skating rink.

Also, you haven’t seen the bathrooms: a set of private cells behind a wall of translucent blue doors, as if in a giant honeycomb. A guided tour of this part of the restaurant would not be completely absurd but probably won’t be necessary, since paying crowds have already descended on Conduit for other, and excellent, reasons. The restaurant, even in its fledgling days, already must be considered one of the premier spots on Valencia’s still-burgeoning restaurant row; its peer group consists of Range, Limón, and perhaps Bar Tartine, and if only because of the extraordinary atmospherics of the interior design (the architect was Stanley Saitowitz), its sheen is brighter than theirs.

But let’s not forget the appeal of chef Justin Deering’s food either. The man and his staff work in an exhibition kitchen that stretches like a stage across the back of the restaurant, and the menu they’re turning out is a seasonal California one, yes, like so many others, but with an emphasis on butter and cream that reminded me of Traci Des Jardins’s early menus at Jardinière and of Nancy Oakes’s at Boulevard. Butter and cream discreetly bespeak luxury, not only because they’re expensive but also because they bring a velvety weight to foods that probably don’t, in most cases, need it. But part of the appeal of luxury is its very superfluousness. In other words: Conduit is a downtown restaurant that happens not to be downtown and charges (down!) accordingly. It isn’t cheap, but it costs about a third less than its city-center siblings and occupies a neighborhood setting that presents fewer logistical challenges.

Deering’s gnocchi ($12) are finished in bubbling butter — also topped with crab meat and chopped arugula — and as we might expect, they’re très rich, but the butter finish is standard procedure for gnocchi. A more improbable jolt of creaminess can be found in, or on, a salad of little gems ($9), the heads of baby romaine lettuce that so often get used in some variation on Caesar salad. The creamy dressing here is buttermilk based (like ranch) and is slathered on the halved heads with abandon. Even so, it doesn’t entirely mask the pleasant bite of spicy macadamia nuts and radish shavings, fine and delicate as tiny facial tissues, which are scattered over the lettuces and across the oblong plate.

Duck confit ($11) gets the deconstruction treatment instead of the usual meat-on-bone presentation. The deconstruction is visually striking, with a salad of frisée and pear slices at one end, and at the other a smear of duck-liver mousse (creamy!) and the actual confit, a pat of shredded confit meat that might more accurately be described as rillettes. Still, there’s nothing wrong with rillettes, and what’s been deconstructed can be reconstructed, often entertainingly.

Deering isn’t a complete butterfat crackhead. His bigger plates, in particular, rely less on dairy richness than their small-fry relations; a steak of grilled walu ($19), for example, was plated atop a mound of cannellini beans enhanced by crisped flaps of guanciale (a baconlike form of cured pork) and halved green olives fried tempura-style. (Walu is one of those wonderful fish with meaty white flesh taken from the waters of the Hawaiian Islands.)

Kitchen voyeurs (of whom I am one) will appreciate the dinner bar — a half dozen or so seats at the very cusp of the kitchen, with an unobstructed and intimate view of chefly goings-on. (This bar is not to be confused with the bar bar, an impressive affair nearer the front of the dining room, stacked with a full complement of booze.) The dinner bar, interestingly, is another echo of Boulevard, which offers similar seating. A further advantage of the dinner bar at Conduit: it’s near the restrooms, so you can make a brief visit and perusal while the pastry chefs (who are working right in front of you) put together your dessert.

A sundae ($8) sounds like an 80 mph fastball right down the middle of the plate — in other words, banal and sluggable — but a major wrinkle at Conduit is that the pastry chefs make their own ice creams, such as one with cherries and chocolate chunks, a kind of boutique Cherry Garcia, creamy and rich as gelato or frozen custard. Hot chocolate sauce spooned over? A nice touch, as is the pair of triangular chocolate wafers stuck into the ice cream. The clear plastic cup in which the sundae is served, meanwhile, seems like a good joke whose punch line is "Downmarket." But really, you could serve ice cream this good practically any way and send people into transports. Bi-Rite Creamery? What’s that?

A final huzzah for noise management. It is expert. Conduit isn’t quiet — and how could it be, with throngs of 1999-vintage tech androids swarming the place? — but the floors are laid with some sort of charcoal rugs of hemp or sisal, and they soak up sound like sponges. Impressive!

CONDUIT

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

280 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-5200

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Breezy’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Since the symphony strike of the mid-1990s, the west side of the Civic Center has seen more than its share of high-profile destination restaurants open their doors. From Jardinière (born 1997) to Essencia (2007), the tone of the restaurants in the neighborhood (whose epicenter is the corner of Gough and Hayes) has become considerably … tonier.

Much of the upscale-ishness doubtless has to do with the demolition of the Central Freeway viaduct and the reemergence of Hayes Valley as a nice place to live. A fresh bloom of boutique shops tends to confirm this. But east of Gough, the song remains largely the same: opera, symphony, ballet, with the occasional "in conversation with" at Herbst Auditorium thrown in. Yes, we are talking performances of one kind or another, and performance audiences often want something to eat in a civilized setting beforehand and aren’t always eager to cash out their 401(k)s or Google stock options to pay for it. Does the west Civic Center, with its new wealth of destination spots, have anything to offer these people? Ivy’s was the archetype of this sort of value restaurant, but it closed more than a decade ago.

On a recent weekend evening, mild and clear after weeks of stultifying rain, we slipped into Breezy’s at about 7:30 and found both large dining rooms full. A half hour later, as the clock struck eight, the restaurant was nearly empty; we were like the two forlorn members of a school of tasty fish who didn’t get the memo about the approaching great white shark. As curtains grandly rose in grand buildings on the other side of Gough, we made do with a chocolate tart.

Bawer Tekin and Dawn Wiggins opened Breezy’s last fall in a space long occupied by the Blue Muse, whose fanatical devotees will be relieved to know their restaurant has reappeared a block away, in a space that adjoins the performing-arts parking garage. The old space, meanwhile, looks little-changed and is still rather cavernous, with the front room still dominated by the big bar and the rear dining room faintly secret, like a cell in a medieval cloister. A creamy color scheme brings some warmth to this brutal roominess, and the iridescent tiles on the support pillars exert a certain hypnotic appeal, as Rubik’s Cube did a generation ago.

But forget about Breezy’s pleasantly unobtrusive décor and its friendly, efficient service, which holds up well even at the heart of the pre-performance rush. You’re there to eat, and the food is good. Quite good! Interesting without calling undue attention to itself, and reasonably priced in a fat-cat city where the word affordable often seems as if it’s been read right out of the language.

Chef Rodney Baca’s menu offers, according to the restaurant’s Web site, "the fresh tastes of the Mediterranean, with a swirl of Asian flair." Nicely put. The food, in other words, is that by-now familiar amalgam of California–New American cuisine, with touches of local and sustainable, along with a few blatant violations of these tenets. I love stuffed tomatoes, and Baca’s version ($9) is excellent — a baseball-size, reasonably ripe (for February) fruit, opened at the top like a Halloween pumpkin for a lively filling of prosciutto, cheese, and basil — but … a tomato in February? With basil? Everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire wrote in Candide, except (and I choose to believe this is implicit in the Voltairean text) winter tomatoes.

An arugula and watercress salad ($6) is a little more like it. The greens reached the table still practically glistening with rain, and instead of walnuts (those usual suspects), Baca used spicy peanuts to add crunch while making, possibly, a sly Super Bowl reference. Aged bleu cheese is a standard player in these salads and did appear in this one, but the vinaigrette acquired a refreshing sheen from pomegranate juice.

The kitchen also handles pasta beautifully, and this is an important consideration for performance-bound people, who will be more comfortable sitting there for an hour or three if they’ve eaten something a little lighter than a 20-ounce steak. You can get some steak with your pasta if you like; linguine alla carbonara ($14), with a classic sauce of pancetta cream and green peas, also includes meatballs of rib eye and Asiago cheese — just enough meat to register. And macaroni and cheese ($6, for a serving big enough to be a small main dish), is infused with truffle oil, scattered with crisped bits of chorizo, and plated with mixed micro greens, for a full-spectrum effect.

The chocolate tart ($7) we were so contentedly eating when the room cleared, as if in response to an air-raid siren, did suffer from a tough crust. Our server had mentioned this to us beforehand. But it was flavorful tough crust, we had good knives, and the ganache inside was intense and at the very precipice of not being sweet. Embedded on the surface of the ganache like bits of buckshot were blueberries, while napped around the edge was a wild berry marmalade and a dusting of pulverized pistachio.

At weekday lunchtime (the other busy period for restaurants in this area) Breezy’s is nicely accessible. Its large carrying capacity must help. Choices tend toward the conventional — Cobb salad ($9), say, or seared ahi tuna ($11) on a focaccia bun — and as at dinner, toward lightness too. Lightness, freshness, the pleasant startlement of a fresh breeze in the face: the name Breezy’s made not much sense to me before I went there and ate the food, but then I did and now it does. *

BREEZY’S

Lunch: Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

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

409 Gough, SF

(415) 552-3400

www.breezysf.com

Full bar

Moderately noisy

AE/DC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

A la Turca

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TURKISH TREAT Lebanese, Syrian, Greek — a craving for Mediterranean or Middle Eastern can be satisfied at a number of Bay Area restaurants, yet what if you want the one cuisine bridging the two? Inexplicably, Turkish restaurants are sorely missing from an otherwise all-inclusive food scene.

But deep in the cracked-out heart of the Tenderloin resides the consistently delicious and ridiculously affordable A la Turca. It’s a virtual Xanadu for any aficionado of the Byzantine: flat-screens showing Turkish channels, an all-Turkish waitstaff, hard-to-find Turkish dishes like fried carrots in yogurt sauce, a swarthy Turkish chef in the window shaving glistening slices of doner off a spit, the potent Turkish tea served in the traditional diminutive tulip-shaped glasses, and Turkish wine selections. Add the smell of diesel, cigarettes, and that ubiquitous lemon cologne, and I would swear I was in the back streets of Istanbul.

And thankfully, the food is incredible. The lahmacun (Turkish pizza) is perfectly crunchy on the edges and covered with a thin mixture of flawlessly seasoned tomato and ground lamb. The doner is divine. But I would go to A la Turca for the manti alone. Manti is Turkish comfort food — meat and onion ravioli in a spicy tomato and garlic yogurt sauce (bring Altoids). I’ve never found it outside Turkey, but A la Turca has a delectable version available only on Sundays (I’ve always thought the mark of a great restaurant is that it can make demands on you).

The desserts were surprisingly bland, but the rest? Çok güzel.

A LA TURCA Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m. 869 Geary, SF. (415) 345-1011, www.alaturcasf.com

Monk’s Kettle

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› paulr@sfbg.com

First, although it’s early, let’s hand out our first annual Best Restaurant Name Award. This year’s winner is the Monk’s Kettle, which is a witty, memorable, and — since the place in question is a craft-beer bar with food to match; ergo, a kind of hipster tavern — evocative phrase. Everyone loves a monk, and kettle is just fun to say, especially after a fancy beer or two.

The Monk’s Kettle is not a brewpub. No beer brewing is done on the premises, which are probably too snug anyway. The deal instead is a wide offering of beers from around the world, in the manner of Toronado or Moe Ginsburg’s; some are draught, many others are in bottles, but all are served in one of the stunning array of specialty glasses stacked behind the bar like crystals in some extraordinary ice formation.

Pardon is hereby issued to those who don’t recognize the space as the recent home of a Thai restaurant, Rasha, and before that, of Kelly’s Burgers. The footprint is the same — deep and narrow, with the sizable, mirror-backed bar and a semiopen kitchen along the right side and, on the left, booths snuggled against the windows — but the smell of old grease is gone, the color scheme is now one of muted earth tones, and the harsh lighting has given way to halogen pinpoints and, above the booths, glowing disks that look like the shells of some huge mollusk.

But the aesthetic makeover, though thorough and stylish, is dwarfed as a marker of change by the crush of people trying to get into the restaurant. A year ago Rasha seemed to be largely empty, despite good food at moderate cost, a bright red neon sign, and a prime location; the Monk’s Kettle, at age two months, is already wall-to-wall crowds on weekend evenings, with even more people spilling out onto the sidewalk. And they’re young, hipstery people.

If the wealth of craft beers is part of the Monk’s Kettle’s appeal to this social cohort, so too must be the food, which is a surprisingly vegetarian-friendly version of pub grub. Many of the most memorable dishes are meatless and would do credit to the kitchen at Greens. But hipsters like their burgers too, apparently; on a recent evening while eating at the bar, we were flanked by young burger eaters dressed à la mode, two and three to a side.

The burger ($10.50) is good. The meat is grass-fed Niman Ranch and is served on a dense, chewy bun from La Brea Bakery. A slice of cheese (various choices) adds $1.50, and the American-style fries are fine. But there’s nothing exceptional here. As for the house-made veggie burger ($9.50): half a gold star for innovation, since the patty is falafel, laid out on the same La Brea bun instead of stuffed into a pita pocket with tahini sauce.

On the other hand, the Monk’s Kettle does offer quite a few treats you won’t regularly find on menus in the Mission or around town. There’s a fresh pretzel ($6.50), for instance, twisty soft and served with whole-grain mustard and a cheddar-ale sauce for dipping and dunking. We also liked the lightly crisped black-bean cakes ($8.75), a pair of slim disks scattered with roasted-corn salsa and artily piped with chipotle crème fraîche. Bruschetta ($8.50) — toasted bread spears smeared with cannellini puree — were plated in an overgrown garden of mixed greens and resembled statuary half hidden amid unkempt tendrils, but the greens were enriched by sautéed mushrooms and chunks of white cheddar cheese, bringers of flavor, texture, and heft.

Butternut squash soup ($6.50) needs special handling to rise above its usual station as a cold-weather commonplace. Do pepitas, the little pumpkinseeds of Mexican cooking, answer the call? The Monk’s Kettle kitchen installed them as a scattering across the surface of the soup, and they did their best, but the soup, while creamy, was a little too sweet and unfocused to satisfy, even with pepitas. It was also, however, nicely steamy, which brought some relief to my sniffly friend across the table.

Also nicely steamy was a bowl of Jude’s vegan chili ($6.50), a black-bean preparation laced with tomatoes, mushrooms, and olives. We did catch a whiff of some faint, faintly exotic, eastern Mediterranean spice in there and found ourselves thinking more of Turkey than Texas: mushrooms and olives in chili? The Turks, it must be said, prefer chickpeas to black beans. (The chickpea is thought to be native to southeastern Turkey.)

The kitchen seemed to be in possession of a mushroom mother lode, because tasty fungus recurred as a ragout in the day’s surprisingly elegant potpie ($14). I say elegant because the ragout had been baked in a handsome white crock with fluted sides, under a tarpaulin of butter-flaky pastry worthy of a beef Wellington. The potpie had the look of a huge, family-style dessert — a giant pot de crème, possibly, lurking under the pastry.

We never quite got around to actual dessert, but we did dabble in the beers (whose listings go on for several pages), in part to see which glasses would be used to serve them. St. Bernardus, a dark, caramelly Belgian brew ($7.75 for an eight-ounce pour), arrived in a vessel that looked like a giant cognac snifter, while Bitburger pilsner ($6.25 for 14 ounces) was presented in an attractive if slightly disappointing pilsner glass, a close relation of the ones I have at home. Mr. Cider, meanwhile, partook of the Fox Barrel black currant cider ($4.50 for eight ounces); this was served in a wineglass look-alike and was refreshingly unsweet in the European manner but did not really taste of black currant — a presence in name only, but we liked it anyway.

MONK’S KETTLE

Mon.–Fri., noon–2 a.m.; Sat.–Sun., 11:30–2 a.m.

3141 16th St., SF

(415) 865-9523

www.monkskettle.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Cuckoo for Coco500

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› paulr@sfbg.com

An adage favored by the paterfamilias: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He has generally deployed this wisdom in the matter of automobiles, while for me it has tended to apply to … well, practically everything. Bizou, for instance. This was the restaurant Loretta Keller opened at the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan in 1993, a time when the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan was a pretty lonely place at night. There was as yet no baseball park or light-rail line nearby, just the dowdy Caltrain station and lots of empty-looking warehouses slouching in the gloom.

Keller had worked at Stars in its glamorous heyday, but her restaurant, which served rustic French and Italian foods in a setting of rustic elegance, most closely resembled Zuni Cafe. The place was always, in my experience, discreetly stunning, and when I learned a few springtimes ago that she was recasting it for contemporary tastes, I thought, Oy. The subtext of the change seemed to be that the city’s most recent bevy of young, rich plutocrats was uninterested in a restaurant with a hint of Provençal languor; to lure them in, you needed halogen spot lamps, unadorned surfaces, certainly more noise, and a menu promising excitement.

Coco500, Bizou’s successor, does answer to this description, but it is nonetheless just as stunning in its own way and is a worthy bearer of the torch. I went in warily, full of skepticism, and was almost instantly won over, and that is about the loudest hallelujah I can sing for any restaurant, reinvented or otherwise.

Most of Coco500’s magic has to do with the food and the service, it must be said. The redesign of the interior emphasizes blond wood and is reminiscent of a Scandinavian Designs store or a sauna, and while there’s nothing wrong with the Danish modern look, it doesn’t exactly send the most accurate subliminal signals about what sort of food to expect. If the cooking is no longer about Provence and Italy, it’s still Cal-Med in some fundamental way. You’re not likely to find lutefisk on the menu, though there is plenty of seafood, and even in California an ethos of seasonality has to account for winter’s being one of the seasons. Bizou was good at this; so is Coco500.

Let’s start with a marvelous flat bread ($10), like the thinnest of thin-crust pizzas, topped with a fine mince of mushrooms and, for some extra chthonic intensity, truffle oil. The sense is of eating slices of especially flavorful winter-dampened earth, and the crust could not be better.

Seafood is more seasonal than we’re sometimes aware, though most Bay Areans probably associate king salmon with summer, and this Bay Arean associates halibut with winter. Ono, on the other hand, I associate with Hawaii; it’s one of those marvelous fish taken from the deep, clean waters around the islands, and while it makes a doubtful entrant on a restaurant menu in San Francisco, thousands of miles distant, Coco500’s kitchen does manage to turn it into a delicious crudo. The chunks of opalescent white flesh are sprinkled with fennel shavings, drizzled with a blood orange gastrique, and wrapped in wildly unseasonal, but tasty, basil leaves. It’s like eating prescooped Chinese lettuce cups.

More winter: celery root ($6), roasted with thyme and neatly cubed, could almost have passed for some sort of potato dish. A cream of cauliflower soup ($6) did not lack for cream — an ingredient of underappreciated potency that can overwhelm through sheer richness but didn’t quite here. Bits of chervil and squirts of paprika oil over the soup’s surface helped maintain balance.

Duck is also wintry for me, maybe because it’s a close relation to goose and roast goose is a classic holiday dish, dramatic if, in the end, more trouble than it’s quite worth. Boneless duck breast, on the other hand, is a type of flesh for all seasons: red and meatlike for bad weather but also highly grillable and always easy to deal with. At Coco500 the duck breast ($23) was grilled (medium), sliced, and presented with two extraordinary companions. One was a whole braised endive, almost like a torpedo onion, the other a duck baklava, rillettes under a pastry roof — completely unexpected and natural at the same time. Also delicious.

Alaskan black cod ($23), also known as sablefish, was another faraway fish, and I should have resisted it on carbon footprint grounds if nothing else, but I was lured in by the bit players: smashed (skin-on) fingerling potatoes and creamed rapini, like creamed spinach but with a sharper edge. The gently sautéed fillet itself, delicate and immaculately white, was good though not exceptional. I did find some ex post facto consolation at Seafood Watch, which reports that black cod is a best choice; the fish are line-caught from well-managed and sustainable fisheries. Please, restaurants, trumpet this kind of information! Don’t assume we have it or always have the presence of mind to ask for it.

We might not have had the presence of mind because we were probably thinking ahead to dessert and other postprandial wonders, such as Armagnac ($10), my latest passion in the liquid fires. Less fiery but not less worthy was a warm apple-huckleberry tart ($8) — basically a single-serve apple pie stained blue by the berries, with an immensely flaky (in the good sense) crust. As for the fruit: I love apples and apple pie, but the huckleberry (a close relation of the blueberry) is an American original, so how about a starring role someday?

COCO500

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

500 Brannan, SF

(415) 543-2222

www.coco500.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately loud

Wheelchair accessible

Namu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Of the city’s many village centers, I have always had a special fondness for the Inner Richmond enclave along Balboa, from Arguello to Eighth Avenue or so. Here you find Russian bakeries nestled across the street from sushi bars, with a Korean barbecue at one corner, a Chinese joint at the next, and a chic Cal-Med spot a few steps beyond the traffic light. Add a butcher shop, a nursery school, and a cleaners, and you have a self-sustaining little world. It’s like a less-trafficked Clement Street.

The backwater charm has persisted for years, despite the occasional incursions of upscaleness: Katia’s Russian Tea room, with its immaculately starched tablecloths, and, of more recent vintage, the Richmond, which opened a few years ago in the old Jakarta space. The latest spit-and-polish entrant, Namu, isn’t as conspicuous as either of those two restaurants; it opened about a year ago in a midblock storefront, and you could easily walk right by it if you weren’t paying attention.

At least you could in the middle of the day. By night, Namu attracts the young the way a lantern attracts moths on a summer evening; they gather in clusters on either side of the door and along the curb, dressed in night shades of blue, gray, and black, talking on cell phones while waiting for a table to open up or the rest of their party to appear. If you were rushing along the sidewalk, you could probably pick your way past without too much fancy footwork, but you’d notice the crowd, certainly, and wonder what was up.

Part of what is up is certainly chef Dennis Lee’s cooking. (Lee owns the place with his brothers, David and Daniel.) Although Namu’s menu includes elements of both Japanese and fusion cooking, its most striking quality is its elegant recasting of Korean themes. It’s not quite a Korean bistro, but it’s more than a step in that direction and away from the traditional Korean barbecue, an honorable example of which stands at the corner.

Namu does offer that well-known Korean staple, kimchee (cabbage pickled with garlic and red chiles), and it’s just about indistinguishable from the corner barbecue’s: both offer excellent, sour fire. But at Namu the kimchee is served as part of a banchan plate (the first is complimentary, after that $4), in the company of, say, surprisingly rich sautéed chives and coils of pickled carrot, all presented on a museum-of-modern-art dish that looks like a flattened candelabra. There is a sense of stylish balance in both presentation and flavor that announces the kitchen’s sophistication.

You could satisfy yourself entirely with Japanese items, if you were so inclined, and you might even be able to convince yourself that you were at a sushi bar. Although there’s no sushi on the menu, the restaurant’s look is agleam with dark minimalism, including the unframed urban-industrial photographs hung on the walls as if at a hip gallery. Anyway, tataki — lightly seared tabs of fish — is almost like sushi, and Namu’s version ($10), with albacore tuna, is cleverly enhanced by a drizzle of Thai chili ponzu. Seaweed salad is also a sushi bar standard; here it’s called ocean salad ($8) and is made from a jumble of red, green, and wakame seaweed and looks like leftover Christmas wrapping. Nice touches: halved cherry tomatoes beneath the seaweed, and ume vinaigrette (ume is a pickled Asian plum) to give the salad fruitiness that isn’t quite sweet.

Pan-seared dumplings (a.k.a. pot stickers) are a commonplace throughout east Asia. Here ($9) they’re filled with slivered shiitake mushrooms and served in a shallow bowl with yet more shiitake slivers and a dashi broth reduced to dark intensity. (Dashi is one of the basics of Japanese cooking and is a stock made from kelp and dried skipjack.) Fresh rolls are also an east Asian commonplace, but Namu’s version ($6) feature a cross-cultural twist: chunks of grilled skirt steak, for a hint of the American southwest and, simultaneously, Korea. Just as unexpected is the mung bean cake ($6), and if you shy away from mung beans as the principal ingredient of indifferent desserts, you’ll be surprised here by the resemblance to crispy polenta triangles, suitable for dipping in ponzu sauce. And there is an explicitly Italian touch to the buckwheat noodles ($9.50); they’re tossed with shiitake mushrooms but also pesto (from Thai basil!), pine nuts, and garlic before getting a good sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese.

We didn’t particularly respond to the broccolini ($7), which wasn’t bad but wasn’t special despite embellishments of yuzu ponzu and fried garlic. It seemed too much like ordinary steamed broccoli. But we did respond to the prawns ($9), which had been glazed with den jang (a Korean fermented bean paste similar to miso) and grilled in pairs on skewers.

Too much culinary globe-trotting? The hamburger ($9), then, is restful in a juicy, tasty, villagy way, with a first-rate bun and good fries that would be just a bit better if more svelte, more in the frites line. Of course, even B+ fries tend to get gobbled up, even by those who mean to save some room for dessert. Namu’s desserts are well above the ordinary: a chocolate brioche bread pudding ($7) for instance, napped with raspberry sauce (is any dish with brioche disappointing? I say no), and a puddinglike crème brûlée ($7) lifted from the mundane by little butter cookies flavored with our friend ume, the distinctive Japanese preserved plum last observed in the seaweed salad vinaigrette. Some plums certainly get around.

NAMU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

489 Balboa, SF

(415) 386-8332

www.namubar.com

Beer, wine, sake

AE/MC/V

Noisy if crowded

Wheelchair accessible

Serpentine

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you didn’t know that Dogpatch’s newest glam restaurant, Serpentine, is the younger sibling of the Slow Club, would you guess? Signals are mixed, and your answer might depend on whether you concentrated your attention on the menus or the physical particulars of the related pair. On the latter point, we have a sort of local restaurant version of Wills and Harry, the British princelings beloved of paparazzi: a confounding blend of similarities and dissimilarities, evidence that could go either way. If you squint, you suspect a family likeness, but you know you’re not looking at twins.

The Slow Club has always struck me as a descendant — a noisy one — of speakeasies. (Is there such a thing as a speakloudly?) The look is low, velvety, and slightly secretive; there are few windows, and the spot lighting is spare. Serpentine, by contrast, soars like a cathedral in its old industrial site. Brick walls? Yes, it has them, punctuated with vast factory windows that face the west and the afternoon sun, but there is also an exposed ceiling of poured concrete laced with electrical conduits. This vault of open space, rising a full two stories above the dining-room floor, might be a considerable factor in swallowing up noise; Serpentine looks like it should be deafening, but it isn’t, even when full. It helps, in this respect, that the floors aren’t reflections of the ceiling but are of burnished wood, warming and elegant and not quite as cacophony producing as poured concrete. Also warming: the wealth of votive candles, several to a table, that lend the restaurant a sense of rustic intimacy. It’s as if a country inn had decided to squat in one of Charles Dickens’s abandoned blacking factories.

Not many country inns, on the other hand, whether in Dickens’s time or our own, have served food quite as good as Serpentine’s. California cuisine has gone from novelty to cliché to beyond cliché and back again, but at Serpentine it does what all good cooking should do: cause you to pause, to notice, to inquire. What is that, and how did they do that?

"Is this tomato soup?" my companion asked, jabbing a spoon into the creamy puree that had been set before me. And the correct answer was: no, not tomato but carrot ($7.50), and not even carrot with ginger or curry but just plain carrot, adorned only with a few fried sage leaves. The soup’s color was difficult to make out in the dim light, so on that basis alone I granted a pardon on the tomato-or-carrot question, but there was also an aromatic fruitiness I would never have associated with plain carrot soup.

Interesting and unexpected ingredients enhance the restaurant’s spell. I’d never heard of spigariello; I would have guessed it was some obscure pasta shape, but in fact (according to the well-schooled server) it’s a toothy green from the broccoli family, composed by chef Chris Kronner’s kitchen into a handsome salad — with crumblings of blue cheese, bread crumbs, and a pepper vinaigrette — that resembled a small holiday wreath.

The menu doesn’t force you toward big plates, and many of the smaller plates are sizable and rich enough to satisfy. A plate of lamb riblets ($11.50), for instance, featured about a half-dozen pieces of achingly tender meat still on the bone, and that was plenty, even allowing for some shameless raiding from across the table. The raider and I did agree that the seasoning palette — of pickled shallots, feta cheese, and mint salsa verde — was missing something. A hint of sweetness was needed, a splash of balsamic vinegar, maybe, or some interesting honey.

Meanwhile, we shared the savory bread pudding ($11.50 with an add-on heap of mesclun), a baked, caramelized delight of some scale that glowed gold in the candlelight and spoke of sustenance on a wintry night. The pudding was fortified with roasted butternut squash, buttermilk, and blue cheese — a sturdy and honest combination. And, for a bit of spice, peeled prawns on a bed of white grits ($10.50) were dressed with poblano pepper sauce, a demure-looking, muddy green puddle that really lit up the room on making contact with a human tongue. At least that was this human’s experience.

For those of us who use a caloric equivalent of zero-sum budgeting — i.e., each indulgence must be offset by a savings — Serpentine is a forgiving place to eat. On the one hand, there are subtle lightenings to be found in un-looked-for places; a nice example of this was a sandwich of roast turkey slices and sauerkraut on rye bread ($9.50) that amounted to a reduced-calorie Reuben and reminded us, yet again, of turkey’s many uses.

And, on the other, there are the desserts, which, like good poems, depend on concentrated effects rather than volume to establish their place in memory. A particularly noteworthy example might be the chocolate-hazelnut tart ($7.50), an almost fudgelike (and not too huge; about the circumference of a baseball) disk trimmed by a fluted pastry crust and dotted with hazelnuts. The tart (served with a scoop of chocolate ice cream from Bi-Rite Creamery) was like an upper-crust relative of a dark chocolate–with–nuts candy bar: a Snickers wrapped in buttery pastry.

The crowd is eclectic. We noticed plenty of young people, but more than a few older folks too, parenty types in the company of adult children. As an adult who once took his parents to the Slow Club only to watch them struggle with the noise, I looked on these entourages with an odd mix of remorse and approval, though more of the latter than the former. Serpentine: same great taste, less deafening.

SERPENTINE

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

2495 Third St., SF

(415) 252-2000

www.serpentinesf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Note: Serpentine observes a no-reservations policy

Cassis

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› paulr@sfbg.com

In the Big Book of Troubled Restaurant Spaces, there will have to be a long chapter (with footnotes!) devoted to 2101 Sutter. Since the mid-1990s this unassuming but hardly forbidding site has been home to Nightshade, Laghi, Julia, Winterland, and now Cassis, and I might be forgetting a few. The comings and goings have been many and hasty. Why the address’s occupants should have such a nomadic bent, one after the other, isn’t obvious when considering the physical particulars. 2101 is a perfectly nice setting, a sort of fat reverse L with the entryway, bar, and small dining area on one axis and, on the other (beyond a psychedelic screen that resembles strips of vinyl studded with disks of glass, like a hippie’s belt collection), a larger dining area with an exhibition kitchen. The kitchen had been covered over during the brief Winterland era, the picture-window opening plugged with drywall, but now the view is back, and we notice a pizza oven among the other handsome implements.

Yes, pizza, though Cassis (as the name suggests) is a French restaurant. But the cooking isn’t generic French; the street signage advises us that the restaurant serves "cuisine niçoise," and Nice is a French Riviera town quite near Italy. The city’s most famous contribution to culinary annals is probably the salade niçoise, that likable jumble of tuna, red peppers, quarters of hard-boiled egg, and black olives, but the city is nearly as pizza crazy as Rome, and that’s saying something. To sit at an outdoor table at one of the many cafés along Nice’s pedestrian promenade, drinking chilled rosé and eating thin-crust pizza, could be the ultimate experience niçoise.

Cassis can’t match these plein air atmospherics, of course. For one thing, it’s in San Francisco, which is not an alfresco town, and for another, it sits in a remarkably nondescript building in a neighborhood filled with nondescript buildings. Even if you could sit at a sidewalk table, you almost surely wouldn’t want to, since Sutter and Steiner are not, to say the least, charming pedestrian promenades, while nearby Geary Boulevard is a roaring sluice of automobile traffic. So, inside! The big horseshoe bar is welcoming, the outer dining area relaxed — but you like to see your chefs in action, and that means a table in the main dining area, beyond the hippie-belt screen.

The screen is a Winterland holdover, but subtle changes to the sleek chill of that restaurant’s design have brought some cheering warmth to Cassis. The return of the open kitchen is one; another is the faux brickwork on the support pillars. The rise in ambient temperature has, like global warming, caused a palpable shift in the mammalian population; gone are Winterland’s droves of 30-year-old, gelled-hair, tech billionaires in black mock turtlenecks, and in is an older contingent, rather Pacific Heights–looking. These are people who might not have responded too enthusiastically to Winterland’s sea urchin foams but are perfectly happy with Cassis’s simple but intense lobster bisque (a steal at $6.25), enriched with cognac, or the pissaladière ($7.50), the classic tart of caramelized onion that’s like a solid version of French onion soup.

The master of the kitchen is Stephane Meloni, who opened the restaurant last year with his brother, Jerome. Jerome runs the front of the house. The brothers grew up in Nice, which among its other winning attributes is not far along the coast from Cassis, a picturesque, cliff-hanging village. Hence the restaurant’s name. Those with total recall might remember that there was another Cassis in the city in the mid-1990s, a bistro in Cow Hollow. But there is no other connection between the two places.

I would have dispensed with the coil of fried onion atop the pissaladière. It had been fried to toughness rather than crunchiness, could not be cut, and was generally an inconvenience. Otherwise, the kitchen didn’t miss a step; the cooking is a series of gentle euphonies, polished versions of bistro favorites. (There is a real difference in France between a bistro and a restaurant, and les frères Meloni calling their place a restaurant isn’t a casual choice.)

Duck confit ($22.50) is a rustic staple on many a bistro menu, but here the leg (good crispy skin!) was accompanied by a boneless half breast grilled to a gratifyingly steaklike medium rare. Lending the plate architectural interest and style: a cylinder of gratin potatoes, looking like a pillbox.

Potatoes — fingerlings — got a more natural treatment with the roasted monkfish ($23). They were simply steamed, halved, and thrown into a peppercorn sauce, velvety but with sharp edges. Lying at the edge of the sauce pool was a bundle of pencil-thin asparagus (too early to be local, I’m afraid), baby pattypan squash in green and yellow, and a fine dice of tomato. I would give this combination no better than a C for seasonality but an A for color and texture.

Even the small dishes are memorable. You hardly ever see panisses ($4.25) — the chickpea fries of Provence — anywhere, but Cassis’s are excellent: crisp outside, creamy within, and presented in a geometric stack. And spinach ($5), seared with garlic and shallots, unfurls on a long platter like a length of knotty, kelp-swaddled rope recovered from a long-sunken ship.

Cassis doesn’t seem to have generated the buzz of its most recent predecessors, and maybe this offers us a clue to its prospects. Although it’s a nice destination, it’s not a destination restaurant but a neighborhood one, and the neighbors, having reclaimed the space after a long struggle, seem to be pleased. Everybody likes a new chapter.

CASSIS

Tues.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

2101 Sutter, SF

(415) 440-4500

www.restaurantcassis.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Navio

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When preparing coastal cuisine, it helps for a restaurant to have a coast at hand, to get both the kitchen and the patronage in the mood. Navio, which serves this sort of cooking in the baronial Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, does enjoy the services of a rather scenic bit of coast, with heavy surf beating rhythmically at the edges of a links-style golf course that unfurls itself like a gray-green ribbon beneath the restaurant’s windows.

The Bay Area is often compared with many places around the world — Italy, France, Greece, and Australia, to name a few — but Scotland is not one you hear mentioned too often. Yet during the glide down 280 on a misty and lowering winter afternoon, with the Crystal Springs reservoirs gleaming silver, like a string of lochs nestled at the feet of brooding green highlands, one did find oneself thinking of kilts and bagpipes. And the Half Moon Bay Ritz, which commands its stretch of craggy coast like the clubhouse at St. Andrews, strengthened this pleasant illusion.

The hotel’s long axis runs parallel to the shore, a straightforward design technique that gives an ocean view to the largest number of windows. Navio, accordingly, is long and narrow, like the dining car on some huge railroad train of yesteryear. If you want a table next to a window, you’re likely to get one, and if you’re interested in a little more privacy, one of the cabinetlike booths (complete with drawable curtains) along the inner wall might well suit. There is a third line of tables running along the dining room’s spine, and maybe being seated here is something like being assigned to the middle rows on a wide-cabin airliner — today’s version of steerage, and good-bye to the civility of travel by rail. But Navio’s windows are big enough so that even those consigned to these least-exalted seats have a good view of sea and sky.

We wound up in a far corner next to a window, from which vantage point I could easily observe the golf course. The weather was apparently too blustery for golfers and their speeding carts, and the course was lonely; the only sign of movement was a couple walking their golden retrievers along a path near a fiendishly positioned sand trap.

Coastal cuisine. Thoughts turn to seafood, of course. Fritto misto ($14) is probably not the most imaginative way to prepare marine delights, but it is a crowd-pleaser, and Navio’s kitchen (under the command of chef Aaron Zimmer) manages to get out of the way without tripping over its own feet. We found, in our amply heaped dish, a wealth of nongreasy but nicely battered calamari rings and tentacles, along with carefully peeled shrimp, while on the side sat a stainless-steel ramekin of pungent, fat-cutting garlic aioli, ready for dipping duty. The leftover aioli would have gone beautifully on the warm bread (from Bay Bread), which they will keep bringing to you, so be careful. We stopped the procession after two basketsful.

This restraint was something of a loss, since the soups are also bread friendly. Given the kitchen’s nonradical intentions, it wasn’t surprising to find a clam chowder ($11) on offer, New England–style, milky, with chunks of potato and clam. The chowder was rich and elegant if not quite striking; also pricey, but that is the new Half Moon Bay, a onetime fishermen’s foggy enclave now abloom with luxury housing.

A better soup, I thought, was the carrot-ginger version ($9), a puree the pastel shade of tangerine sherbet and thickened to a velvet smoothness by a bit of potato. Carrot soup sounds like something Gerber might put in little jars for the nursery school set, but in the right hands, like Navio’s, it becomes memorable, a blend of earthiness and (thanks to the ginger) ethereal twinkles.

Beautifully crisped confit of duck leg ($20) might not be coastal, exactly (though why not?), but it certainly is classic, especially when nested in a bed of Puy lentils and featherings of braised frisée. As a recent dabbler in the art of confit, I was impressed not only by the crinkly golden skin but also by the meat, lasciviously moist and well seasoned. (Seasoning is perhaps an underrated aspect of making confit; all the hullabaloo is about the slow cooking in the fat, but how liberally the uncooked flesh is rubbed with salt and spices makes a big difference in how the dish turns out.)

As for wild mushrooms: I see them as being at least as seasonal as spatial, and it rains as much at the coast as anywhere else, perhaps more. Certainly the rainy season is the season for wild mushrooms. They turn up, in a jumble sweaty with butter, as the sauce for a plate of hand-cut linguine ($17), noodles (of flour and egg) whose soft texture and subtle absorbency set them apart from macaroni pasta.

The dessert menu is a trove of comfort foods — cobbler, cake, toffee, crème brûlée — but it might be idle to point this out, since most desserts are comforting in some primal sense. (Either that, or they are ambitious disasters strewn with spun sugar.) An apple cobbler ($10.50), capped by crumbly crust and with slices of fruit still firm enough to evoke their once-fresh state, was like a treat pilfered from Grandmother’s windowsill while still cooling. And for the ultimate in shareable desserts, there is the cookie jar ($10.50), an impressive array of handmade delights including macaroons, chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies, and brown sugar sticks. Only the oatmeal raisin cookies disappointed, and they disappointed only me, who inexplicably just didn’t like them. Had they been made with Irish oatmeal?

NAVIO

Breakfast: daily, 6:30–11 a.m.

Brunch: Sun., seatings at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.; Sat., noon–3 p.m.

Dinner: Mon.–Fri. and Sun., 6–9 p.m.

Ritz-Carlton Hotel

1 Miramontes Point Road, Half Moon Bay

(650) 712-7000

www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Properties/HalfMoonBay/Dining/Navio/Default.htm

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Cafe Andree

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Someone says the word global and — quick! — what’s the first association that occurs to you? Warming? Expect a congratulatory phone call from Al Gore. I like Gore and wish he’d managed to become president, but he won’t be calling me, because I would shout out knives! in response to global. Global knives, beloved of sushi chefs, are those ultrasharp Japanese knives made from ceramic material.

There’s no sushi on the menu at Café Andrée, though executive chef Evan Crandall describes his new menu as global. On the other hand, there is tempura — but I am getting ahead of myself. The restaurant might deal in a world’s worth of food, but its aesthetic tone is low-key Euro; it looks like a bistro that’s somehow been engulfed by a London men’s club. (Actually, it’s part of the Hotel Rex, a Joie de Vivre concern.) An entire wall is given over to a set of framed drawings that amount to a kind of study, while atop a tall wooden breakfront at the rear of a dining room perches a globe. There is a reddish bordello glow to the small space that faintly insinuates we’re not seeing the whole picture; does the breakfront peel away to reveal a secret staircase?

An issue haunting the diner in any hotel restaurant is the suspicion that the surrounding tables are filled with travelers, tourists, and other itinerants, people too tired, busy, or anxious to get out there and see the city and mingle with the locals. These people prize convenience and often have the expense account funds to pay for it, and hotel restaurants are generally obliging on both counts. On the other hand, more than a few hotel restaurants are worthy in their own right; some of San Francisco’s best restaurants are to be found in hotels. The question, then, is whether Café Andrée is a nicely tricked-out expense account joint or a bona fide interesting restaurant or, possibly, both.

The prices, certainly, are worthy of the Union Square neighborhood. Many first courses cost well into the teens, while main courses cluster in the mid- to upper 20s. For those kind of bucks, we expect some serious bang, and lo! Café Andrée delivers it. Crandall’s food is simply splendid: innovative but not sloppy or overwrought, carefully plated, and attentively served. By the time you’ve finished, you really don’t care anymore whether the people at the next table are from Tulsa or Aberdeen or Mint Hill, and from the satisfied looks on their faces, they don’t care where you’re from either.

Let’s start with some bread, slices of sweet baguette, still warm and presented with a tray of butter and salt granules in their respective chambers. I liked the flexibility here, though the butter was too chilled to handle gracefully. It would have been clever to use the bread to mop up some soup or sauce instead of trying to spread it with uncooperative butter, but the soup we’d had our eye on, a Cajun crab chowder, had sold out. Apparently the pent-up demand for crab around here is considerable. So, no sopping.

I could not regard a roasted beet salad ($10) as proper restitution, even if enlivened with a Mediterranean mélange of fennel shavings, toasted pine nuts, and a vinaigrette lumpy with goat cheese, but the beet connoisseur loved it. And halfway around the world we went — the other way — for crab, not in chowder but in a panfried cake ($14), with shrimp: a single entity looking like a gilded Easter egg, riding on a magic carpet of Thai cucumber salad (thin pickled slices, perfumed with Kaffir lime essence), with a sweep of red curry aioli arcing across the plate as if from a painter’s brush.

A fillet of black cod ($25) was coated with a caramelized persimmon glaze, and while I’m not wild about persimmons, I liked the glaze. It flattered the fish the way the right clothes can help somebody skinny look more substantial. The bed of lacinato kale and maitake mushrooms was both visually interesting and tasty, but the most arresting characters on the plate were the pair of butternut squash tempura, tabs of orange flesh battered and flash-fried. "They’re sweet!" cried my tablemate, a noted dessert maven, but they weren’t that sweet and also retained a savory richness.

And speaking of savory richness: we come now to the mushroom ravioli ($22), the free-form kind, like a trio of round sandwiches built with disks of spinach pasta and filled with a dice of sautéed wild mushrooms lifted to the sublime by the earthy breath of black truffles and an impressive, buttery wash of what the menu card calls "mushroom consommé." Here at last we had a liquid worthy of being sopped up with the fine bread, but the fine bread was long gone by then.

Bread pudding is an exercise in both frugality and expansiveness, so why not make one tres leches–style ($8), with an angel food–like cake soaked in various forms of milk? For additional interest, sauce it with dulce de leche (sugar caramelized in milk) and toss a few tapioca pearls in there. The result was sweet but not cloying, substantial but not heavy, and wet but not soggy. Our knives went right through it, and they weren’t even Globals. *

CAFÉ ANDRÉE

Breakfast: Mon.–Fri., 7–10:30 a.m. Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 7:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF

(415) 433-4434

www.thehotelrex.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Pleasant noise

Wheelchair accessible

1300 on Fillmore

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Ordinarily one would be distressed, though these days hardly surprised, by the news that a farmers market in the midst of the city was being displaced by a brand-new building full of luxury condos, with a fancy restaurant on the ground floor. Although farmers markets, like coyotes, have been modestly flourishing in the city of late, they are still a delicate species whose natural habitat — often parking lots — invites predation by developers. Then there is the horror of contemporary architecture, which reflects, simultaneously, our fetish for the industrial and our indifference to the touch of the human hand, the small but artful detail that gives warmth and life to big buildings with expansive spaces. Without that touch, too many of our just-raised edifices are nothing more than triumphal and simplistic tombs made of concrete, steel, and glass.

The Fillmore farmers market began in the spring of 2003, in a parking lot at the corner of Fillmore and Eddy, and was of particular value not least because it brought high-quality fresh produce at reasonable prices to one of the city’s less golden neighborhoods. One chilly evening a few weeks ago, I found myself at that corner and was completely disoriented; a huge building had sprung up in the parking lot, like a giant mushroom after an autumn rain, and the few blocks of Fillmore below Geary seemed more than ever like one of Manhattan’s canyons, with the valets at Yoshi’s smiling and motioning to passersby like those guys who try to lure people into girlie shows in North Beach.

We weren’t on our way to Yoshi’s, as it happened, but to 1300 on Fillmore, a quietly glamorous new restaurant that brings a touch of Mecca SF–like magic to a historic, jazz-inflected neighborhood. (Meantime, to end the suspense, if any: the farmers market, though displaced, survives nearby, at Steiner and O’Farrell.) Although the restaurant keeps a poker face to the street — just a succession of smoked-glass panels, like a display of the world’s biggest sunglasses — its L-shaped interior is both spacious and clubby. A wealth of wood glows with warmth under the halogen spot lamps, while all of those windows are hung with tall, gauzy draperies, ready to billow in a breeze that will never blow through.

If we were somewhere in the South, the absence of a breeze would grow oppressive at a point well before high summer, and we would stomp our feet and demand mint juleps or iced tea. But we’re here, in our blue state and ice blue city, so we must make do with the Southern touches chef and owner David Lawrence brings to his sophisticated menu, beginning with the triangles of corn bread that quickly appear at the table, ready to be spread with butter or, for those with a bit of derring-do, pepper jelly, or best of all, with both.

The smaller courses range from homey to urbane. An example of the first is a plate of hush puppies ($13), half a dozen peeled shrimp dipped in a peppery batter, deep-fried, and presented in a crock with a side pot of ancho chile rémoulade. The cosmopolite, tempted by but wary of deep-frying, might let his companion order this dish, and maybe the fat fries too ($6), with homemade ketchup, for overkill, while choosing for himself the oyster bisque ($9) — classy, but tasting at least as much of cream as of oysters — or the sautéed wild mushrooms ($9) seated on a bed of white polenta. These last two dishes were brought to us slightly underseasoned, but a handsome little tray of salt and ground pepper was already on the table, which made it easy for us to take corrective action and implied we were meant to.

Undersalting was a more serious issue with the maple-glazed beef short rib ($28), a thick disk of meat with a bit of bone sticking out of the middle. It looked like a wheel that had flown off a Weber kettle. We could taste the maple on the surface of the meat, which was fork tender and moist, but once we penetrated to the interior of the great disk, we found ourselves in dim lighting indeed. The beef’s enveloping sidekicks — fried onion rings on top, mashed potatoes underneath — were good but peripheral in every sense.

Better was arctic char ($25), a salmonlike fish presented as a breaded and crisped fillet, almost perfectly square, nested atop a tasty hash of roasted brussels sprouts, fingerling potatoes, bits of lobster, and balsamic gastrique. I didn’t detect much Southern influence, but the flavors and textures were beautifully integrated and the portion size was ideal, especially with the wheel of beef looming across the table.

If the savory courses seem as much Pacific as Gulf Coast, the dessert menu speaks with an unmistakable drawl. There are first-rate beignets ($8), three doughnut torpedoes lightly dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar and ready for dunking into either warm chocolate sauce or coffee foam, which had a root-beerish fizz along with a hint of chicory: New Orleans coffee, we guessed. A gingerbread napoleon ($8), meanwhile, looked "like the de Young Museum," according to a tablemate with whom I’d been pleasurably commiserating about the de Young Museum. At least the napoleon — an elaborate modernist construct of wafers, gingerbread pudding, whipped cream, and a square of apple-caramel jelly — was edible, as opposed to bulletproof.

Service: attentive if slightly erratic (some dishes to the wrong people). These are usually teething troubles, and the best thing about teething troubles is that you outgrow them to have a long run, which you’re pretty sure you will. You’re jazzed. *

1300 ON FILLMORE

Daily, 5–11 p.m.

1300 Fillmore, SF

(415) 771-7100

www.1300fillmore.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Well-modulated noise

Wheelchair accessible

Nickie’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Cooking styles have their seasons, just as nature does, and lately there has been a delicate springtime for restaurants serving Louisiana-style food. By this I mean Cajun and creole, a pair of slippery terms that are almost always mentioned together but, despite an implication of fungibility, don’t mean quite the same thing. Cajuns were French speakers who in the 18th century left northeastern Canada and drifted down the Mississippi Valley to the bayou country south and west of New Orleans, where they established a rural and isolated culture that persists to this day. Creoles, by contrast, were citified types who traced their origins directly to Europe; New Orleans was their capital and remains their symbol.

These distinctions, fiercely policed by the interested parties, carry a diminished and blurred charge here in our polyglot land of blurred distinctions. If you see crawfish étouffée (a classic Cajun dish) on a menu, you’re likely to see jambalaya and gumbo too, with beignets (the sophisticated little holeless doughnuts) for dessert. And where would you be looking at such menus? Possibly at such old-timers as Cajun Pacific or the Elite Café, or at such newcomers as Farmerbrown and Brenda’s, whose openings have helped fill the void left by the departures some years ago of Jessie’s (on Folsom Street) and Alcatraces (on 24th Street).

Amid all of these comings and goings and endurings, the question of convincingness has never quite dissipated. A friend with Cajun roots scoffs at the Bay Area’s Louisiana-style restaurants, but it’s likely he hasn’t yet been to Nickie’s, which serves a jambalaya (among other Cajun-tilting treats) that can fairly be described as incendiary, in not the likeliest setting: a remade pub with sports-bar overtones on one of the sketchier blocks of lower Haight Street.

Haight east of Divisadero these days bears some resemblance to the Valencia Street of 15 years ago. The sense of stratification is vertiginous; at the corner of Steiner stands RNM, a clubby restaurant of voluptuous urbanity, but take a few steps east and you are passing badly lit Laundromats, a "low cost" butcher shop, and the occasional pedestrian mumbling soliloquies to a shopping cart in the middle of the street. Then you see a large N glowing green in the night, and you step inside and order a Stella Artois on tap — Nickie’s offers 13 varieties of draft beer, plus pear cider, beer in bottles, and mixed drinks and wine — while scanning several flat-panel windows into the wide world of sports. And you are hungry.

There is no connection I know of between sports bars and Cajun-creole food, but a pub is a pub and should have at least some pub food, sports screens or no, and Nickie’s does. If fish-and-chips is the staple dish of English pubs, then the burger has to be the staple of ours. Nickie’s version ($11) is a triple threat: a troika of little burgers on little egg-washed buns, each with a different topping. The avocado and cheddar edition didn’t quite work for me (clash of creamy yet assertive personalities), but Swiss cheese went well enough with mushroom, and the blue cheese–and–bacon combination was intense.

As for the accompanying fries: they were good with ketchup but even better dipped into the spicy aioli left over from our rapid devouring of the shrimp cakes ($8), lightly crisped like any good fritter and insinuatingly lumpy with crustacean meat. You can get coleslaw instead of fries, but really, who has a burger — let alone three burgers — with slaw instead of fries? And what would you do then with your leftover aioli? Stick your finger in it? Who, me?

We’d ordered mac and cheese ($6.50) as a sort of shareable starter, and it might have held its own if it had appeared as the opening act, ahead of the jambalaya. Instead it turned up in the same armful of plates as that formidable dish and ended up being overwhelmed by it. (Service is attentive enough, if not exactly polished.) But there was no dishonor here, since the jambalaya ($10) left us gasping with pleasure. The dish was studded with peeled shrimp and knuckles of seriously spicy andouille sausage, and the low volcano of rice, cooked with tomatoes and green bell peppers, had been infused with enough cayenne to be spicy-hot in its own right.

In keeping with the complex, squabbling-siblings narrative of Cajun and creole, there are Cajun and creole interpretations of jambalaya. The latter (and perhaps the original) kind includes tomatoes and is accordingly reddish, while the former is tomatoless and acquires its brown color from the initial searing of meat in the pan. Either way, jambalaya is a New World descendant of paella and, like its close relation gumbo (a child of bouillabaisse), reflects the complex play of influences — French, Spanish, Caribbean, African — that produced the well-seasoned cultural stew of New Orleans and South Louisiana.

I would add Irish to that list if there were (but there isn’t) any historical warrant for doing so, since Nickie’s feels somehow Irish, and to be served excellent Cajun and creole food, along with a foamy glass of draft Guinness, by a server with an Irish accent in a pub on Haight Street in San Francisco is one of life’s delightful little paradoxes. Paradox is the spice of life — let’s get that into our book of quotations, truisms, aphorisms for all occasions, and words to live by. *

NICKIE’S

Mon.–Fri., 4 p.m.–2 a.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon–2 a.m.

466 Haight, SF

(415) 255-0300

www.nickies.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Clay Oven

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Two cheers, then, for Google, which recently rerouted its Noe Valley shuttle-bus lines so as to cause less air pollution and other distress in the heart of a neighborhood that has become, in effect, Googleberry RFD, the nesting habitat for those countless Google employees who spend their working days in the suburban wilds of the Peninsula. The child is father to the man, and the city is now the suburb, a dangling appendage to industry but no longer itself industrial. Just recreational.

During the last dot-com boom, in the late 1990s, a rise in both quality and quantity was noted in Bay Area restaurants serving Indian food. Software engineers and other tech types of Indian heritage were drawn here for work, and they expected — and got — an improvement in Indian restaurants, which previously were scarce and abysmal. The renaissance, or naissance, first took hold in the South Bay, whose environs were and are dotted with gigantic tech installations (including Google’s, in Mountain View), but now that everyone has moved to the city, enabled by shuttle buses with wi-fi and probably whirlpools, the city is getting better Indian restaurants too. Two more cheers.

Before the recent opening of Clay Oven, Noe Valley had no Indian restaurants at all, not a one, despite the neighborhood’s profound connection to Silicon Valley. An Indian restaurant in Noe Valley was arguably overdue — and not just because of software engineers and other Googloids either, but also because many of the rest of us marginal-Luddite types happen to like Indian food and its hit parade of spices. Of course, Dosa and Aslam’s Rasoi, each within a few steps of Valencia and 22nd streets, aren’t exactly light-years from Noe Valley, but there is something cozier about Clay Oven’s setting on outer Church, amid a quieter but flourishing restaurant row and Muni’s J trains rumbling past at odd intervals: a real convenience for those lucky enough to catch one.

If you believe addresses are portents, then you might think Clay Oven’s prospects are no better than mixed. The space was occupied most recently by a California-style bistro that never quite caught on, and before that by a Chinese restaurant that never quite caught on, and before that by a Burmese-inflected spot whose owners kept an old sofa and a dead television at the back of the dingy dining room. The Burmese food was pretty good, but eating there was like having dinner in a U-Store warehouse.

All of that dimness and debris has been cleared away. The old TV and sofa are long gone, and the kitchen has been separated from the stylishly low-key dining room by a new wall. Even the building’s faded facade has been remade; it’s now clad in red granite. If you didn’t know what used to be here, you would never guess.

The food is what many of us would probably consider standard-issue in Indian restaurants these days, but it’s carefully prepared and intensely flavorful. (Clay Oven, not coincidentally, has a number of older siblings around the city, including India Clay Oven in the Richmond, as well as a namesake Clay Oven in San Mateo.) The only real disappointments for me were the pappadum ($1), the crinkly lentil wafers, which were cold and therefore a little flat, and the palak pakora ($3.50), fritters of spinach in a batter of chickpea flour — also cold, and apparently fried (well ahead of time) in rancid oil.

Other than that: satisfaction. How about tandoori chicken, which is so cliché that it transcends cliché? You would expect a place called Clay Oven to have a pretty good version, since a tandoor is a clay oven, and Clay Oven’s version ($9.95 for a half bird) is exemplary, very tender and juicy, with the requisite reddish pink color (from the seasoned yogurt marinade), presented on a sizzling iron platter with slivers of onion and quartered lemons.

But we were pleased too to find tandoori chicken meat turning up in a dish called chicken makhai ($10.95): chunks of boneless flesh swimming in a voluptuous, spicy sauce very similar to that of chicken tikka masala. The restaurant offers this latter preparation too ($11.95), the only difference being … well, we couldn’t really detect any difference. If you’re concerned about the heat factor, incidentally, you needn’t worry, since the kitchen will tune the food’s fieriness to your specification.

Vegetarian dishes, as is typical at South Asian restaurants, are more than sufficient if you are a shunner of flesh. Saag paneer ($8.95) struck us as unusually and agreeably creamy, with a heavy allotment of white cheese, while chana masala ($7.95) — chickpeas cooked in a spicy gravy — was rich in said gravy, which helped allay any sense of dryness. (Chickpeas can be chalky.) Rice, of course, is offered to help capture the sauces of all of these dishes, but the breads work just as nicely, from a simple, well-blistered naan ($1.95) to a whole-wheat chapati ($1.50) glistening with oil.

Some of the humblest of dishes were among the most memorable. A cucumber salad ($2.75) turned out not to be a yogurty raita (though raita is available) but instead a heap of peeled coins sprinkled with salt and curry powder. And mulligatawny soup ($3.50), a hearty combination of shredded chicken and rice, was Soup Nazi–worthy, though served in a dainty little bowl. Ordinarily I might have hoped for a slightly bigger serving, but the world is not ordinary in the wake of Thanksgiving. So: two cheers yet again for little bowls of soup, and a dessert menu (of such usual suspects as rice pudding and saffron ice cream) from which one can abstain with a clear conscience. *

CLAY OVEN

Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Dinner: daily, 4–10 p.m.

1689 Church, SF

(415) 826-2400

www.indiaclayoven.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Le P’tit Laurent

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Although for years I have believed and maintained that you could never get good cassoulet in a restaurant, I find that I must now recant. You can get good cassoulet in at least one restaurant in this town, and that restaurant is Le P’tit Laurent, which opened a few months ago at the corner of Chenery and Diamond, in the heart of Glen Park’s utterly transformed commercial village.

The restaurant bears the name of its owner, Laurent Legendre, who was one of the partners in Clémentine, a late-’90s presence in the Inner Richmond. I never quite warmed to Clémentine, whose rather formal and correct French cooking seemed a little crimped after the exuberant whimsy of Alain Rondelli, previous holder of the Clement Street space. But no such ghost haunts Le P’tit Laurent, whose predecessor was a blues club named Red Rock. The new bistro already feels as if it’s been there since time out of mind; it has that nicely worn-in Parisian look, from the clutter of liquor bottles (and a miniature Eiffel Tower) behind the mirrored bar to the little, distinctively French signs posted all over the place, including one for cave at the mouth of the wine closet. There is also a pressed-tin ceiling and a service ethic that is French in the best sense: friendly, yes, but knowledgeable and crisp first.

Best of all is the street scene that continuously unfolds beyond the many windows. One of the drawbacks of the French bistro in America is that America isn’t France, and our street scenes don’t look French. Glen Park would never be mistaken for the Marais, even at night, but one evening, amid early darkness and the descending scent of winter, I thought I caught a whiff of the 11th arrondissement: blurred streetlamps, a metro station at the corner, pedestrians hurrying home from work up quiet side streets, though not carrying baguettes under their arms.

Of course, I was eating an excellent cassoulet at the time, and this might have affected my perception. The only flaw in Le P’tit Laurent’s cassoulet ($19) is that it can’t be ordered as part of the three-course, $19.95 prix fixe menu (available Monday to Thursday, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.). Otherwise, the dish is flawless: an earthenware crock of white beans in a sauce thickened by a long, slow simmer with duck-leg confit, chunks of pork, and oblong coins of Toulouse sausage.

The cassoulet is a meal in itself and then some, so our first course — steamed mussels in a creamy white-wine sauce ($9), with pale gold frites ($2.50 extra) — was overkill in the form of an overture. (Prekill?) The broth was excellent if conventional, and it seemed to gather a bit of extra magic when sopped up with the fries or (when they ran out, because of course they did) chunks of baguette. And it probably made more sense as a prelude to a lighter main course, such as sautéed sea bass ($16) in a Grenobloise sauce — a rather forceful concoction of melted butter spiked with herbs and capers (and possibly a dab of mustard, I thought).

One of the kitchen’s themes, in fact, seems to involve giving hearty treatments to seafood. On an earlier visit we found several chunks of monkfish ($17.95) sprawled on a bed of shredded cabbage and bacon (a combination reminiscent of the Alsatian dish choucroute). On that same visit we liked suprême de poulet ($14.95), a roasted leg and thigh of chicken on a bed of couscous and garlic confit, with a cheery sauce of citrus reduction and ginger, but were less enthusiastic about the vegetarian plate ($14.95), a pair of large, free-form ravioli stuffed with red beet slices and bathed in too much of a decent but unremarkable mushroom sauce. If you needed proof that the traditional French gastronomic ethic is unenthusiastic about vegetarianism, I give you exhibit A.

If we felt we’d drifted into an unstated conflict, we were soon mollified by dessert: to wit, profiteroles ($5.95), in fact the best profiteroles in recent memory. There was nothing too out of the ordinary about the flavors; the pastry balls were stuffed with vanilla ice cream and sauced with chocolate and caramel. But the pastry! Sublimely flaky. Profiteroles are too often tough and rubbery, like old racquetballs, but Le P’tit Laurent’s were yieldingly delicate, bits of buttery finery that surrendered themselves and were soon gone but not forgotten. They were so not forgotten, in fact, that we ordered them a second time a few evenings later, and while I was tempted to cap things off with a snifter of Armagnac, I felt no need in the end. (To paraphrase the endlessly paraphrasable Homer Simpson: my gastronomic rapacity did know satiety.)

As for Glen Park — well, these days I hardly know ye. When Chenery Park opened just a few doors up in 2000, it was a lonely outpost of upscaleness in a Sleepy Hollow sort of urban enclave that seemed little changed since the 1950s. But these first years of the new millennium have brought all sorts of newness, from the cool pizza place across the street (Gialina) to the gorgeous Canyon Market (viewable through Le P’tit Laurent’s windows as part of the faux–11th arrondissement display) to, finally, a retro-chic Parisian bistro that serves quite good food at reasonable prices and is, accordingly, packing them in. The case for cassoulet has been made.

LE P’TIT LAURENT

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–2 p.m. Dinner: daily, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

699 Chenery, SF

(415) 334-3235

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Live Sushi Bar

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REVIEW When you’re looking for a restaurant in Potrero Hill, Live Sushi Bar is the proverbial needle in the haystack. But with a good location, great service, and fresh food at reasonable prices, it’s worth finding.

First of all, our server figured out I was a vegetarian when I ordered the Green Combo, and he replaced the beef-based miso soup that accompanies the combo with edamame before I had to ask. He also helped my sushi-novice companion choose a combination of rolls she’d be comfortable with.

As for the food, the vegetable tempura was nothing to sneeze at, but the sushi is really where this place shines. The highlights of my meal were the veggie swamp rolls, cucumber and avocado topped with a delicious seaweed salad that made them look like edible Fraggles curled up on my plate. My friend ordered the Roll Combo and was pleasantly surprised by the all-veggie cucumber rolls, a nice balance to the fishy tuna and crab rolls that constituted the rest of her order. The combos are certainly the best way to go: for the price of one order of rolls, you can get three different rolls, as well as miso (or edamame) and salad. Plus, everything arrives so beautifully arranged, you’ll almost feel guilty ruining the edible works of art with your chopsticks.

And an extra bonus? The women’s bathroom, which not only smells like a tropical paradise but also has a miniature village inside: ducks rowing a boat, a bridge, and little buildings all arranged in an alcove. Stuffing yourself and a friend on great sushi for $30 and then visiting a tiny fantasyland — who wouldn’t love that?

LIVE SUSHI BAR Daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.–late. 2001 17th St., SF. (415) 861-8610

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