Restaurant Review Archives — Page 6 of 15 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Pizza Nostra

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

February 8, 2011

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Nice — I speak of the French city, not the human quality, of which I must be one of life’s least accomplished practitioners — isn’t quite Italian, but it isn’t quite not, either. Like Alsace in the north — another locus of French pizza — it has been the subject of international contention for centuries. Maybe pizza helps settle nerves frayed by all this struggle, but whether it does or not, pizza served with a distinctly French flair (and often a pitcher of local rosé) is what you’ll find at the many outdoor cafes in the heart of Nice, just a few blocks from the beaches of the Cote d’Azur.

It’s what you’ll find, too, at Pizza Nostra, our own little slice of Nice — complete with outdoor tables! — at the north foot of Potrero Hill. The neighborhood will never be mistaken for the Cote d’Azur, and of course the weather here is considerably fouler, but there is something sublime about pizza — really a whole Italian menu, with many interesting small courses, salads, soups, and starters — served with Gallic style.

The restaurant opened some years ago, as Couleur Cafe, in a small shopping center with a parking lot and buildings of a shed-like, provisional quality, like a PX on Guam. It then became Pizza Nostra, changing hands last year from Jocelyn Bulow to Winona Matsuda. She hasn’t changed much, and maybe that’s because there isn’t much in need of change. Despite the faux-suburban setting, the interior has wonderful candlelit atmospherics under a high ceiling that melts into shadow. The service is impeccable. And the food travels well beyond the country of pizza; you could do quite nicely here without pizza at all. But the pizzas are lovely, and if you were stuck with just that, you’d be happy too.

But I do question the wisdom of bringing basket after basket of complimentary focaccia to people who are in all likelihood waiting for pizza. White flour in our diet is like atmospheric radiation left over from those 1950s tests in the South Pacific: insidious, omnipresent, unnoticed. I think this every time I go by Tartine Bakery and see people queuing like Soviet-era Muscovites. As Michael Pollan noted in his polemic In Defense of Food, white flour is so devoid of nutrition that even bugs don’t want it.

Having said that, I note that Pizza Nostra’s focaccia is addictive, with a pillow-like softness and bewitching olive-oil breath. If you can restrain yourself from gobbling it down straight, you will find it’s useful for dunking and sopping applications. We found its spear shape ideal for sticking into a bowl of mushroom-eggplant soup ($6) that was possibly the most gratifying use of eggplant I’ve ever come across. Its subtle, bitter bite was like a sheen around the earthy weight of the fungi.

The focaccia was also useful in wiping up the savory oil left on the plate after we’d demolished the halved brussels sprouts ($5), pan-roasted with fat chunks of pancetta. I would have let the sprouts cook through and caramelize a little more, but they were tender and flavorful nonetheless.

Sicilian-style tuna salad ($12) seemed like a close relative of salade niçoise, except without anchovies. But there was a wealth of halved pear tomatoes, pitted nicoise olives, and cannellini beans nested in a jumble of arugula and frisée, with the tuna arranged in a berm that partly enclosed the greens.

The pizzas are thin-crust, made (according to the menu) in the style of Recco, a town in the northern Italian region of Liguria, not far from Nice. The array of toppings is mostly conventional, although the kitchen does throw together various specials, including a pie ($16) topped with hot Italian sausage, red and yellow bell peppers, mushrooms, a red-onion confit, and broccoli florets — all of which runs against the basic article of American faith that more is better. Sometimes more isn’t better. Broccoli doesn’t translate well to pizza, and we found the red-onion jam to be jarringly sweet.

But — on the subject of sweets — the olive-oil cake ($6), a cupcake-like disk, was dense and moist. It could have stood without assistance from the large pat of limoncello gelato on the side, although the gelato was a nice touch.

PIZZA NOSTRA

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., noon–3 p.m.

300 De Haro, SF

(415) 558-9493

www.pizzanostrasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Not too noisy

Wheelchair acccesible

Mission Chinese Food at Lung Shan

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

January 25, 2011

3

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE As a rule, I am wary of restaurants where you order items by the number — especially when the numbers run into the hundreds. You start to think it’s like an automotive plant back there in the kitchen, where they’re slapping on option groups (fog lamps, alloy wheels, a leather-wrapped steering wheel) according to some big book of codes. Of course restaurant kitchens are like factories — are factories — we all know this, but there is such a thing as too much choice and too much process, even in America. I’m not sure anyone truly needs, or even wants, DishTV’s 500-plus channels, or a restaurant menu that has to be printed on several folios, like a poetry chapbook.

Chinese restaurants are notable, in my experience, for being more likely than other kinds of restaurants to offer a far greater number of dishes than any restaurant kitchen could be expected to cook with attentive passion, but a notable exception is Mission Chinese Food at Lung Shan. On any given night — even a cold weeknight — you might think you’ve stumbled on a crowd of people waiting to audition for “Brooklyn: The Musical.” Every hipster for miles around seems to be wedged into the dining room waiting for a table. It is a veritable hipsterama, and I mean this in the best possible way.

Hipsters have a certain reputation for shunning math — or is that meth? — and (perhaps because of being raised in a culture of shopping-mall vapidity) show a craving for any validating experience that can be described with the adjective “street.” So maybe their massive presence here is a response to the street-food menu, which numbers just a few dozen items. Or maybe they just know good food, at a good price, when they find it. There is plenty of agreeably mediocre Chinese food to be had in San Francisco, but not at MCF. The cooking here is clever and forceful, and it’s also gently incendiary. This is the kind of food that makes your nose run. You can also get Chinese beer for $3 a bottle; as Bart Simpson once put it after agreeing to let the vet spay Homer and give him a flea bath for $20, “shop around, you can’t beat that price!”

Even the cold items carry a chili charge. Tiger salad, for instance ($7) — an irresistible name; who could resist having it? — consisted of four squat pillars of herbed lettuces, red perilla (a kind of shiso leaf), and roasted seaweed in a puddle of chili oil, as if the plate’s previous tenant had been some greasy chorizo. But even with all the exhilarating heat, even cold heat, you soon understand that this is Chinese-influenced cooking, not Chinese cooking.

Salt cod fried rice ($10), for example, sounds like something the Vikings might have cooked up ago while sailing across the north Atlantic. Despite the fancy emendations, including confit of escolar, the dish seemed very much like other fried rice dishes you’d find around town, with little rounds of Chinese sausage, like a sliced-up red pencil, lending a defining presence, along with scallion for color contrast.

The menu’s signature dish could well be the sizzling cumin lamb ($12.50), served on a sizzling iron platter that keeps gently cooking the onion slivers and slices of jalapeño pepper as you pluck out chunks of the highly scented lamb. The meat is from the belly and is therefore quite fatty; it takes the form of jointed spindles whose two arms are glued together by the melted fat. It is rich, intensely perfumed, spicy-hot, and (for an auditory thrill) actually sizzling. We could not ask more from any meat dish.

Still, after working your way through a plate of such weighty food, a bit of relaxation would be in order — a bath, say, in a broad bowl of broth filled with pork dumplings ($10). The steam itself was — a kind of pork aromatherapy — and there was a strong temptation to put towels over our heads and hold our faces in the steam flow.

Lung Shan’s street face is about as prosaic as it gets. It doesn’t look to have been freshened for decades and gives no hint of the crowd that gathers there when the sun goes down. But thrill-seekers know that there’s no thrill quite so thrilling as the unadvertised one.

MISSION CHINESE FOOD AT LUNG SHAN

Thurs.–Tues., 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

2234 Mission, SF

(415) 863-2800

www.missionchinesefood.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Loud

Wheelchair accessible

Beast and the Hare

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

January 18, 2011

2

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If one reason to go out to eat is to partake of dishes you can’t easily make yourself, another is to find ideas for dishes you can make yourself. I place myself more in the latter category, and, as an ersatz Frenchman and perhaps unacknowledged admirer of French industrial espionage, I find myself peeking at dishes as they emerge from restaurant kitchens, wondering whether I could manage some version of this or that in my own kitchen or appropriate a few clever twists or wrinkles as enhancements to some quotidian staple of the repertoire. As urban voyeurism goes, this subspecies seems fairly mild and nontoxic.

Food fits a sensibility, ultimately, the same way clothes do. Some people are born to wear tuxedos and nibble foie gras from dainty toast rounds — Pierce Brosnan springs to mind here — while others (the young, mostly) look most aglow in t-shirts, cargo pants, and espadrilles, eating foil-wrapped burritos while sitting on the curb.

Extremes tend to attract the most attention, in part because they’re easy to identify, but between them lies a wide country full of distinctive treasures. In San Francisco these treasures are — I speak now of food, not clothes — the neighborhood restaurants, the places that, for the better part of 20 years, have found and held a balance between flair and rusticity. They make the kind of food you’d make at home, if you spelled home with a capital H and Architectural Digest was coming to shoot a photo spread; they make food that’s recognizable and unintimidating yet subtly sublime, at a reasonable price.

There was a bloom of these places in the early to mid 1990s, and according to this timeline Beast and the Hare, which opened at 22nd and Guerrero streets in November (in the old La Provence/Mangiafuoco space at the corner) is a latecomer, or maybe a throwback. The restaurant is good-looking — simple, royal-blue walls and generous spacing among the tables — but it’s not stunning. It reminded me of someone wearing a nice pair of Levi’s with a white button-down shirt and black loafers. Such a person would want honest but sophisticated food, and that’s what chef Ian Marks’ kitchen would give him.

Marks’ résumé includes a stint at Liberty Cafe, a neighborhood light from the early 1990s, as well as Fatted Calf and Hog Island Oyster, and so his to-the-point menu includes, not surprisingly, oysters and house-made charcuterie. You can get a satisfying arrangement of charcuterie, including lardo draped on thin slices of pink-lady apples, rabbit rillettes, and slices of smoked duck breast, along with toast rounds and a small pile of pickled vegetables, for $14.

The pickles helped cut the sense of fattiness, we found, as did the lacinato kale ($5), which had a light crispiness, almost like that of pappadum, I associate with flash-frying. My ersatz-Frenchman self noted that the idea of handling kale (which can display an obstinacy like that of cheap steak) in this way had never before occurred to him.

Osso buco ($18) is typically served with risotto, which, for creaminess is hard to beat. But risotto is unforgiving and tricky to time, and — in a slight inversion of the usual rule — restaurant versions often aren’t quite as good as the homemade kind, at least if the home chef is reasonably attentive. Beast and the Hare’s solution was to substitute white beans for the risotto, and if they weren’t quite as creamy, they did give a nice textural counterpoint to the rich, gelatinous marrow sauce oozing from the core of the gigantic veal shank.

A pressed duck leg ($18) reminded me of chicken under a brick, with crispy skin, a restrained juiciness to the meat, and a convincingly steam-rollered look. If, like me, you have been overexposed to confit and sometimes find duck too rich and fatty, you would probably warm to this method. Further cutting the richness were a pair of nicely browned potato disks and a bed of still-crunchy chicory.

The dessert menu does contain at least one extraordinary item, and that is the beer ice cream, which appeared as a small sphere accompanying the German chocolate cake ($8). Beer ice cream sounds gimmicky, but it did really, and pleasantly, taste of beer — as if someone had mixed suds with some heavy cream and a touch of sugar, then frozen it. A little more conventional were the beignets ($6), like a bunch of little fried basketballs in a rack after gym class, with, on the side, a thick and bewitching orange caramel sauce. If they’d only served you the sauce, you probably wouldn’t have complained. The ersatz Frenchman had to be restrained from licking the dish clean. What a beast he is.

BEAST AND THE HARE

Dinner: Wed.–Mon., 6–10 p.m.

1001 Guerrero, SF

(415) 821-1001

www.beastandthehare.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Michael Mina

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

January 11, 2011

24

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When Michael Mina closed his eponymous restaurant in Union Square last year, I did not mourn. I had visited the place early in its run, toward the end of the summer of 2004, and felt as if I’d been seated inside a giant pillowcase, with awkward ergonomics and over fussy food — good food, of course, but expensive and show-offy. The desire — I might say the lust — of human beings to leave their mark on the world, whether by making rivers run backward or carving radishes into rose blooms, is a constant, for better or worse, and one notes its manifestations with wary neutrality. But as a philosophical matter I subscribe to the Alice Waters school of letting foods speak in their own voices instead of turning them into chefly statements, and in this sense a certain sort of high-style cooking poses issues for me.

In October, Michael Mina reopened in the old Aqua space, and a circle was closed, since Mina had been Aqua’s chef for a decade, through the 1990s and into the new millennium. How, I wondered, did they actually move the restaurant? Did they pack it into moving vans and speed off in the middle of the night, the way the Baltimore Colts did in 1984? However the move was accomplished, it was well worth making. The new space, while vault-like, is softened by curvature of the spine; it’s also quiet enough for comfortable conversation even when full. The ergonomics are much improved.

And the food? Well, Mina still likes his flights, his arrays of one- or two-bite treats, but the general tone of things is more muscular — an amuse-bouche of beluga-lentil soup, say, served in a demitasse with a small square of grilled-cheese sandwich on the side — and at times even rustic, as with the baskets of grilled levain to be spread with ricotta cheese enhanced by honey and pepper.

The smaller courses are mostly wondrous. A platter of hors d’oeuvres ($16/person) was a blitzkrieg of sensory experience, including a sublime crab fritter nested in a lettuce cup, a small filet of cured ocean trout propped on a mini-blini, a sensuous round of blood-red steak tartare, and (tasting mainly of fat), a foie gras “pb&j” with a buckwheat cake and huckleberry preserves.

The spell did weaken some with the main courses; a “five seas” tasting of Japanese fish ($42) could have been an appetizer plate, as could a duo of crispy fish ($39). A frenched rack of Prather Ranch lamb ($39), on the other hand, offered real ooomph, although views were divided about the niçoise-style fregola pasta, mixed with shreds of lamb osso buco served in an elegant little pot on the side — too rustic and not part of the greater whole? Maybe, but I liked it anyway.

Although the eagle-eyed will note that Michael Mina’s prices are top-tier, I hesitate to describe the restaurant as a haven for the rich, if only because an experience there is actually available to people whose incomes don’t reach past the payroll-tax cap. I have no issue with the rich per se — they, like the poor, will be with us always — but I feel no special urge to worship them or their achievements. I leave that task to them, since they seem to be well-equipped for it.

It is a writer’s job to afflict the comfortable and complacent, and so a few weeks ago I noted the absurdity of Senate Republicans’ waging all-out legislative war to extend the so-called Bush tax cuts on adjusted incomes over $250,000 when doing so requires us to borrow yet more money from foreign creditors, chief among them China. This brief noting of the obvious occasioned a hail of furious, invective-laden email — “cheesy,” “socialist” — hurled by web trolls from as far afield as Cape Cod.

I recognize such outbursts of right-wing media thugs because I’ve seen them before. In October 2008, when I dared to mention other obvious absurdities — Sarah Palin, our antediluvian Cuba policy — abuse also poured in from afar and I was even denounced by noted high school graduate James Taranto in the politics blog he writes for The Wall Street Journal. The wing nuts of the right perceive, I guess, that tax cuts for the rich — following bail-outs for reckless Wall Streeters — are politically touchy in a time when the federal deficit has become an aneurysm. They believe that media intimidation, even of small fry like me, is always worth a try. And plainly they believe that the next presidential campaign is already on. There, I agree with them. *

MICHAEL MINA

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

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

252 California, SF

(415) 397-9222

www.michaelmina.net

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Moya

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

January 4, 2011

5

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Many of the city’s Ethiopian restaurants are to be found in the Western Addition (on or near Divisadero Street) and in the Inner Sunset, so to find one, Moya, blooming in SoMa is an unexpected pleasure. The rush of Internet Age money into the neighborhoods south of Market Street in recent years has been a fast-rising tide that can be said to have lifted all boats only if by boats we mean yachts. But if by boats we mean boats, then some swamping has occurred. The area isn’t yet devoid of modest, high-value restaurants, but the trend has bent strongly in the direction of pricey new places, from Prospect in the east to Bar Agricole in the once-forlorn west.

The foods of Ethiopia seem a little underappreciated on these shores. The cooking is as gratifyingly spiced as that from the other side of the Indian Ocean. But while Indian cuisine has found a sort of vogue here, perhaps because of the influx of so many software engineers, Ethiopian cuisine has not.

Yet neglect isn’t always and entirely a bad thing. It can help preserve a certain integrity and authenticity. At Moya (which opened last summer), the look is big-city modern, with high ceilings, a floor handsomely laid with rough tiles the color of sandstone, and walls washed with a butter color. The place looks fresh and clean, and the kitchen is half out in the open, which lends a reassuring transparency to things. There is nothing quite like being able to see the people who make your food actually making it.

But at heart, it’s very much a mom-is-cooking operation. The ayb, a kind of cottage cheese, is house-made according to a family recipe. You can order the cheese as a side, for $4, and it’s also served with the kitfo ($14), a kind of spicy, tataki-ized steak tartare — steak tartake? More on the beef in a moment, but as for the cheese: it was more creamy than chunky, almost like a relation of mascarpone but with a fresh sourness that led me to ask our server whether lemon juice had been substituted for rennet as the curdling agent. The answer was indefinite, which might mean I hadn’t put the question clearly or had stumbled on a trade secret. But the cheese did strongly remind me of a simple fresh white cheese I’ve sometimes made myself (using lemon juice squeezed into scalded milk) for the Indian spinach dish saag paneer.

The other lovely element of sourness in the food involves injera, the bread (made from a grain called teff,) that resembles a cross between sponge cake and sourdough. You could make a savory bûche de Noël from it. At Moya. as at all the Ethiopian and Eritrean places I’ve been to, injera is ubiquitous, whether laid out as a kind of mat for other items to rest on; rolled up like fresh lavash and set beside a rounded cone of green lentils — azifa ($5) — strongly seasoned with red onions, garlic, lemon, chilis, and olive oil or torn up and tossed with tomatoes, green peppers, onions, and a garlicky vinaigrette for ye timatim fit fit ($4), a sort of east African panzanella.

The kitchen’s seasoning hand is a robust one, whether the animating ingredient is garlic (the ye timatim fit fit should come with a whole coffee bean or two for each diner, to chew away garlic breath, which becomes particularly lethal the morning after), or hot pepper. We were consulted on how hot we wanted the kitfo and ye doro tibs ($12), chunks of boneless chicken sautéed in clarified butter with berberé, (the traditional Ethiopian chili powder), onions, garlic, tomato, and herbs. When told that hot was quite hot, we said medium and hoped for the best. But medium turned out to be what most places would call hot. I like spicy food, and I found the tingling afterglow of the berberé to be a distinct pleasure. But mild wouldn’t be a bad default choice for those in doubt.

As is customary, the main courses were piled together onto a platter lined with injera, and a well-dressed chopped salad dotted with tomato quarters were heaped at either end. The salad was both decorative and cooling, while the injera rug, of course, was ripped to shreds that served as little finger-operated grabbing devices. The atavistic satisfaction of tearing something up and then eating it reminds us of how close to being uncivilized we are, really, even in such civilized surroundings.

MOYA

Dinner: nightly, 5–9 p.m.

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

1044 Folsom, SF

(415) 431-5544

www.eatmoya.com

No alcohol

Cash only

Not particularly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Parada 22

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

December 28, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

Out at the west end of Haight Street, what do we find? Not a pot of gold, sadly, though plenty of pot, whose haze hovers fragrantly above the pavement like hippie ground fog. Also: a McDonald’s, complete with parking lot. This has always faintly depressed me. Across the street, an emerging Whole Foods (with parking lot), while a block to the east, the old I-Beam has been obliterated in favor of condos.

In the midst of all this corporate commotion, it would be easy to overlook Parada 22, a tiny restaurant that opened last spring serving Puerto Rican food. The western run of Haight Street, while rich in places to eat, has never really been known for its restaurants, yet Parada 22 is worth seeking out. If I hesitate to describe it as a destination restaurant, it’s only because that label might raise expectations to curse (in the sense of “hex”) level.

We are talking, after all, about a restaurant with concrete floors, crayon drawings, and old newsprint on the walls (including the San Francisco Chronicle’s unforgettable reporting on the outbreak of the Spanish-American War), no host’s station, and a table set just inches from the front door, the better for the people seated at it to be buffeted by winter drafts as diners come and go.

But we look closer and find grace notes. Each table holds a flickering candle, along with an old coffee can supplied with utensils and napkins. Even better: one of the chefs, on a cold evening, brings everyone a little cup of pork and vegetable soup, made from a pork leg roasted earlier in the day (and with stock made from the roasted bones). You might call this an amuse-bouche — if it was more whimsical and less sustaining. I warmed my hands with the cup, since concrete floors can make a place seem cold even if it isn’t.

Puerto Rican cooking involves versions of and variations on foods that are characteristic of the Caribbean basin. It’s on the rustic side, with plenty of beans and rice, roasted plantains, and cassava root (an appealing alternative to the potato that has never found much traction in our own potato-involved cuisine). The root stars in a salad ($7) that, when warmed, provides a strong contrast to the chilled greens, carrot tabs, and tomato dice. (The advertised avocado was a no-show.)

There’s also plenty of meat, at least as Parada 22’s kitchen prepares the cuisine, with an emphasis on pork. Pork’s cultural meaning is complex; pigs are fecund scavengers that thrive across a wide range of habitats, which means they are efficient producers of protein and therefore a boon to human populations in less than bountiful circumstances. And pork, along with wine, is about as closely associated as a comestible could be with Latin Christianity. Eating it — or not eating it — can be a powerful assertion of cultural identity.

I love pork as a cook would love it, for its compatibility with so many different treatments and seasonings, its modest cost, and its relative ease of handling. Parada 22’s pernil asado ($12), which reached the table as a heap of oval slices, reminded me of how good pork can be even when lightly adorned (with garlic and oregano) and simply roasted: the meat juicy and giving a hint of ropiness for texture. As, perhaps, an echo of humankind’s ancient fear of going hungry, the plate was finished with failsafe heaps of Spanish rice (studded with bits of ham), white beans (simmered with potato, carrot, and winter squash), and a green salad. Even without the pork, there would have been a meal.

Just as meal-worthy was a pot of red beans ($3.50) simmered in a spicy red sauce with bits of ham and chunks of cassava root. If you had only a fiver in your pocket, you could go to the McDonald’s a few blocks away and end up with God knows what, or you could have Parada 22’s red beans — a stew, really — and be much more genuinely nourished.

The menu card also offers several sandwiches, including a Cuban version with pork (Puerto Rican and Cuban foods seem much more alike than not) and a beef edition ($9), with mats of meat whose toughness belied their thinness. Caramelized onion and melted white cheese lent a Philly-cheesesteak effect. The baguette was adequate, but the whole thing would have been better if the bread had been toasted.

For dessert there was, fittingly, rum cake ($3.25), a neat square of yellow sponginess under a cap of whipped cream. It looked quite demure and innocent but did have DUI alcohol breath. In that respect, it reminded me of tiramisù, except much less soggy and therefore more coherent. Bust averted.

PARADA 22

Tues.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

1805 Haight, SF

(415) 750-1111

www.parada22.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Tolerable noise

Passion Cafe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

December 14, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Although I deplored Julie & Julia — a dreadful bit of movie pap, except for the scene where Julie discovers that Julia hates her bloody blog; priceless! — I was mesmerized by the al fresco dinner cooked and served by the unsinkable Julie on a Brooklyn rooftop. There is a magic like no other in floating motionless above the nighttime city, with a soundtrack of soft conversation, gently clicking tableware, and the odd horn honking on the street below.

The street below the rooftop dining patio at Passion Café — opened not quite a year ago by Steve Barton and Jacques Andre — is Sixth Street, between Market and Mission, and it has more than its share of honking horns, along with speeding traffic, trash spread like autumn leaves in sidewalk tree wells, and a Dante-esque population of the shattered and lost. Sitting under an umbrella at a long picnic table 50 feet above all this on a rooftop patio framed by trellised vines and with a tall potted ficus at the end of the next table, is slightly surreal (though pleasant). If there is indeed a stairway to heaven, as Led Zeppelin once suggested, it might well begin here.

Passion Café will never be confused with the Fifth Floor, a few blocks away. Fifth Floor is higher up, totally enclosed, and all but lacking a ground-level presence. Passion Café, on the other hand, has its feet solidly planted on terra firma: there’s a large ground-level dining area, complete with exposed brick and oil paintings (for sale), just inside the door. But the draw of the place is definitely the roof, which you attain by climbing two flights of wide wooden stairs that creak. At the landing between the flights is a small tea table set for two — the perfect spot for a civilized break up, or maybe (for the less civilized) a discreet shove.

The food carries mostly French nomenclature and takes a variety of familiar French forms — the menu offers a variety of tartines, along with plates of charcuterie and paté — but the execution is strongly Californian. Many of the plates come heaped with mixed green salads, and white rice is served on a scale I have never remotely seen in France.

The ratatouille ($14), for instance, included a berm of rice that looked like something left behind by a Tonka-truck snowplow working its way through a blizzard. The vegetable stew itself, meanwhile, wasn’t a stew at all but more of what appeared to be a stir-fry of long, rather tough eggplant strips, lengths of red bell pepper, zucchini chunks, and tomato, but not enough tomato. It was as though the kitchen had thoughts of transforming a peasant’s dish, a way of using up the end-of-summer surplus from a vegetable garden, into a gourmand’s delight, as in the movie Ratatouille, but lost its nerve after a few hesitant steps. I would have liked a bit more thyme and garlic, too, but the dish was still flavorful.

Napoleons are typically confections of layered pastry one finds on the dessert cart, but Passion’s version ($14.50) was savory and made with pasta — lasagna, basically, with ground beef, baked in an oblong crock. Beside it rose a low mountain of mixed greens dotted with olives and croutons and dressed with a cumin-inflected vinaigrette.

Cumin, an easterly breeze, reminds us of the French connection in the Middle East and so it wasn’t completely surprising to find yet another hint of it in Passion’s paté ($5). The spice added a note of exotic excitement, but the paté itself (mounted on yet more salad) fell short of an ideal creaminess; despite the thinness of the slice, its texture was almost leathery. It was like a bit of old shoe sole that had fallen away into a clump of wet grass.

Views were mixed on the tomato-mozzarella salad ($5). You might wonder how anything could possibly go wrong with such a straightforward preparation — slices of ripe red tomato alternating with slices of cheese, and perhaps a drizzling of balsamic vinegar over the top — and the answer would be the bits of arugula the kitchen scattered about. Arugula has a nuttiness with a slightly bitter edge, and here the bitterness seemed to assert itself to the dismay of the table, though once we figured out what the little green flecks were, I came to admire their feistiness.

Desserts weren’t served with mountains of rice or salad (yay) or even dribblings of berries (boo). Chocolate mousse cake ($5) was fluffy and light as laundry taken fresh from the dryer, though on the sweet side, while a Granny Smith apple crisp ($5) could have used more apple character. Maybe they should look up one of Julia’s old recipes.

PASSION CAFÉ

Tues.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m.;

Sat., 9 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

28 Sixth St., SF

(415) 437-9730

www.passioncafe.net

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Pleasant noise

Wheelchair access to ground floor

Miss SaiGon

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

December 7, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE There really is a Miss Saigon inside of Miss SaiGon, but she seems to be made of plastic, if — to quote Groucho Marx — I’m any judge of horseflesh. With her motionless good cheer, the big doll looks like salvage from some airline’s marketing campaign, circa 1968. Next to her stands a kind of aqueous sculpture, with sheets of water rippling down a long glass panel.

Such kitschy drama, and we’re barely inside this Vietnamese restaurant (not to be confused with the musical of the same name). The semi-cavernous dining room — weirdly reminiscent of a dance floor in some mid-list gay bar — is screened from the street by a barricade of translucent draperies that hang from floor to ceiling with lacey, lingerie-like suggestiveness. It feels like an after-hours, members-only sale at a Victoria’s Secret warehouse.

Yet behind the bar, the wall is painted a nervy lime green — a hue that will be powerfully reminiscent (to the restaurant-minded) of Mangosteen. Mangosteen is part of the new wave of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian restaurants that have opened along Larkin Street, on the north side of Market, in recent years, while Miss SaiGon stands just steps away from old-guarder Tu Lan, which Julia Child is said to have admired. One evening, on my way to Miss Saigon, I peeked inside Tu Lan and wondered how Child even fit inside, let alone enjoyed herself, and whether the oft-told tale of her admiration might be apocryphal.

Miss SaiGon, slightly more two years old, belongs to the post-Child era, but I would guess the old doyenne would find the newer place eminently acceptable. The interior is attractive without being overbearing, the social tone is comfortable, with lots of younger people among the clientele (laptops glowing on tabletops in front of them — but aren’t laptops quaint now?), and the extensive menu is mostly excellent.

If brevity is the soul of wit as well as menu-writing, then a vast menu like Miss SaiGon’s, with so many items that they have to be numbered (including No. 4, kimchee, a ringer from Korea), is generally best approached with caution. The more dishes a kitchen has to master, the more likely it is the chefs’ attention will be diluted or that ingredients for the less-loved dishes will sit around too long — that something will go awry, in other words.

But the execution at Miss SaiGon is sharp and assured, the flavors properly balanced and amplified, like rich sound. The only exception, to my mind, was an unlikely one: slices of pork stir-fried with lemon sauce and vegetables ($9.50). The vegetables were ordinary — celery and carrots, mainly — and the lemon sauce was MIA. Instead, the dish was dominated by an unannounced walk-on: pineapple, in chunks. Pineapple is fine in piña coladas and as a supplement to lubricious activity, but as an accompaniment to pork here it was too sweet, too overwhelming, and too obvious.

Neither too sweet nor too obvious was the papaya salad ($6.50), which resembled a nest of glass shards and was fortified with shrimp and ground pork. Ground peanuts added texture, leaves of fresh mint brought their bewitching breath, and — best of all — the salad was dressed with some version of nuoc mam, the salty-tangy-sweet blend of fish sauce and vinegar that is one of Vietnamese cuisine’s signature condiments.

The prospect of cold noodles — sesame ($3.95) — on a cold night caused some consternation around the table, but there turned out to be something sufficiently warming, or at least sustaining, in the fatness of the noodles to muffle the disquiet. Sesame can have a sharpness that verges on the unpleasant, but the potentially harsh edge was blunted by the plush saltiness of fish sauce.

Even better were garlic noodles ($8.95), stir-fried with bits of boneless chicken, basil, and lemongrass — a lovely little symphony of melody and harmony, and hot to boot. Bun cha gio ($7.50) — a huge bowl filled with vermicelli noodles, egg rolls, and lettuce, with a side of nuoc mam sauce laced with carrot threads and crushed peanut — was a duet of hot (the egg rolls) and cold (everything else). And that was just fine. When it’s chilly out, you don’t quibble about whatever form warmth chooses to take, even if it’s the eternal smile on the face of a life-sized plastic doll, waving hello and goodbye to all and sundry.

MISS SAIGON

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

100 Sixth St., SF

(415) 522-0332

www.misssaigonsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Pica Pica Maize Kitchen

Andrew Lam

-

November 30, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Corn is the theme at Pica Pica, a “maize kitchen,” to drive the point home. Corn is perhaps the greatest of the Americas’ food offerings to the rest of the world, with the potato, tomato, and cocoa bean not too far off the pace. And it’s full of ancient subtlety, a point too easily obscured by the mountainous heaps of American monoculture that helped make the movie King Corn so visually arresting. Corn is to the Americas’ more southerly peoples what wine grapes are to the French.

Pica Pica isn’t that grandiose, of course. It recently moved into a space at the corner of 15th and Valencia streets that, through years of restaurant iterations, reminded me of nothing so much as those sheds ice fishermen huddle in. It is narrow and it is modest. But the lighting has been freshened and clarified, the tabletops are made of a handsome composite, and the interior signage, which explains the menu’s various terms, is bright with primary colors.

That menu is basically Venezuelan, which makes Pica Pica a successor of sorts to Yunza, a lovely little place that had a too-short run over on Fillmore Street about five years ago. (And let’s not forget Mr. Pollo, on Mission, though the name makes me think of Mister Ed, TV’s talking horse.) One difference is that Yunza offered full table service, whereas at Pica Pica you order at the counter and post a number at your table so they can find you when the food is ready.

Another, more important but less obvious, difference is that Pica Pica’s cooking is (apologies in advance for this tiresome cliché) ingredient-driven, even beyond the dexterous use of maize. And I don’t mean “ingredient-driven” merely in the sense of going to the farmers market and fussing about seasonality but of using the wide panoply of possibilities available to kitchens from mighty to modest in this blessed part of the world, and of being aware not merely of flavor but of color and texture too.

A nice example of the kitchen’s attentiveness to the full spectrum of sensual appeal is the bululú salad ($3.99), a jumble of roasted corn kernels, julienne red bell peppers, chunks of jicama and pineapple, quinoa, and daikon sprouts, with a syrupy passion-fruit vinaigrette on the side. The vinaigrette was a bit sweet, but the salad as a whole, in addition to looking like a slightly loopy still-life painting with abstract tendencies, offered more snap, crackle, and pop than even the most antic breakfast cereal.

The chupe soup ($3.99/small) was no match for the visual splendor of the salad — it looked like many another chunky chicken soup — but the chunks, which included chicken shreds, a segment of corn cob, and white rice, were weighty enough to give the soup a low center of gravity.

At the heart of the menu are the corn flatbreads: arepas ($7.99, puffy, savory, made with white corn); cachapas ($8.99, flatter and more crepe-like, yellower, noticeably sweet); and the maize’wiches ($7.99), which combine elements of the first two. These breads can be fitted out as you please, from a broad range of fillings that range from meatless to meaty, with scrambled eggs in between.

Some random tasting notes: la vegetariana, a compendium of tofu slats, avocado slices, plantains, and black beans, was difficult to eat because of the toughness of the tofu. Catira, shreds of chicken sautéed in a sofrito then put to bed under a blanket of melted cheddar cheese, was tasty, but not tasty enough to overcome the sweet interference of encircling cachapa. (There is a reason high-fructose corn syrup comes from corn. You could make a nice crèpe suzette from a cachapa.) Pulled pork, on the other hand, or pernil, was about as good as it gets — and made that much better by the little tub of aioli served on the side. The spicy sauce served with la vegetariana (we guessed some version of chipotle or other hot-chile aioli) was better yet, and a pretty peach color on top of it all.

Like the three tenors, Pica Pica’s three corn flatbreads share obvious similarities and have distinctive virtues, but if I could only choose one, I would choose the arepa, which seemed to me the best balanced and most disciplined of the three: redolent of corn but not cloying, thick and firm enough to hold its contents without becoming competitive. None of the three, though, are finger or ballpark foods, suitable to eat by hand; they’re all too big and unwieldy, and you’ll need a knife and fork so as not to disgrace yourself. Don’t ask how I know.

PICA PICA MAIZE KITCHEN

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

401 Valencia, SF

(415) 400-5453

www.picapicakitchen.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not too noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Ragazza

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

November 23, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Ragazza is the younger sorella of Sharon Ardiana’s Gialina in Glen Park and, as is so often the case with siblings, the two restaurants do and do not resemble each other. Much of the differences are traceable to the respective neighborhoods. Glen Park (where we find Gialina) has in recent years become an annex of city’s baby belt, whose big, shiny buckle is just over the hill in Noe Valley. Kids like pizza, and Gialina has fine pizza, along with a selection of pastas, a roast or two, and a selection of contorni. Eating at Gialina is a little like waiting to check in for a flight on Southwest Airlines: the environment is lively, lighthearted, and swarming with small children. (Shouldn’t shrieking children be flown on their own airline, perhaps Screaming Babies Airways, with a big screaming baby head painted on the tail of every plane. But if they want to eat at Gialina, okay.)

Ragazza, by contrast, brings haute pizza culture to a vortex of the Haights (lower and upper) and NoPa that so far shows few signs of turning into kiddieland. The restaurant opened recently in a space that’s worn quite a few masks over the past decade; 10 years ago, it was a bistro called Metro Café, then became a fine Nepalese restaurant called Metro Kathmandu, reverted briefly to Metro Café, and now this.

There is nothing distinctive about the mid-block, storefront setting. The glowing red paint scheme of the Kathmandu era has been dialed back to milder earth tones. Otherwise, the look of the restaurant is little different. (In this aesthetic continuity, too, Ragazza differs from its older sibling, whose neglected space was heavily made over before its opening in early 2007.)

Ragazza’s menu is somewhat less pizza-pie-centric than Gialina’s. The new place offers a number of antipasti choices and small plates, along with several roasted items. (Gialina offers one antipasto and one roast.) You could make do very nicely here without having a pizza at all. But the bulk of the clientele seems to understand Ragazza to be a pizzeria at heart, and so the pies emerge from the kitchen in a steady stream, with at least one seeming to turn up on virtually every table. It’s like watching a quarterback spread the ball around to eight different receivers.

Although Ragazza doesn’t offer Gialina’s fabled chili-bomb pizza, the aptly named atomica, it does have a spicy pie of its own, the moto, fired with Calabrian chilis. (These have an aromatic fume all their own and haven’t really been given their due.) The amatriciana pizza ($16), festooned with a sunny-side-up egg, also offered a noticeable nasal kick. And even the pies that aren’t armed with chili heat tend to be bracingly fragrant — a potato version ($15), for instance, topped with red onion and gorgonzola cheese and liberally laced with thyme. No hint of starch overload here, despite the potentially smothering presence of the spud.

Herbal perfumes, along with chili heat, are a recurrent theme. We were particularly aware of the oregano breath wafting from a crock of corona beans ($6) simmered with oven-roasted tomatoes. Oregano is the quintessential pizza smell, but I’d never come across corona beans before and, from their pale chubbiness, would have guessed them to be cannellini or flageolet. They’d been cooked just right and still offered nominal tooth resistance before yielding an interior creaminess.

Purely creamy, on the other hand, was the soft polenta ($9). Polenta can be bland, and it is sometimes enlivened by sautéed mushrooms and gorgonzola — and given Ragazza’s obvious gusto for big flavors, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find those players here. Instead the boost came from a medallion of tomato mascarpone cream, freighted with basil and set atop the polenta like a rosette.

The real test of any restaurant’s food is whether it can hold your attention even if, say, Mark Zuckerberg is sitting at the next table, making moony eyes with a comely ragazza. Was that really Mark Zuckerberg at the next table, an actual person as opposed to the character in the movie The Social Network and the subject of far too much quacking in the key of same from The New York Times’ waddling line of op-ed ducks? We weren’t sure. Zuckerberg is said to live in the wilds of the Peninsula, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of some faceless apartment, just as Jerry Brown did during his first go-round as governor. Yet there he was — maybe — in Ragazza, having come for the girl and stayed for the (pizza) pie. He didn’t friend us, alas, alack. *

RAGAZZA

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 255-1133

www.ragazzasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accesssible

Skool

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

November 16, 2010

1

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When, in the course of human events, you come across a wood-fired pizza oven in a seafood house — in a seafood house tending in the direction of a sushi bar, no less — you probably blink twice, wondering if you’ve somehow mixed up your meds. But no: step into Skool and there it is, flickering on your left. There is a small catch (!) to stepping into Skool, and that’s finding it in the first place. The restaurant, which opened early in July, lies in a nameless border country surrounded by Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, and the gallery district.

Fifteen or 20 years ago this bricky warehouse neighborhood was deserted at night, and even today, you’d never think you were at the corner of 16th and Valencia streets. Compounding the mystery is the reticence of Skool itself; the restaurant’s street face is a row of tall steel posts, like some kind of barrier to keep tanks from rolling through, marked only by a graphic of an orange fish.

From a checkpoint-like gate you trek steadily uphill, around three sides of an open-air patio, until you finally step inside and find yourself under a firmament of halogen-spot stars, on a loft-like concrete planet forested with gorgeous wood furniture, some pieces of which (I am thinking in particular of the long communal table) look as though they could have come from the workshop of Gustav Stickley himself. It’s sleek, elegant, open, and warm, and the wood makes all the difference.

The restaurant’s style of cooking both does and doesn’t belong in such a setting. It, too, is sophisticated and urban, but — unlike the interior design — it too often goes too far and seems complex for the sake of being complex. The servers are well-drilled in explaining the nuances of the menu and the ingredients that grace the various specials, but the recitations, in their extensive and ruthless precision, made me feel as if I were watching one of those pharmaceutical ads on television, with their windy warnings about side effects that can include drowsiness, dizziness, and sudden death, not to mention certain phenomena lasting more than four hours.

The kitchen’s tendency seems to be not to let high-quality ingredients speak in their own voice without being interrupted — a kind of culinary version of SPIRD (smartest person in the room disorder). We were assured, for instance, that the cubed halibut in the ceviche ($11) was “sashimi grade,” yet it was inflamed with serrano chili and cilantro — two items I love, but they can overwhelm the delicacy of pale-fleshed fish. House-cured sardines ($10) held up a little better, with their oiliness and firmness of flesh not disappearing in the presence of raspberried onion, herb oil, and pillows of ripe avocado. But still, it was a struggle.

A straightforward bowl of squid-ink spaghettini ($17) turned out to be a treasure trove of complexity, with Monterey Bay squid and local white shrimp bathed in a broth of lemongrass, red curry, seaweed butter, and diced tomatoes. These flavors were harmoniously blended, and the look of the dish was striking — a mass of writhing purple-black filaments, like a wig from a character in a Pixar movie — but it did seem to lack a clear direction. A lot of voices, skillfully directed, can become a choir, but they can also turn into a tower of Babel.

Spiced panko salmon ($18) — a thick, shapely filet crusted on one side with bread crumbs — was served atop a sauté of green and yellow wax beans. It was moist and flavorful, but so rich I felt as if I was eating a stick of butter. The fish had been “pan grilled” — in butter?

Some of the best dishes had nothing to do with the sea. The mushroom risotto ($20) was beautifully cooked al dente, and its troupe of wild fungi (among them enoki, buna shimeji, and eryngii) was enhanced by a strong charge of truffle oil, along with plenty of grated Parmesan cheese for that final nutty-salty touch. And (from the pizza oven!) a wonderful flatbread, or coca ($15), like a slimmed-down focaccia, with Laura Chenel goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, tapenade, and greens.

The dessert menu, of all places, was an oasis of calm amid the frenzy. A rich slice of chocolate tart ($6) was subtly enhanced with cardamom, while a pear tart ($6) was a disciplined reimagining of that old autumn classic from France, tarte tatin — flaky housemade pastry, fruit in its prime, some whipped cream, not much too it, really. And yet: from less, more.

SKOOL

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., noon–4 p.m.

1725 Alameda, SF

(415) 255-8800

www.skoolsf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

On the noisy side

Wheelchair accessible

Paradise Pizza & Pasta

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

November 9, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE The current pizza vogue reminds us that pizza is always in vogue. Pizza is timeless; have you ever met anyone, or even heard of anyone, who doesn’t like it? Yet the welter of new and ballyhooed pizzerias, in all their worthiness, can sometimes make us overlook the older, time-tested spots like Cathy and Sal Alioto’s Paradise Pizza and Pasta at the edge of West Portal.

Paradise has been “family owned and operated since 1989,” according to the menu card, and that’s a lot of restaurant years. (Restaurant years are even briefer and more brutal than dog years, which is saying something.) The restaurant also claims to offer the “best crust in the city.” This is a complex matter in which personal taste inevitably figures, as we shall see.

But first, the setting. It’s clean and modernish, with a semi-exhibition kitchen and bright green tabletops illuminated by a small spotlight in the ceiling — a mercy for those of us who were born before, oh, let’s say 1989, and now have difficulty reading menus by the dim light in so many of our more au courant restaurants. The interior design does contain one oddity, and that is the large fish composed of pizza pans mounted above the kitchen. It looks like some sort of Christian symbol while implying that the restaurant is some sort of seafood house, which it isn’t.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t glimpses of seafood on the menu. There are, including sautéed shrimp, fettuccine with shrimp, and shrimp on a pizza. Ahi even turns up occasionally, in tissue-thin flaps, almost like prosciutto — on a plate of bruschetta ($10.95) in the company of caramelized onions and juicy, late-season tomatoes.

The pizza crusts strike a nice balance between anorexic (in vogue at the moment) and foccacia-puffy, which I have always found to be bloating as well as flaccid when soggy. Paradise’s crusts are thin and crisp enough to hold a firm point (with good chewiness) while flashing some well-blistered puff along the edges.

As for toppings: they come pre-bundled for your convenience, under a variety of alluring names (all containing the word “paradise”), or you can put together your own consortium, starting from $10.95 and rising in increments from $1 to $1.50 per extra topping, depending on the size of the pizza. The ingredients, although not exotic, are fresh and vivid, the Italian sausage in particular, which skillfully balances the assertiveness of its two principal players, garlic and fennel seed.

The triumph of the pizza over the calzone in this country is something of a mystery to me. Does it have to do with the comparative ease of cutting up a pizza into slices for sharing, whereas a calzone is usually too big to be a finger or hand food? Paradise’s calzoni (all $12.95) are splendid to look at, each a sizable mezzaluna bulging with tasty goodies and with a subtle sheen, like that of a good (if blistered) brioche, on the outside. The salsiccia edition, filled with crumbled Italian sausage, chopped mushrooms, and mozzarella and ricotta cheeses, would pretty easily be enough for two people, especially if preceded by a starter course of some kind.

One such course we weren’t impressed with was a cream of artichoke soup ($4). The soup was certainly creamy — indeed, it seemed to be nothing but creamy, as though the kitchen had poured a carton of half and half into a pan and gently heated it. We did detect a faint hint of lemon in all that unorganized richness, but of the headlining ingredient … bupkes.

Paradise does a lively takeout business, which — as at every other such place I’ve ever been to — does slow the sit-down service. The servers themselves are attentive, knowledgeable, and prompt, but because the kitchen is busy baking pizzas for an unseen host as well as for the people sitting at tables, there can be a bit of a wait. But the beers and wines are moderately priced by city standards, and the crowd is spectation-worthy, a true neighborhood potpourri ranging from greatest-generation couples out for a simple dinner to packs of high school boys in their Giants regalia — black and orange, so reminiscent of Halloween. Halloween has just passed, but, like pizza, it never goes out of vogue in our town.

PARADISE PIZZA & PASTA

Daily from 4:30 p.m.

393 West Portal, SF

(415) 759-1155

www.paradisepizzaandpasta.com

Beer and wine

DC/DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Another Monkey

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

November 2, 2010

6

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE The restaurant formerly known as Conduit was so strikingly designed inside that when, earlier this year, it morphed into a Thai spot, another of those with “monkey” in the name — Another Monkey — I winced, and only in part because the word “monkey” makes me think of ol’ Dubya, now in exile in the Dallas suburb of Elba. The indecorous neon beer sign glowing in the front window seemed to be a particularly glum portent. It said: come in and slam a few! And eat pad Thai with your fingers while you watch ESPN.

As fate would have it, Another Monkey does offer pad Thai, and the flat-panel television mounted over the bar probably does show ESPN on occasion, but otherwise, the ruin I inferred from the infernal neon sign is nowhere to be seen. The restaurant’s high-style interior is intact, while the food is electrifying. The only physical change I noticed in the space was the screening-off of what had been an exhibition kitchen at the rear of the dining room; the counter and stools are still there, but the view now consists of a long eyeful of frosted glass instead of a tableau of busy chefs.

Conduit had been, in its brief heyday, a scene reminiscent of the early days of Foreign Cinema — limousines double-parked on the street and swarms of hipster-geeks in various shades of black jamming the doorway — so Another Monkey’s more relaxed state is easier to live with. When a place becomes over-popular, everything is put at risk, from the quality of the food and service to the ambience itself. Another Monkey shows no signs of becoming a Conduit-style scene, but it is distinctive and gracious enough to draw a steady crowd. It has a neighborly feel, yet for those farther afield it’s worth seeking out, both for its distinctive setting and the sharpness of its cooking.

Chef Aom Phanthong’s menu is, like a bar stool (!), sturdily balanced on three legs: familiar standards, innovative dishes, and items for hard-core (or, in menu-speak, “experienced”) connoisseurs of Thai cuisine. In this last category we find the dip-relishes, whose odors and flavors are “very strong,” according to the menu card’s minatory phrasing. Suspicious people might flee in the direction of the pad Thai, or the excellent fish cakes ($7.50 for four) with an enlivening sweet-sour sauce on the side, along with threads of red and green cabbage.

In the alternative, they might turn toward the mix-and-match department. You can get tom yum shrimp ($9.95), served in little heaps atop crisped triangles of flour tortilla. The menu calls this “nacho style,” and it was quite good, though the frying left the tortillas with an oily aroma, and why flour tortillas instead of the tastier (and healthier, not to mention more authentic) kind made from masa?

The appeal of duck has long eluded me. Like goose, it resembles (for me) slightly gamier, richer chicken — the chicken, interestingly, being native to Southeast Asia. So subbing duck for chicken in a red curry ($15) wasn’t a complete Californication, and maybe, in its exponential richness (rich meat amplified by rich sauce) it wasn’t California at all. The portion size turned out to be just right, though, and with a pineapple slice for a subfloor and some fresh basil over the top, the dish’s richness remained under control.

Richness also briefly threatened the northern Thai hung le curry of pork belly ($13), mostly because of the nature of the meat. Our exquisitely polite server asked if we would be comfortable with “visible fat.” As an American, I have lived most of my life amid visible fat, so this prospect did not deter. And the dish itself turned out to be marvelous, a kind of gingery stew served in a handsome little pot, the meat stringy but tender and a scattering of fresh peanuts for textural counterpoint.

Another Monkey maintains an extensive wine list, which on the one hand is a reassuring line of continuity from Conduit and on the other is paradoxical. Thailand is not wine country, and Thai cuisine (like Indian and Mexican cuisine, to name two other large examples) didn’t evolve with wine. But wine geeks must love a challenge, because the carefully bound list is presented with almost biblical reverence. Beer is still preferable, in my view, but not the almost undrinkably bitter Duvel, the only Belgian beer I’ve ever had that I didn’t like. That’s not the beer proclaimed by the window sign, by the way.

ANOTHER MONKEY

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.

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

280 Valencia, SF

(415) 241-0288

www.anothermonkeythai.com

Full bar

MC/V

Some noise, but not bad

Wheelchair accessible

Citizen’s Band

Andrew Lam

-

October 26, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE One of the revelations in Peter Mayles’ cycle of enchanting memoirs about life in Provence (A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence, Encore Provence) is that some of the best food in France is to be found at truck stops. This stands to reason, since truckers are a migratory species whose survival depends on knowing where to eat — and French truckers spend their days zooming around France, a land where food and wine are as much a part of the national identity as the language itself.

Citizen’s Band (which opened in August on a semi-sketchy stretch of Folsom St. in SoMa) isn’t quite a truck stop and it certainly isn’t in France, but it does have, stashed above the door, a collection of vintage CB radios, the kind whose tinny crackle helped drive C.W. McCall’s 1975 truckers’ anthem, “Convoy.” And it is, in its hipster-city way, a convincing contemporary version of a roadside diner: it has a long counter, zinc-topped tables, harsh lighting, and plenty of din, all at the edge of an insanely busy street.

But the place doesn’t serve Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, despite a plethora of hipsters, and the staff all seem to be relations of Flo, the cheeky woman from the Progressive Insurance TV ads. Indeed, beer places a distant second as a libation to wine, which is offered in a variety of interesting pours listed on the huge chalkboard that backs the counter. So maybe we’re not so far from France after all. Or somewhere in Europe. Lately I’ve noticed a small but definite bloom on wine lists of reds produced in German-speaking lands, and Citizen’s Band offers a glass of Blaufränkisch, an Austrian red, for $7.50. Our (female) server described it as “feminine,” not a customary description for wine. To me, the wine was light and spicy, like a nero d’avola after some heavy core training. Could this be what she meant?

If a convoy of hungry, discerning French truckers came rolling up to Citizen’s Band, what would they find, apart from trouble in parking? American food, subtly reimagined and cooked to the highest standard. Chef Chris Beerman’s menu includes elements of what we might call comfort cuisine, including macaroni and cheese and a burger with fries, but it also soars into the higher airs of the gastronomic ether — and even the homey stuff is enriched by a close attention to detail.

The mac ‘n’cheese ($8) was made with fontina and a Sonoma dry-jack fonduta, which helped permeate the pasta tubes. I didn’t like the fried onion rings on top; they were crunchy but discordant. A plate of humble franks and beans ($8) was stylishly reinvented with grilled sweet Italian sausage from Paul Bertolli’s Fra’ Mani in Berkeley, surrounded by butter beans (from Iacopi Farms) in a rich sauce of oregano, pecorino romano, and (to judge from the glossiness) butter. And how many diners, or truck stops, would toss a salad of baby arugula leaves ($8) with diced peaches (for deep sweetness), almond brittle (for sweet crunch), Point Reyes blue cheese (for rich bite), and a huckleberry vinaigrette for a final fillip of piquancy and (deep purple) color?

The burger ($13, plus $2 for cheese) was quite a production. The beef was kobe, from Snake River Farms; the bun, challah (which is pretty much brioche, for purposes of richness). Also aioli and house-made burger pickles and — better than either of those items, good as they were — no raw onion. Best of all, the kitchen actually grilled the meat as ordered, to medium rare, as recommended by Flo. A medium-rare burger means a juicy burger, and juiciness makes all the difference. A dry burger is a dead burger. The stack of fries on the side was excellent, still warm and crisp from the deep fryer.

The roasted red trout ($20) looked like a pair of cantaloupe slices slipped atop an heirloom-tomato panzanella, with a scattering of garlicky Monterey Bay calamari and some uncredited braised greens. The fish was lovely, but it was the panzanella that commanded our attention: it was colored by several shades of cherry tomatoes and made crunchy by croutons toasted gold. Panzanella is summer on a plate, but it’s also, at least traditionally, frugality on a plate, a way of rejuvenating bread that’s past its prime. To find it deployed with such elegant discipline here was a delight. Encore!

CITIZEN’S BAND

Dinner: Tues.–-Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Brunch: Sat., 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

1198 Folsom, SF

(415) 556-4901

www.citizensbandsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Uptown Joe’s

Andrew Lam

-

October 19, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Use of the word “downtown” in the American vernacular has always faintly troubled me. It’s a term that should be used only with respect to Manhattan, which really does have a downtown, along with a midtown and an uptown. The better phrase for the rest of us is “city center,” which is what you tend to see in European cities — signs reading “centrum” or (in German-speaking lands) “zentrum,” with a big arrow pointing you in the right direction.

Of course, in a city as hilly as San Francisco, “up” and “down” have meanings independent of any two-dimensional map. Uptown Joe’s, the successor to Café Majestic, might not be in any actual uptown anyone here would actually refer to, but the restaurant is pretty far up the southern face of Pacific Heights. So it can claim some real elevation, if not a view. It’s the “Joe” part of the name, interestingly, that’s been the occasion for some legal tussling in the past year between Uptown Joe’s and Original Joe’s, which burned down three years ago.

What’s most striking to me about the restaurant’s name is how inapposite it is. It sounds a diner-ish, Seinfeldian note — you can almost see Uncle Leo carping and gesturing in a booth over a bowl of chicken noodle soup — but the restaurant is in fact an elegant, high-ceilinged, cream-colored vault, almost fin de siècle Viennese in its quiet dignity. If you thought that the quiet restaurant was a thing of the past here, where the dominant trend in restaurant design is a noisy urban minimalism with concrete accents and patrons texting away because they can’t hear one another, you’ll find Uptown Joe’s to be a welcome surprise. It’s the sort of place that encourages that most retro of human practices, conversation.

In keeping with the vast dining room’s old world graciousness, the kitchen turns out a menu that might have been described as “continental” a generation ago. Many dishes have Italian roots — there are a number of pastas and several veal possibilities, including piccata and parmagiana — but many others seem generically occidental, such as charbroiled filet mignon or pork chops.

A nice touch on the antipasto platter ($14.95 for two) was the red-wine vinaigrette drizzled over everything. It lent a glamorous and inviting sheen. “Everything” meant ham, salami, and pepperoni, slices of white cheese, tomato quarters, black olives (pitted — thank you!), and red-onion rings atop chopped spears of romaine lettuce.

Minestrone ($5) was served in a tureen whose shape probably helped hold in heat but made access tricky. The soup itself had a sickly, gray-green color, perhaps because of a bounty of cabbage, and was dotted with kidney beans and macaroni tubes. Its flavor was dominated by the earthy bite of the stock (roasted vegetable?) and the heap of grated Parmesan our server spooned over the top, to give it a cap almost like that of French onion soup.

Fried chicken ($18.95 for a half-bird) had a crisp, brownish-bronze crust that was lovely to look at but, being gravely underseasoned, not much to taste. Some CPR administered via salt shaker did restore a faint heartbeat, and the meat itself was juicy. The real redeemer of the plate was the slew of vegetables — broccoli and cauliflower florets, zucchini, sheets of Swiss chard, chunks of baby carrot — apparently braised in stock, to judge by their flavorfulness. Steamed mixed vegetables so often taste like hospital food, but not these.

Calamari steak ($18.95) is sometimes said to be the poor man’s abalone, but it can be splendid in its own right if not overcooked to toughness. Uptown Joe’s batter-fried version was tender with just a hint of chewiness (can we say al dente in this context?) and doused with lemon butter for a fillip of decadence. On the side: a mound of rigatoni tossed with marinara sauce.

Uptown Joe’s prices strike me on the whole as not bargain-basement despite the restaurant’s folksy name. Neither are they through the roof, especially considering the ambiance, although the desserts did leaving me wondering. The chocolate mousse cake ($7.75) was light as whipped cream and not much else, while the apple pie ($7.50, with a pat of vanilla ice cream) was almost too hot to eat in spots despite a creditable crust. In a word: middling.

UPTOWN JOE’S

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10:30 p.m.

Brunch: 9 a.m.–2 p.m.

1500 Sutter, SF

(415) 441-1280

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Bar Agricole

Andrew Lam

-

October 12, 2010

1

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE At the risk of sounding like a grossly premature exit poll, I am willing to say that Bar Agricole, which opened mid-August on a rather grimy block of 11th Street, is already, and easily, the best restaurant on that block. Not that the bar (pardon my punnery) is set all that high. You might very well think that Butter, across the street, doesn’t represent serious competition. You might, if you have a long memory, remember Undici (later Eleven), a lofty, 1990s place across the street that might have been worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Bar Agricole — but was also deafening. Bar Agricole is supremely worthy and not deafening.

The sonic detail deserves mention for several reasons, one of which is that the restaurant looks like it should be deafening. Once you gain the dining room (after a trek up a woody incline, past a semi-secluded open-air terrace), you find yourself in a onetime plumbing-supply shop remade in the sleek Euro-modern style that you might find in one of the more happening neighborhoods of Stockholm. Interior vistas consist of wood, plate glass, and seating that doesn’t look ergonomic. Noise is almost always the companion of these chic design elements.

But Bar Agricole’s tables are spaced widely enough to let the restaurant breathe, and, for a rustic-enviro touch, the long bar is made from wood recycled from an Ohio farm, if my eavesdropping ears heard the story right. The madding crowd is never far away, yet the sound is muted just enough not to become the center of attention. It’s like watching a big pot of simmering stock coming to a boil it never quite reaches. This kind of ambience management is a subtle but real triumph.

Agricole — as Francophiles might know — refers not only to agriculture but to a type of rum favored by the French. The chief impresario of the place, Thad Vogler, is a cocktail man, and the cocktail list is impressive. But you’d have a hard time finding any mixed drink to top the white, or unaged (“blanche”) armagnac, which, like my beloved grappa, is as clear as water but fruitier, more melodious, less openly fiery. Like agricole rum, it finds its way into a number of cocktails, but it’s splendid when taken straight.

Chef Brandon Jew’s cooking is also melodious and goes down easy. The theme is California eclectic, with, like a corniche, a fair number of tight twists and turns. The chopped liver on toast ($8), for instance, was warmed all the way through, which lent the dish an appealing melted-fused quality. Tomatoes with bottarga ($14) revealed itself to be a colorful salad of heirloom fruit with a heavy (and unannounced) scattering of shell beans. For seasoning, there were flecks of bottarga (salt-cured fish ovaries, a Mediterranean delicacy).

The kitchen’s eye for color is sharp. A plate of picalilli ($6), or pickled vegetables, was dominated by luminous yellow cauliflower florets and nearly as luminous quarters of red beet. Other players: halved baby carrots, long beans, skinny green peppers flushed with red as if by dawn, and whole okra pods. Altogether it looked like something Cézanne might like to paint, if he didn’t gobble it down first, which was what we did.

No menu is truly complete without at least one flop. At Bar Agricole, this would be the beguilingly named sardine roll mops ($6), which consisted of a large piece of fish wrapped pig-in-a-blanket-style around a pickle spear the color of radiator fluid, then laid on a board of flatbread and doused with crème fraîche. The overall effect was supposed to be, I guess, a variation on a Sunday-morning shmear, but the flatbread was uncooperative and difficult to eat and the fish-pickle pairing wasn’t much better, despite the cream’s attempts at reconciliation. If a dysfunctional family were turned into food, it might seem something like this.

On the other hand, we loved the tanginess of the olive-oil poached tuna ($14) mingled with fennel-root shavings and cilantro. And the corn pudding ($16) — like an eggy polenta, topped with corn kernels, okra halves, whole padrón peppers, and served in an earthenware crock — was original and sublime, while being at least plausibly vegetarian-friendly.

If you like lemon verbena cream, you’ll want dessert. A puffy cloud of it semi-salved the dryness of the blueberry shortcake ($8) — tons of blueberries, though — while another puff appeared, uncredited, with the wondrously glazed peach-pluot upside-down cake. If you had to bet the farm on one of these, you’d be wise to choose the latter.

BAR AGRICOLE

Dinner: nightly, 6 p.m.–1 a.m.

355 11th St., SF

(415) 355-9400

www.baragricole.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Tolerable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Capp’s Corner

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

October 5, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

My first experience of Capp’s Corner was long ago, in college, a melancholy dinner on a damp winter night with my first love. By “long ago,” I mean so long ago that I decline to say how long. By “first love” I mean unrequited love; is there any other kind of first love? I suppose the possibility exists. But for the moony-eyed young, the most real sort of love is the hopeless, thwarted kind, the impossible dream. In that sense, I had won the love lottery at age 20. Lucky me.

It does seem odd, lo these decades later, to associate Capp’s Corner with any form of melancholy. Now, as then, the restaurant is not only a North Beach institution but the very picture of cheerfulness. Its checkertop tablecloths are just like the kind you see in Moonstruck, a not-bad movie about lovelornness, with wonderful glimpses of New York’s Little Italy. There is also a certain saloon feel at Capp’s, lent by the large bar near the entrance; unlike many so-called bars in many of our newer, fancier, and more effete places that seem to have been installed largely for show, this one is the real deal, a working bar where people actually sit and drink.

Elsewhere in the large dining room, people are eating as well as drinking, sometimes in groups of two, often in larger arrays. The restaurant is just down the block from Club Fugazi, longtime home of Beach Blanket Babylon. That’s a show people often attend in sizable groups, and often after having eaten dinner. Capp’s Corner is just the (meal) ticket for these folks; it’s convenient, spacious, practiced in dealing with bigger parties, and it serves many dishes family-style, no matter what kind of family you’re a part of.

The main twist in the family-style service is that the minestrone is presented in a big white earthenware tureen, so you get to serve yourself. This does raise the slop factor, particularly if I happen to be sitting at your table, but it also contributes to festivity. The soup itself was rich in cabbage and cannellini beans, a little lighter on tomato than is usual, and had a savory-sweetness I associate with slow-cooked onion. Our tureen produced eight or nine servings — not a bad yield for a table of six.

Throw in a continually replenished basket of bread and butter, and you have the makings of a small feast. Beyond that was a salad of chopped, chilled lettuces scattered with chickpeas and kidney beans and dressed with what the menu calls a “creamy vinaigrette” — I might call it Thousand Island, Russian, or something similar on the ground that its pinkish-red color implied the presence of tomato in some form.

The family-style dinners are offered at two prices: $18 (for pastas) and $20.50 (for pretty much everything else, including veal and petrale sole). You can get a pair of fleshier dinners (steak and osso buco) for $25.50, and if you don’t want family-style, $15.50 buys you pasta, soup, and salad.

If you like your pasta served in gargantuan portions, you will be happy here — and you’ll be even happier if you like tomato sauces. These, whether marinara or bolognese, are hard to avoid, although a white-wine sauce does pop up here and there. The spaghetti with meatballs was probably typical, though: a huge clump of pasta (cooked a bit past al dente but not mushy) finished with a heavy ladling of bolognese sauce and two orbs of chopped meat the size of a baby’s fist. The meat seemed a bit dry to me, but given all that sauce, it didn’t much matter.

The veal tortellini were better: less daunting in scale, nicely bite-sized, and given a sun-dried tomato cream sauce that was finer than the bolognese. Also satisfying: slices of breaded eggplant baked with mozzarella and marinara and béchamel (or, in Italian, besciamella) sauces. The bitterness of the eggplant had been expertly leached out, and the dish as a whole had a faux-meatiness that might have convinced an omnivore — or at least an omnivore distracted, perhaps, by a value-priced glass, or three, of Chianti ($3.50). I wouldn’t call Chianti my first love, wine-wise, but it tends to be solid. Anyway, it’s the only sort of wine you could drink with a clear conscience in a place like this, with a lovers’ moon peeking through the windows and BBB — the greatest hat show on earth — just a few steps away.

CAPP’S CORNER

Dinner: Mon.-Fri., 4:30–10:30 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun., 4-11 p.m.

Lunch: daily, 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1600 Powell, SF

(415) 989-2589

www.cappscorner.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Spire

David Talbot

-

September 14, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE You can’t be stunned when a restaurant near the baseball park — and Spire is just steps away — has a big flat-panel TV showing Giants’ games. Spire has such a TV, so let’s grant a modicum of kudos for its public-spiritedness. Or at least its awareness of what its clientele is likely to find interesting. But the glowing oracle of sportsdom, while conspicuously slung from a wall just inside the entrance, isn’t the restaurant’s most distinctive design feature. That would be what I can only call the charcuterie bar — a gleaming slab of peach-colored granite that’s a little like the cured-meat equivalent of a sushi bar, except you can’t sit at it and order things. You can only watch, wondering if you’ve stumbled onto a secret Food Network set, and where are the klieg lights and cameras?

Despite the lack of seating, the presence of the bar does announce that food is serious business at Spire. This is no sports bar — although a word of warning — the place is noisy, a vibratorium. The building is a converted MJB coffee warehouse, and the exposed brick walls are braced by a line of triumphal arches. But whatever relief from impinging decibels the high ceiling might have provided is offset by the rock-hard flooring.

Naturally, chef Laird Boles’ kitchen turns out a charcuterie platter, and there’s also a selection of raw seafood, with crudo, ceviche, and oysters. (Boles once cooked at Waterbar.) But the menu, mostly, is farmers-markety. So a salad ($9) of stone fruit and Laura Chenel goat cheese wasn’t assembled atop any old lettuces but atop County Line 5 leaves; these were immaculate, and the stone fruit (cherry halves and wonderfully ripe nectarine) wasn’t too shabby either. And nothing says summer quite like stone fruit unless it’s corn, as in a sweet corn soup ($6) with the kernels puréed and food-milled to a bisque-like smoothness. “Sweet” wasn’t an idle modifier here, and I ended up having to ask for salt, more as matter of personal taste than in response to a miscue. Sweetness can be flat; salt deepens it and adds an extra dimension. Other extra dimensions included a dollop of sour cream in the soup itself and, alongside, a pair of puffy-crisp corn fritters riding the rails of piquillo-pepper coulis.

Chicken, we were advised some years ago by Anthony Bourdain, is the dish for people who can’t decide what they really want. This might sometimes be true, but it doesn’t do justice to the bird, which, if handled right, can be splendid. Spire’s half-chicken ($20), a Rocky the Range leg and breast, had the marvelous crisp skin and slightly pressed look I associate with the Italian technique known as al mattone, or under a brick. The chicken was presented with two pucks of savory bread pudding, a stack of sautéed mixed beans — haricots verts and wax (n.b. the menu said “haricots verts,” small proof of the larger principle that menu cards tend to be advisory rather than strictly honored) — a heap of sautéed baby shiitakes, and a fabulous reduced jus.

If you do know what you really want, you might very well want halibut ($24), and this is good, because halibut is just about the perfect fish in these parts. It’s taken from sustainable fisheries, it takes well to a variety of cooking techniques, and it tastes good. Here a thick filet was pan-roasted, then plated with lemon grits, tarragon leaves, and tomato quarters — a colorful, tasty ensemble redolent of the season.

It is rare now to have a disappointing dessert, but it’s probably just as rare to come across a dessert so rich you wonder if you can finish it. Spire’s chocolate almond layer cake ($8) looked unassuming enough: a modest, dark-brown disk with a comet’s tail of pitted cherry halves and streaks of caramel sauce, little embellishments that added visual texture while also implying that reinforcement was at hand should the star player be found wanting. But the cake itself was so engulfingly rich and moist, dessertdom’s answer to foie gras, as to obliterate any such need. I have never had a richer, moister cake. It was so satisfying as to be nearly fatal. But I did live to tell, and now I have told.

SPIRE

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sun., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

685 Third St., SF

(415) 947-0000

www.spiresf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Izakaya Sozei

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

September 7, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE A specter is haunting America — the specter of deflation, according to the worthies at the Fed, who, having played no small role in conjuring said specter, are now kind enough to warn us of it. Let the excellent adventure begin, but first, a stop at Sozai (full name: Izakaya Sozai), a twice-reinvented Japanese restaurant in the mid-Sunset, where the crush of youth is so massive that even the most slithery of specters would have a tough time worming their way in.

One tends to associate youth-crushed restaurants with Valencia Street, those droves of 30-year-olds in jeans and black shoes with disposable incomes adequate to support restaurant-going as a form of entertainment. Irving Street would hardly seem to be a serious competitor to the Mission extravaganza, and Sozai looks demure from the sidewalk: Japanese-style screens over the large windows and modest signage. But once inside, it’s all energy. The space seats only a few dozen, and as we all remember from high-school physics, compression produces heating.

The clientele is substantially Asian, which makes for a complex comment on the food. Despite the name, Sozai is far from a traditional Japanese restaurant. Its nearest relation is Namu, which stitches together Korean, Japanese, and Californian influences into a new piece of small-plate cloth. At both places, overflow spills onto the sidewalk, where wait-listers can be observed in deep communion with their smart phones, fingers jabbing away.

Sozai’s menu does offer a base of recognizably Japanese dishes, including otsumami, sashimi, nimono, and yakitori. The kitsune udon ($7) — fat wheat noodles in broth — is wonderful, despite a difficult-to-eat block of tofu floating on top. But the more exciting action is posted on the chalkboard; there the dishes can slide away from categories, and in some cases from Asian influences altogether.

An octopus ceviche ($8) served in a martini glass, for instance, with a gap-toothed fence of tortilla chips ranged around the lip, was like something you’d find in tony Peruvian or pan-Latino restaurants. The marinade was splendidly tangy; the octopus itself tough. But where would you look to find chunks of boneless, slightly fatty duck meat ($6) grilled on skewers after a bath in blueberry port? The port was vanishingly unpresent, while the meat itself was gamy and chewy, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Equally oddball were skewers of brussels sprouts ($5) wrapped in bacon and grilled. I am a big believer in both grilling and combining bacon and cruciferous, but here the method — which left the vegetable in a semi-raw state while failing to crisp the bacon — did not impress.

Pulled-pork croquettes ($5) resembled a pair of whole-wheat English muffins but lacked any crust or crispness and, worse, were seriously underseasoned. If it hadn’t been for the side dish of ginger-charged hoisin sauce, we might not have finished them. The bed of daikon threads did offer a subtle heavenly quality and some texture, but no flavor.

The kitchen’s best dishes seem to be the simplest and the most Japanese, and maybe this shouldn’t surprise us. Mackerel, or aji, tataki sashimi ($10) was about as straightforward as it gets, a low heap of fish strips with skin still attached. It looked like a gathering of eels.

A salad of yuzu-dressed mozuku seaweed ($4) couldn’t have been improved upon while acquiring a sheen of elegance from the martini glass it was served in. And a plate of blanched baby yellow carrots ($4) needed only a shallow dish of lumpy miso paste on the side to offer a complete, and remarkably vivid, experience.

Taking chances does raise the risk of failure, and Sozai’s kitchen takes more chances than most, perhaps with the understanding that even serious culinary failures are almost sure to fall well short of inedible disaster. But one of the desserts, fig tempura ($5) arguably crossed the line. It consisted of halved figs, dipped in a light tempura batter and fried just enough to be crisp (why couldn’t the croquettes have been this crunchy?) and arranged around a helmet of vanilla ice cream.

The figs were neither sweet nor mealy inside, so call that a draw. The ice cream was fine. But why oh why drizzle everything with a too-tart balsamic reduction? It looked nice, like chocolate syrup, but knocked the dessert off balance. If not for the ice cream, the figs and balsamic could have been served as an hors d’oeuvre. As a dessert, it left us deflated.

IZAKAYA SOZAI

Dinner: Wed.-Mon., 5:30–11 p.m.

1500 Irving, SF

(415) 742-5122

www.izakayasozai.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Hunan Chef

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

August 17, 2010

1

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Many of us would probably agree that a certain sort of Chinese restaurant tends to be rather plain on the inside, with lots of linoleum, severe fluorescent lighting, and chairs that look like they were bought for 25 cents each from San Quentin Prison’s annual garage sale. Hunan Chef, on Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights, gives us a variation on this familiar theme — it is ugly on the outside. It is, in truth, in a building so ugly, so faceless and phlegm-colored, that we are left to wonder how such a structure could have been conceived, let alone built.

The good news is that Hunan Chef is reasonably appealing inside. Once there, you don’t have to look at the outside anymore, so that’s a plus right off the bat. A friendly aquarium with languid gourami burbles near the front door, and an array of tchotchkes are arrayed around the dining room, including, toward the rear, a poster for Budweiser cerveza tacked onto the wall, for a hint of college-dorm nostalgia in multi-culti guise.

The better news is that Hunan Chef serves pretty wonderful food at modest prices. Most remarkable, the table service is friendly and efficient despite the bustling takeout service. This you hardly ever see, in my experience. Takeout takes priority in the same way a telephone call trumps a customer actually standing at the counter in a hardware store. If I see takeout bags being taken out in large numbers, I usually resign myself to slow, erratic service. But not at Hunan Chef.

The long menu includes many standards, and for the most part they don’t disappoint. Only the scallion cakes ($3.95) left us feeling a little deflated; the cakes — actually a single cake cut into triangles like a pizza — suffered from dryness, which can be a symptom of having been made beforehand and then left sitting around too long.

Potstickers ($4.95 for six) more than compensated. They were as big as a baby’s fist and juicy. Roasted duck wonton soup ($6.50) was also richly satisfying, a broad bowl of golden, oily broth backfilled with chunks of roasted duck and a wealth of wrinkly, pork-filled wontons. The soup alone would have made a meal for a single (takeout?) diner.

Generally I steer clear of curry dishes in Chinese restaurants. There is a yellow harshness I associate with curry powder spooned from a can. Hunan Chef’s Singapore rice noodle ($6.50) did have the golden hue that suggests the presence of turmeric, but the curry flavor was smooth and mellow, not at all metallic. Also, there were plenty of other colorful attractions on the plate, including shrimp, shreds of barbecue pork, broccoli florets, carrot slivers, lengths of scallion, bamboo shoots, chunks of green bell pepper, and threadings of egg, which looked like ganglia as seen under a microscope.

Cabbage beef ($7.50) didn’t look like much at all: pale gray-green cabbage leaves wok-fried with chunks of beef. But if ginger zing had a color, it would have been among the most colorful items on the menu. Carrot slivers helped, a little. Cabbage is a wonderful, supple vegetable that does suffer some from drabness and a reputation as poor-people food. As a boy, I hated it; now I seek it out.

The restaurant offers a range of what might be called signature dishes — dishes with “Hunan” in the name — among them Hunan chicken ($7.50). Here we found, along with chunks of boneless flesh, swaths of bok choy, button mushrooms, broccoli florets, carrot slivers, and whole dried red chilis. These last implied a sauce with some heat — Hunan being, along with Szechuan, among the spicier of China’s regional cooking styles — and there was indeed a hint of heat in the marvelous, garlicky red sauce. This was the kind of sauce that left you wishing Chinese restaurants brought you a basket of bread so you’d have a means of sopping it up. An alternative to bread is to have the leftovers boxed up. Once you’re in the privacy of your own home, you can do as you see fit.

Service was excellent. The serving of dishes was well-paced, empty plates were removed promptly, and water glasses never ran dry. I was reminded, as I so often am at Chinese restaurants, of the prep time involved in virtually every dish, the dicing, chopping, and shredding — an expense of human effort and energy that reduces cooking times and therefore the need for scarce fuel. As the child of an energy-hogging culture that burns fossil fuels to blow leaves from the sidewalk so the wind can blow them back again, I can’t help but be impressed by this.

HUNAN CHEF

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.;

Sun., 4–9 p.m.

525 Cortland, SF

(415) 648-3636

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Pera

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

July 13, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If books and movies can have subtitles, then why not restaurants? A subtitle is like a bit of extra seasoning, a way of emphasizing certain meanings, and this is particularly important at a time when restaurant names can seem increasingly whimsical or obscure.

Pera’s subtitle (printed at the top of the bill and on its website) is “a Mediterranean affair,” which makes it sound like a cheesy movie about poor, doomed Princess Grace of Monaco. “Turkish cuisine” would be a bit more exact, but “Mediterranean affair” certainly sounds a romantic note, and Pera does have its low-key atmospherics, especially on summer evenings when elongated twilight stretches over the north face of Potrero Hill and glints through Pera’s windows.

Pera opened last November, under the auspices of Irfan Yalcin and his wife, in a space held by the Chinese restaurant Eliza’s since the early 1990s. (Eliza’s still exists at its longtime California Street location.) Turkish cuisine seems to be enjoying something of a boomlet around here in recent years, and why this is so is nearly as great a mystery to me as why we have so few Greek restaurants.

As it happens, and despite the long-term tensions between Greece and Turkey, Greek and Turkish cuisines are plainly related. Pera, whose menu tilts toward foods from Turkey’s Aegean coast, even offers versions of pastitsio, the baked pasta dish that is Greece’s answer to lasagne, and moussaka, the pastitsio-like dish of layered eggplant. But chef Muhammet Culha also turns out items I haven’t seen before on Turkish (or Greek!) menus around town.

Conspicuous among these is the talas boregi ($16), whose closest relation in the American food lexicon is probably chicken pot pie. The dish arrived as a triangle of phyllo wading in a shallow pool of coconut curry sauce (I had never before come across coconut milk in Turkish cooking). Within the pastry envelope was a piece of smoked, boneless chicken breast, while elsewhere on the plate lay a garnish of green apple, sliced thin, and some currants. In a sense, this dish was the philosophical opposite of that other great Mediterranean cuisine, Italy’s. The Italian kitchen emphasizes simplicity, directness, and the primacy of a particular ingredient or seasoning. By contrast, Pera’s talas boregi orchestrated a diverse cast of characters into a bewitching harmony, a sum greater than its parts.

But Turkish cooking can be just as direct and simple as Italian. Sometimes, in fact, it can seem Italian, as with spanaki ($6.50), spinach sautéed with garlic and pine nuts just as it is in Sicily. (“Spanaki,” we should note, is the Greek word for spinach — the Turkish word is “ispanak” — and Sicily was settled by Greeks in pre-Roman times.) The condiment consisting of yogurt, cucumbers, dill, garlic, and olive oil, whether called tzatziki or cacik ($2.50) is also about as basic as it gets and shares a deep and obvious root with the Indian yogurt sauce raita.

You can get the tzatziki, along with a host of treats to dunk in it, as part of the meze platter ($14), which is a sampler and therefore irresistible. The ensemble includes dolmades (stuffed grape leaves), saksuka (roasted eggplant with bell pepper, potato, and caramelized onion in a garlic tomato sauce — a lot like caponata), and zucchini cakes, along with olives, feta cheese, and triangles of warm pita.

Since the Aegean is a sea, we might expect to find seafood on the menu, and we do, including wonderful fish patties, or balik kofte ($10), a pair of hamburger-flat disks presented with concasse tomatoes and mango dice. (Do the Turks grow mangoes?) Also quite nice was a filet of grilled salmon ($18), topped with a Meunière-like sauce of white wine, lemons, garlic, and capers and plated with vegetables and what the menu card called (in Greek) patates tiganites, or fried potatoes — sautéed cubes, really.

For dessert you can have baklava, if you like your phyllo drenched with honey, but the more compelling choice is yogurt with honey ($6), which must be counted as a dessert that is actually, definitely good for you. (Both yogurt and honey are fermented foods, rich in probiotics.) Yogurt from the eastern Mediterranean is especially creamy and rich, as here — almost like tangy-sour cake frosting. One small surprise: no cherries on the menu, for dessert or otherwise, though the cherry is profoundly — or we might even say majorly — associated with Asia Minor.

PERA

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: daily, 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1457 18th St., SF

(415) 796-3812

www.perasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Manageable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Osteria Stellina

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

July 6, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If you think food Valhalla is the Ferry Building, you haven’t been to Point Reyes Station lately. The Ferry Building is just a building full of food — a nice building with interesting food, I concede — whereas Point Reyes Station is basically a village consecrated to food, Foodville USA. It’s full of produce markets, butchers, bakeries, creameries, and restaurants, seemingly to the exclusion of everything else. The village, which sits on Highway 1 near the foot of Tomales Bay in the far west of Marin County, is just a few blocks’ square, but those blocks are chockablock with people wandering on foot from one little food heaven to the next.

If Marin County doesn’t make my list of favorite places, it’s mainly because of the dense population corridor along U.S. 101 in the east. To the west, though, beyond the Mercedes-clogged tracts of Fairfax and San Anselmo, the land relaxes into open, rolling country plied by cyclists and dotted with stands of oak trees and boutique agricultural concerns, many carrying the “Marin Organic” label. And the capital of this peaceable (if kingless) kingdom is Point Reyes Station.

Given the bucolic setting, I was a little surprised to step into Osteria Stellina, one of the newer and most heralded restaurants, and find myself in a rather plain gunmetal-gray dining room. It was like being in the officers’ mess on a battleship. Gray is a nice color for flannel suits, but on the walls of a restaurant — a restaurant, moreover, serving a Cal-Ital menu that bursts with flavor — it struck me as overcautious.

Still, the nautical hint isn’t entirely misplaced. Point Reyes Station was once a port, and nearby Tomales Bay produces a wealth of farmed oysters. Naturally, Osteria Stellina offers these (from Hog Island) raw, and also (from Drake’s Bay Family Farms) atop a pizza ($18). This was as improbable a home for oysters as I’ve ever come across, but it did work. It helped that the rest of the pie was liberally spread with leeks braised in cream (from neighboring Straus Creamery), lemon thyme, and parsley — a tasty, green-yellow paste like a less manic gremolata. A small downside: the paste made the crust slightly soggy.

Damp bread isn’t always a disaster. We were smitten with Stellina’s version of panzanella ($18), the salad whose key ingredient is stale bread, moistened with vinegar and proof that thrift need not be dull nor otherwise feel like deprivation. This panzanella was the kind the king might be served, if west Marin had a king; it was made with heirloom tomatoes and (non-stale but perhaps toasted) Brickmaiden sourdough bread and further fortified with shreds of local chicken, Point Reyes mozzarella, greens, olives, and a balsamic vinaigrette. Panzanella is irresistibly flavorful, easy to make and share, and wonderfully redolent of both summer and elegant frugality, and I wonder why we don’t see it offered more often on menus.

Another Italian favorite that seems underrepresented in this country is the combination of cannellini beans and tuna. At Stellina this dish ($13) was made with conserved tuna (which I supposed to have been poached in olive oil), and it took an additional charge from celery and organic baby fennel, along with lemon quarters to squeeze over the top.

Even something as unassuming as a grilled-cheese sandwich ($14) can become special if it’s made with superior bread and interesting cheeses (fontina and, from Valley Ford, Estero Gold) and plumped up with braised veal shanks and caramelized onions. A kind of osso buco sandwich.

Stellina’s desserts have an artisanal intensity. The strawberry “pop tarts” ($10), a pair of shortbread-like pastry squares wrapped around a layer of fruit preserves, were enhanced by a scoop of lemon-buttermilk ice cream. This dessert was a whimsical reimagining of a Saturday-morning breakfast favorite from the 1960s. The fig crisp ($10), on the other hand, was direct and powerful — mostly fruit (including some blackberries) with just enough pastry and ground almonds to give context through texture.

The wine list is neither too long nor too short, and it offers local and Italian wines at moderate prices. Organic house wines (sauvignon blanc and zin) are available on tap, and all the wines except the sparkling are available in carafe or bottle. I was thrilled to find a greco di tufo, an obscure Italian varietal grown mainly on the far side of Mount Vesuvius. It goes well with oysters, and pizza too.

OSTERIA STELLINA

Dinner: nightly, 5–9 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

11285 Hwy. 1, Point Reyes Station

(415) 663-9988

www.osteriastellina.com

Wine and beer

DS/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Heirloom Cafe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

June 22, 2010

8

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE The Gospel According to Matthew offers no restaurant commentary I’m aware of, but it does remind us that “you will know them by their fruits” — the King James Version of the holy book gives us the fruitier “ye shall know them by their fruits” — especially (to make a slight inference) heirloom fruits. Or restaurants. If you want to know what a neighborhood is like and how it might be changing, you look at the restaurants.

Recently The Wall Street Journal ran a story suggesting that the Mission District is rapidly being colonized by techsters who live in the city and commute to jobs on the Peninsula in shuttle buses provided by their employers, among them the colossi Google and Apple. The map showed the corporate bus stops, though not the location of Heirloom Café, which opened in April in a gorgeous box of a space at Folsom and 21st streets. But if the shuttle-bus routes are adjusted so that the techsters can be dropped off there and go straight in to dinner, I won’t be surprised.

Heirloom is the kind of place that, five or six years ago, you would have expected to find opening in Glen Park or outer Noe Valley. It is a respectful, conscientious restoration of an old Victorian space, with wood-plank floors, cream-colored walls, lots of natural light, ceiling fans, and tables (including the long communal table) simply but handsomely dressed with white linens. Its menu is refreshingly brief and implies a lineage, at least in spirit, from Chez Panisse and Zuni Café.

But it is an odd experience, I must say, to stand on the sidewalk outside the door and watch the local world go by. Heirloom sits in the very heart of the Mexican Mission, and might as well be the embassy of some faraway country no one has heard of. The neighbors pass by with scarcely a glance at the place or the menu card posted in the window. The people who do pause, and then step inside, all seem to be wearing Dolce & Gabbana eyewear, or at least look as if they’ve tried on a pair or two. Worlds collide, sometimes, but they can also coexist, in the same time and place, as if in parallel universes.

The cooking is as elegant and understated as the interior design. Small touches make a big difference, as in the wonderfully crisp matchstick frites scattered over a salad of smoked trout ($12), frisée, and haricots verts. The fries brought a lovely lightness and crunch to an already complex salad. A mushroom tart ($10) was similarly, subtly enhanced by the tang of bacon. The pastry crust had the tender snap and tastiness of real butter.

On occasion, the magic ingredient goes missing, as with the mussels ($10). These were served with a classic white wine broth, which was a little sharp and sour, especially if you’ve been spoiled (as I have) by such innovations in this area as Thai-style red curry or beer-with-chorizo broths.

And some special ingredients won’t be to every taste. The burger ($12), for instance was served on an English muffin in the presence of pickled carrots, but the dominant reality was the epoisses cheese, whose ripe pungency gave pause. At first bite I wondered if the meat had spoiled — the cheese was that strong. I continue to question the French-style cheeseburger, I must say. High-quality beef generally doesn’t need much support, let alone interference.

A nice illustration of knowing when to leave well enough alone involved the poached halibut ($22), which turned out to be nearly as rich and creamy as the potato purée it was served on. Halibut is something like the perfect fish — meaty and substantial, mild-flavored but not bland, wild but taken from well-managed fisheries. To find it handled with restrained grace is the jewel in the crown.

The menu offers a roaming cheese service from a wooden platter. For $3 per variety, you can treat yourself to such delights as fleur de marquis and tomme de savoie, and you don’t have to do it as dessert. You could have cheese as a starter or intermezzo if you wanted — and if you did it that way, you might scale down to a splendid postprandial cookie ($2), oatmeal with chocolate chips and walnuts. They left out the kitchen sink. Just as well.

HEIRLOOM CAFÉ

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

2500 Folsom, SF

(415) 821-2500

www.heirloom-sf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Can quickly get noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Golden Era

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

June 1, 2010

0

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When you step into Golden Era, you pass through a narrow door and descend a few steps, as if into a subterranean world of disrepute. But you land on a landing, instead of at a bar crowded with sooty Mafia dons, as you might have expected, and from the landing you descend another brief staircase to the dining room, which opens out expansively around you. The experience is a little like the one long offered at Postrio, Wolfgang Puck’s (now closed) restaurant near Union Square.

One difference is that while Postrio was very much about au courant glamour, Golden Era shimmers with a sense of lost glamour. The large dining room, with its high ceilings and wooden arches, is a little dowdy, but its bones are impressive. It’s like a beaten-up pair of good shoes. Local lore teaches that the building was once a residence hotel run by Swedes and the spacious dining room a space for the serving of a Swedish menu. And I can’t imagine a Swedish menu without meatballs.

You won’t find meatballs on the menu at Golden Era — in fact, you won’t find any meat at all, or dairy, since the restaurant is vegan. (Another huge difference from Postrio.) And you won’t find anything Swedish. But you will find wonderful Southeast Asian cuisine, including many dishes that traditionally include meat, with vegan artifice substituting for flesh. As a rule I don’t quite like this kind of vegetarian cooking — a "steak" concocted from a portobello mushroom or some such, often fails to convince. Menu cards that make liberal use of quote marks, as Golden Era’s does, also raise a flag or two.

Despite the quote marks, the food is splendid. It compares favorably to that of Millennium, the fancier and pricier (and worthy) spot in the Hotel California. While a vegetarian or vegan kitchen might seem limited at first blush, with so many fundamental ingredients off-limits, the best such kitchens respond with verve and innovation. Because they can’t rely on the innate impressiveness of a beautifully cooked steak or a fish roasted whole, they must redouble their attention to other details, like composition, color, and texture. This the Golden Era kitchen consistently does.

It would be hard to put together a dish that better demonstrates these attentions than crispy chow mein ($7.95), a bird’s nest of crunchy noodles filled like a savory pie with a wealth of vegetables, including broccoli, carrot, bok choy, and mushrooms, all steamed to a slight tenderness while retaining their resiliency. The miracle flavoring was (we thought) mushroom soy sauce, slightly thickened and glossy, almost as if butter had been added — but butter is a vegan no-no, so how was the transformation accomplished? If by corn starch, then the hands in the kitchen are skilled indeed.

The Vietnamese crepe ($7.50), a huge yellow mezzaluna, arrived with a bouquet of fresh herbs, cilantro, mint, and basil. We were given instructions on how to combine the two, but either we didn’t understand or just forgot, and we ended up just slicing the mezzaluna into strips (like a quesadilla) and scattering bits of the herb bouquet over the top. The crepe’s filling seemed to consist largely of underseasoned rice noodles, so the flavor boost from the herbs was important.

No flavor boost was needed for the potstickers ($5.50), which were filled with a ground substance very like pork (tofu?) along with plenty of ginger. Just to make sure, and for that last kiss of verisimilitude, the potstickers were served with a shallow dish of nuoc nam laced with carrot threads. We also found no flavor shortage in the seaweed salad ($7), a tangle of green filaments, like spinach vermicelli after a bad night of tossing and turning, dressed with crushed sesame seeds and plenty of sesame oil.

For sheer wallop — and proof that lively spicing goes a long way toward compensating for lack of flesh or dairy — there’s the spicy noodle soup ($7). The fat noodles and chunks of tofu offer attractive ballast, but the charge lies in the complex, incendiary vegetable broth. To alert the unwary, red sheets of chili oil shimmer on the surface, like rays of a summer sunset glinting from a pond.

"Vegan dessert" sounds like what the late Herb Caen used to call a "self-canceling phrase." But Golden Era’s desserts could pass at just about any restaurant in town. Both the blueberry cheesecake ($4.75), creamy and lemony with a liberal dribbling of blueberry coulis, and the mocha chocolate cake ($3.50), as velvety and rich as a cashmere greatcoat, were accomplishments any Swedish pastry chef would have been proud of.

GOLDEN ERA

Wed.–Mon., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

572 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 673-3136

www.goldeneravegetarian.com

No alcohol

MC/V

Muted noise

Difficult wheelchair access