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Restaurant Review

Noodle Theory

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Noodle Theory

paulr@sfbg.com

The migratory patterns of restaurants might not be as riveting or significant as those of birds, but they do offer their little quirks and joys. When an Oakland restaurant opens a second front across the bay, in the city — The City, our very own — one sits up and takes notice. I am talking about Noodle Theory, which is the first Oakland, or indeed East Bay, restaurant to hop across our little mare nostrum that I can think of in quite a while, or maybe ever. Since the 1989 earthquake and the realignment of regional dining habits (the city was largely cut off for a month by the Bay Bridge closure), most of the traffic has gone the other way — city restaurants opening in the suburbs, where increasing numbers of diners are. (Also Chronicle subscribers; do we detect a pattern here?) In this sense, Noodle Theory is a kind of reverse commuter.

With a name like Noodle Theory, you would expect … noodles, and lots of them, and Noodle Theory delivers. Executive chef (and owner) Louis Kao’s menu is a brief primer on the noodles of east Asia, including soba, udon, and ramen. (Noodles, as it happens, are an ancient presence in east Asian cuisine, although it’s apparently a myth that Marco Polo introduced them to Italy.) But the food extends beyond noodles, and many of the noodly dishes display a worldly sophistication that transcends memories of those packs of instant ramen so many of us subsisted on as undergraduates.

The look of the restaurant suggests the basic Asian, even Japanese, tendency of things. (The space’s previous occupant was, in a small irony, a Thai restaurant.) The long, deep dining room, which includes the bar, is screened from the street by a pair of slatted rosewood panels that look like upright futon frames. One wall is upholstered in squares of rust-red leather, while the other consists largely of a floated sheet of iridescent green fabric. The basic effect is one of uncluttered sleekness that also manages to be slightly warm. One glance tells you that you’re somewhere in the Marina, and you’d certainly be pardoned for supposing you had ended up in a sushi bar.

The tableware, too, exudes a minimalist high style: oversized plates and bowls of white porcelain, some hemispherical, others rectangular or square. Some of this must be purely for show, but there’s also a functionality angle, since many of the dishes are complex compilations of noodles, broth, and feature ingredients, like the Szechuan-style oxtails ($13), braised in red wine and served in a deep round bowl with ramen and bok choy. I associate Szechuan style with chili heat, but there was none here, just the deep, brown, Burgundian richness of the braising liquid and tender meat on its knuckles of bone. Despite an ostensible Chinese provenance, the dish was like a cross between osso buco, beef Burgundy, and pho. And that was fine.

Less soupy were a set of pan-seared duck-breast flaps ($16) nested in a tangle of chubby wheat noodles. The noodles glistened with a thick coating of the coconut red curry sauce that is a staple in Thai cooking. The most striking quality of the sauce was its heat; despite its shy, orange-pink, nursery-room tint, it packed a real chili charge that left us smacking our lips for relief.

Many of the smaller dishes, even if noodleless, bring their own pleasures. Each table gets a complimentary dish of soy-seasoned edamame to nibble on, and as much as I love bread and butter, there’s much to be said for healthful nibble food that’s also tasty. If the edamame isn’t enough, then perhaps a bowl of dry-sautéed green beans ($6), a wealth of plump torpedoes nicely blistered and generously seasoned with ginger, garlic, and scallions. And the dinner menu offers quite sophisticated starter courses, such as tabs of grilled Hawaiian butterfish ($10), set up like a lean-to over a salad of ramen noodles and wakame (the translucent green threads of seaweed familiar to sushi lovers), with a wading pool of wasabi cream to one side.

All noodles might be starch, but at Noodle Theory, not all starch is noodles. There’s a wonderful soft bun, for instance, that serves as the basis for the chicken katsu sandwich ($10), whose guts consist of a panko-crusted filet and a purplish smear of Asian slaw. The bun was fabulous and the filet juicy-crisp, while the slaw slightly disappointed despite its rich color. But the taro-root chips on the side gave some consolation.

As for sweet starch: how about the doughnut holes ($8), a stack of a half-dozen or so beignet-like disks, dusted with sugar and ready for dipping into either butterscotch or chocolate ganache sauce? In addition to being one of the few items on the menu without a discernible Asian influence, the doughnut holes are sublime and nicely proportioned. They’re just enough for two people to share without feeling that they will soon need CPR or being so bloated that they will have to lie down on a futon to sleep it off.

NOODLE THEORY

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

Sat.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–5 p.m.

Dinner: Mon., Wed.-Sat., 5–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–-9 p.m.

3242 Scott, SF

(415) 359-1238

www.noodletheory.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Noeteca

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Noeteca

paulr@sfbg.com

Wine — unlike, say, Coca-Cola — has never been a big breakfast drink. Unless you count mimosas, which are basically an exercise in camouflage anyway, champagne bearded with orange juice to give the appearance of healthfulness. No, even the most dedicated wine-drinker must make do with something else in the morning, and that something else is probably coffee.

At Noeteca, a handsome establishment opened by Alex Kamprasert and Scott McDonald in early October on a residential stretch of Dolores Street in outer Noe Valley, the wine-bar aura is modified by glass cases of whole-bean coffee displayed just inside the door, next to a glass case full of pastries. You might feel slightly disoriented at the sight, as if you’ve drifted by mistake into a Starbucks. The coffee station is, in part, a bow to the space’s previous tenant, the Last Laugh Café, and also a visual expression of Noeteca’s commitment to be a kind of public "living room" that isn’t just a place to gather in the evening — although it is that — but to visit in the morning or any time during the day. In this sense, despite the Italian-ish name, Noeteca’s nearest relations are probably the wonderful cafes of Paris, those nameless but indispensable places where you can get an espresso early in the morning, a glass of wine late at night, and good food at any time.

Notwithstanding a similarity in philosophy, Noeteca doesn’t look like any Paris café I’ve ever been in. It resembles, instead, a fusion of lounge (including, for enhancement of living-room atmospherics, a chaise or two in a far corner of the dining room), restaurant, and takeaway bar, and it manages all this in a fairly tight space. And while the food has some traditional Gallic touches, it’s a little more eclectic than anything you’d likely find in a typical French café. As for the wines: the by-the-glass list is lengthy, worldly, and reasonably priced, with — in a welcome touch — pours available in half- as well as full sizes. Need a switch from Cotes du Rhone? Try a hit of Polesio, a tight, quick-on-its-feet wine made from Sangiovese grapes in Italy’s little-known Marche region along the Adriatic.

Since the closing of mc2 in the first dot-com Götterdammerung, the Alsatian specialty tarte flambé, a pizza-like flatbread topped with onions, bacon, and crème fraîche, has been a rare sighting in these parts. I don’t remember seeing one for years, in fact, until recently it turned up on Noeteca’s menu ($7.95), with a lovely thin, blistered crust that was a bit softer and more luxurious than a typical pizza crust. The pie itself wasn’t quite large enough to be a main course, but it did make a tasty, splittable starter.

Autumn means mushrooms and stew, and maybe mushroom stew ($10.95). Here the funghi included shiitake, portabella, and white button; they were swirled into a cream sauce heavy on pearl onions, then packaged in a nice earthenware crock under a gratin blanket of coarse bread crumbs. Very tasty and meaty, although the pearl onions did become oppressive. We couldn’t finish them all.

Our old friend the croque monsieur — basically a ham-and-cheese sandwich — was cleverly recast here as croque napoleon ($8.95), an elegant, savory bread pudding layered with ham and cheese. The pudding was cut into thick slices that leaned against one another like dominoes under a slicking of mornay sauce. On the side: a heap of mixed baby greens dotted with cherry tomatoes. Little side salads like this turn up with many if not most of the larger courses; they are colorful and light but turn repetitive after a while.

One way to get around an uninvited little salad is to have a big salad, like Kris’s chicken salad ($9.95). The theme here was deconstruction; the (chopped) chicken was mixed with pecans and red onions and molded into a disk that stood on one side of the plate, while on the other was the obligatory pile of baby greens and, all around, scatterings of cucumber coins and cherry tomatoes. The vinaigrette was simple but very good.

Given the display of sweets in the glass case at the door, it’s not surprising that the desserts are pretty convincing. And there is at least one genuine star: the chocolate bomba ($6), a softball-sized shell of dark chocolate filled with vanilla and chocolate gelati. Eating it combined some of the pleasures of an Easter-morning hunt for hidden chocolate eggs and of breaking open a piñata. With drama and spectacle like that, the coppa catalana ($6), a version of crème brûlée, suffered slightly by comparison, although its caramel flavor was deep and its texture nicely balanced between firm and creamy. The bomba, incidentally, did not come from the glass case, but the coppa catalana might have. You should not construe these remarks as permission to have either of these delicacies for breakfast. Stick with a mimosa instead. *

NOETECA

Mon.–Sat., 7 a.m–9:45 p.m.; Sun., 7 a.m.–3 p.m.

1551 Dolores, SF

(415) 824-5524

www.noetecacafe.com

Beer and wine

DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Greens

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Greens

paulr@sfbg.com

If there is a better-known vegetarian restaurant in the world than Greens, I’ve never heard of it. But — that sounds a little like hype, and hype is on cozy terms with falsehood. Greens is also 30 years old this year, and since restaurants often age in dog years, or worse, we are talking about a place that can’t ignore the many risks of geriatric life, among them fatigue, complacency, boredom, and a descent into tourist-trappiness. No doubt there are others.

Apart from the fusty, undersized sign above the door, Greens still looks sensational. It helps, surely, that the restaurant was designed around a giant wall of multi-light windows that look directly west, across the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge. Stepping into the restaurant (from the Fort Mason parking lot, prosaic even by parking-lot standards) is like stepping into a postcard; even the tables away from the windows have an expansive view of sea and sky. (And even the table for four in the small, semi-private room at the south end of the main dining room has a commanding view of the bridge.)

A view can be a mixed blessing. View restaurants are often bad, while vegetarian restaurants can be pointedly austere. Greens incorporates its singular view into a theme of subdued, white-linen elegance that gives no clue to the meatless nature of the food. It is one of those rare places that combines high style and a pedigreed menu with something for everyone, even doubtful omnivores.

Greens’ cuisine, in fact, has long seemed to me to have more in common with that of Zuni Café, its exact contemporary, than with the city’s other tony vegetarian temples. The grill is skillfully deployed for smokiness, and the rustic cooking of Italy is well-represented on the menu, since so much of Italian cuisine is naturally meatless and produce-driven. But the kitchen takes inspiration and influences from around the world, including Southeast Asia and the American Southwest.

For a quarter-century, my foundational text for vegetarian cooking has been The Greens Cookbook by Deborah Madison. Madison was Greens’ opening chef, but she left in the early 1980s and was replaced by Annie Somerville, who still runs the show while having published several Greens-related cookbooks of her own, which I also regularly consult. Given the stability in the kitchen, it’s not surprising that the restaurant’s cooking style hasn’t changed much over the years. In fact, you can still get the fabled black-bean chili, a dish about as old as the place itself and muscley enough to sate most meat-eaters.

But … how about a pizza to start? In the early 1990s, on my first visit to Greens, I noticed that the menu offered the same Mexican pizza I’d been making from the cookbook. I was prepared to be shamed, but the restaurant’s pie turned out to be a disappointment, mainly because of a stinginess (it seemed to me) with the toppings. As a home cook, I applied toppings with abandon, but home cooks don’t have to make a profit.

Nonetheless, the gods must somehow have divined my dismay, because a recent corn and grilled onion pizza ($16) was a veritable cornucopia of late-summer bounty: corn kernels, yellow cherry tomatoes as sweet-tart as fruit, plenty of cheese (fontina and grana padano), and blobs of garlicky pesto, all on a nicely blistered crust. It was like waking up on Christmas morning and finding even more presents under the tree than you had tentatively counted the night before. But I am mixing my seasonal imagery. The interval from Labor Day to Thanksgiving could well be the best time to visit Greens, since the kitchen still has access to summer produce even as the delights of autumn (among them peppers and squash) start to trickle in.

Squash — sunburst and butternut — figured in the fabulous Zuni stew ($14.50), "Zuni" here being a reference to the Indian tribe, not the restaurant. The stew (arranged around a set of grilled polenta triangles) was a mélange of (besides the cubed squash) corn kernels, Rancho Gordo beans, diced red bell peppers, carrots, broccoli, and roasted Early Girl tomatoes and flavored with onions, ancho chilis, majoram, sage, and chipotle lime butter. It was tasty, colorful, noticeably spicy, and managed to honor a pair of seasons as well as the ancient Indian trifecta of corn, beans, and squash.

Back to the Mediterranean for the farro sampler ($16.75), a potpourri of farro salad scented with lemon and mint, cucumber coins, cherry tomatoes, summer and shelling beans with tarragon, baby beets on a mache nest, hummus (garlicky!), black and green olives, triangles of grilled pita, and a rather thrilling, earthy-sweet tomato jam that went nicely with the pita and hummus but could as easily been spooned over vanilla ice cream.

Some ice creams — huckleberry, say — don’t need and probably wouldn’t accept such help. Huckleberry ice cream (the color of grape chewing gum) turned up in the company of a wonderful apple-huckleberry galette ($8.75) whose pecan streusel could have stood on its own, or perhaps with the cardamom cream mille-feuille laid atop slices of roasted pear ($8.50). I have never entirely accepted the stewed or poached pear, but roasting helps retain firmness — an important consideration with pears, whether red, green, or some other color.

GREENS

Dinner: Nightly, 5:30–9 p.m.; Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11:45 a.m.–-2:30 p.m.;

Brunch: Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Bldg. A, Fort Mason Center

(415) 771-6222

www.greensrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Buns and the city

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Buns and the city

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE In our hamburger-challenged city, the Mission District would not seem to be a particularly promising place to go burger-hunting. The hamburger is the all-American statement food, while the Mission is many things, but probably not all-American. Among the most conspicuous burger outlets in the Mission is Whiz Burger, which has held down the corner of 18th Street and South Van Ness since time immemorial and even has a parking lot, as if Arthur Fonzarelli might soon be rolling up in a ’57 Chevy. I have eaten Whiz burgers from time to time, but I don’t remember them — and, in fact, not remembering the hamburgers one has eaten in San Francisco seems to be a central fact about eating hamburgers in San Francisco. They are, generally speaking, forgettable at best.

Why this is so remains a mystery to me. Part of the answer might involve the local tendencies toward preciousness and fuss — obsessing about the pedigree of the meat and the bun (ciabatta? focaccia? baked with organic flour?) and the fancy cheese on top, or the exotic bacon, or the foie gras. All these grand touches are ruinous. A hamburger should not be complicated or fussy. The meat should have fat in it and be adequately salted. The soft bun should be buttered and toasted or griddled a little. Maybe a slice of cheese; the best cheese is wrapped in plastic sheets. Nothing says "American" quite like plastic.

Because the Mission is such a gaudy potpourri of ethnicities, styles, and foods, eating a hamburger there could be seen as a particularly pathetic sort of defeat. You could have had dosas or pupusas or rendang curry for the same money, maybe less. On the other hand, maybe there’s an ironic appeal, and maybe that’s the bet placed by Urbun Burger, which opened recently in the heart of the Valencia Street scene in a space that once held Yum Yum House.

The aesthetic makeover, it must be said, is sensational, with a spic-and-span factor Ray Kroc himself would approve of. Despite the deepness and narrowness of the layout, there is a sunniness to things. Under the cashier’s station at the back is a panel of ceramic tiles in mod colors, while the tables sit on gleaming stainless-steel (or chrome) stems. Seating choices are unexpectedly vast; there are tables with taverna chairs, tables with barstools, and a long counter with barstools.

The turkey burger is to hamburger cookery what fish is in other kitchens: it is the test. A good turkey burger, like a good fish dish, doesn’t just happen. Turkey is unforgiving. It dries out easily and doesn’t taste like much. The best news I have to give about Urbun’s turkey burger ($7.75) is that the fries ($2.75) were excellent — tender-crispy, near-molten inside, well-seasoned. But the burger itself was rather dry and lifeless inside its glossy (egg-washed?) bun. Had the kitchen failed to take the necessary remedial steps of adding at least egg yolk, and maybe some oil, to the ground meat? A slice of pepper-jack cheese struggled to make itself noticed, while the restaurant’s signature urban sauce was a little too soupy to bring deliverance. But the fries!

While you can also get a vegan (although not a turkey) burger at Mission Burger, the real burger ($8) here is of beef. And not just beef but a blend of short rib, brisket, and chuck (all from Harris Ranch), none of which are exactly lean cuts. Plus, the patties are seared in beef fat. So moistness and flavor are not issues.

Neither is the setting, because for all practical purposes there is none. Mission Burger isn’t a restaurant, per se; it’s a kind of station at the end of the meat counter in the Duc Loi supermarket. You find it by locating the sign taped to an exhaust hood, as if the hood were a piece of oversized junk waiting on the sidewalk for a bulk-item collection by the trash company. Seating? There is a small family of low benches squatting against one wall, as if in the lounge of a forlorn regional airport. You probably don’t want to sit there. Mission Burger is fundamentally a takeout operation, but also a made-to-order one.

But one of the virtues of a genuine fatburger is that it travels well. As insurance, the briochy-looking bun is lined with jack cheese, spicy caper mayonnaise, and a slathering of caramelized onions. This combination isn’t exactly coherent, but it is tasty. Plus, there are fries, and they are as good as McDonald’s fries used to be back in the day when they were fried in beef tallow. For a bit of color: coleslaw made with red cabbage. It’s appealingly creamy, although that doesn’t do much for the calorie count — not that it matters in the shadow of Mount Fatburger. Could it be the highest point in the Mission?

URBUN BURGER

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

581 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-2483

www.urbunburger.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

MISSION BURGER

Lunch: Fri.–Wed., noon–3 p.m.

2200 Mission, SF

(415) 551-1772

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Magnolia

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Magnolia

paulr@sfbg.com

Imagine a casting call for a beer commercial — a beer, I should add, marketed toward cool young people and not geezers or swollen couch slugs — and you’ll have some idea of the scene at Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery on any given night. Loose halter tops, soccer butts, and headsful of tousled hair dot the Rathskeller-scape, while the human noise (let’s call it the roar of youth) is so loud and steady as to achieve a transcendence. The noise is beyond noise; it warps reality and becomes another dimension. As a confirmed hater of noise, I should have hated it passionately, but it’s hard to sustain that kind of energy when you are engulfed in a sea of jubilant 20-somethings. Like all human moods, exuberance is communicable, and you won’t see many long faces coming out of Magnolia. On the other hand, you might well see some people, probably older than 40, gingerly checking to make sure their ears are still attached to their skulls as they regain the (comparatively) tranquil street.

Magnolia has been a beacon-like presence at the corner of Haight and Masonic for 15 years. In part, and in true pub fashion, it’s a neighborhood joint, but from the beginning the microbrewed beers have provided a broader draw. Magnolia was among the first of the city’s modern brewpubs — places that brewed their own beer and matched good food to go with it. And while the kitchen has recently undergone a change of chef, with Ronnie New now in charge, the food retains its gastro-pubby, beer-friendly edge. There’s a daily pizza, a burger made with Prather Ranch beef, and (at lunch) a meatloaf sandwich. But New has Louisiana roots, and he’s infused Magnolia’s new menu with various Cajun and Creole touches.

You’ll find quite a few of these among the side dishes ($5), which include collard greens, dirty rice, cheese grits, and black-eyed peas simmered with ham hocks. I love black-eyed peas and consider them a real delicacy, and how could you go wrong simmering them with ham hocks? But something did go wrong — maybe a total dearth of salt — and the result was lifelessness. There was considerably more kick in the vinegary (though non-bayou) sauerkraut, but when we asked whether it was house-made, our server shook her head. (Service is surprisingly good, by the way, considering the intensity of the evening rush, but the service staff’s manner is Parisian in its emphasis on efficiency rather than fawning.)

Okra, a staple of bayou cooking, makes its presence felt in ways subtle and not. You can have it more or less straight up, as a buttermilk-battered and deep-fried appetizer, but it also appears in the succotash that accompanies a slab of pan-seared halibut ($19). The fish, topped by a beret of basil aioli, is nicely cooked, moist and flaky, but the plate is dominated by the colorful succotash, a gravelly mat of corn kernels, halved cherry tomatoes, and okra splinters.

Not all the food is Louisiana-inflected or even pubby. We were especially impressed by a watermelon salad ($7), which managed to give the late-summer bounty of California a sly Saharan aura. The cubes of melon were tossed with slices of peeled, seeded cucumber and chunks of goat cheese and then dressed with a saba vinaigrette and shreds of mint. Some sweetness, some tang; a bit of creaminess, a bit of crunch. (The watermelon, incidentally, is thought to be native to Egypt and was cultivated as a means of carrying water in the desert.)

And a summer tomato soup ($7) could have been on the menu at many a California-cuisine spot. The (hot) soup had a pleasant coarseness, but the real treat was the archipelago of croutons, coated with melted Gruyère, bobbing in the middle of the bowl.

In a surprising development, desserts are quite good — neither overwrought nor (as is so often the case at pub-style establishments) ordinary and perfunctory. A plum crisp ($7) was deftly enlivened by the addition of tomatoes; their texture was difficult to distinguish from that of the plums, but their earthy acidity helped damp the sweetness. I would have called this dish a crumble, since it was in effect a shallow dish of stewed fruit with the pastry bits scattered over the top like sprinkles on a doughnut. There was no proper crust.

A pair of tiny ice-cream sandwiches ($7), like sliders, reached the table in a supercooled condition, and we were told to let them stand for five minutes so they could relax. The crisp, alas, didn’t last that long, so when we turned to the sandwiches, they were still slightly gelid. But the flavor of the Bi-Rite roasted banana ice cream glowed through the cold, and the graham-cracker cookies were like un-lemony madeleines. (Perhaps to compensate for the lack of lemon, the inner faces of the cookies were smeared with white chocolate.) The bite- (or two-bite-) size of the sandwiches was also a bit of caloric discipline for those of us no longer in our 20s. A diamond might be forever, but not a soccer butt. *

MAGNOLIA GASTROPUB & BREWERY

Mon.–Thurs., noon–midnight; Fri., noon–1 a.m.;

Sat., 10–1 a.m.; Sun., 10 a.m.–midnight

1398 Haight, SF

(415) 864-7468

www.magnoliapub.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Deafening

Wheelchair accessible

Balompie Cafe

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paulr@sfbg.com

Balompié Café looks like many another modest restaurants in the Mission, but it does make a convincing claim to uniqueness, in three parts. The first is the striking name — basically “ball foot” in Spanish. Football by any other name — including “balompié” and “fútbol” — is still … soccer. Somehow soccer’s claim to being the true football is more convincing than our own. In American football, the combination of ball and foot is seldom a presence or factor.

The second part of our triad is Balompié’s identity as a soccer bar. The walls of the otherwise unassuming space are festooned with soccer-club banners from around the world, and flat-panel televisions mounted high on the walls show plenty of action. Some of the patrons scattered around the dining room and at the bar are likely to be watching rapt, while others will be dividing their attention between the screens and the plates of Salvadorean food in front of them — the place’s Salvadoreanness being its third distinguishing characteristic. Salvadorean cuisine resembles its Mexican cousin in broad outline, with corn and beans at the foundation, as they have been for centuries in Mesoamerica. But Salvadorean cuisine has its specialties and special delights.

Torn though some of the other patrons might be between the food and the televised proceedings, there was no contest for us. Soccer is a little too free-form a game to translate comfortably to television; the main impression made on the remote spectator pertains to the green vastness of the playing field. It’s like looking at an image from Google Earth, with tiny figures frantically running around. The food, on the other hand, richly rewards the attention you pay to it. It is as flavorful as any food you’ll find in this city and is also monumentally inexpensive. Balompié has been at its central Mission location since 1987, and in recent years has opened up at a few other spots (one in SoMa, the other in the outer Mission), but it still gives big bang for the buck, and that’s probably never been more valuable than it is now, in this depression-by-any-other-name.

The best-known Salvadorean dish in this country is the pupusa — and I probably should say “pupusas,” since, as with Lay’s potato chips, the singular reference is absurd. (Balompié’s menu codifies this preference for the plural by requiring that you order a minimum of two pupusas; the regular ones are $2.50 each, the fancier sorts $3.50.) Pupusas are basically stuffed flatbreads (made here either from masa or rice flour) that look a lot like small pita breads, and they can be filled with a variety of delectables.

Spinach and cheese reminded me of the Greek pastry pie spanikopita, while chorizo and cheese had the air of a Mexican-style breakfast. In the case of the blander pupusas — the cheese-and-beans combo springs to mind — enhancement is available in the form of an impressively spicy cabbage slaw, a dish of pickled vegetables (including carrot coins, cauliflower florets, and rounds of jalapeño pepper), and a richly tomatoey, though mild-mannered, salsa.

The pupusas are griddled. The corn pies called pasteles ($5.75 for three), on the other hand, are deep-fried and resemble an improbable cross between corn dogs, falafel balls, and Easter eggs. They’re crunchy on the outside and are filled with well-seasoned minced pork. (Chicken and shrimp versions are also available.)

The bigger plates tend to include large swaths of beans and rice — a worthy combination that can assume the proportions of a small landslide. (You can get the beans and rice as discrete entities, with salad, or mixed together and fried as casamiento.) The wonderful garlic chicken ($9.95), for instance, would have been fine on its own. The meat had been sliced into boneless flaps, then cooked — I would guess on the griddle — until the edges were lightly crisped and caramelized. The finishing touch was a fabulously creamy garlic sauce with a hint of lemon ladled over the top.

A chile relleno ($10.75) turned out to be less routine than it sounded. The pepper, a poblano, was familiar enough; the filling, of chopped, spiced beef, was less so. But the real puzzle was a band of mysterious white threads with the texture of pickled radish and a bitter-fruity flavor. That bite took some getting used to but was, in the end, a real enhancement. We quizzed our server, and she brought forth a jar labelled “pacaya,” or date palm — actually a date-palm blossom, pickled in brine. The date palm is a native of Mesopotamia and is one of the world’s most venerable food sources.

This is the sort of interesting food factoid that can get overlooked when Mexico scores on Costa Rica and the tiny figures run around on the surface of their flat green planet while, at Balompié, murmurs of exultation or disappointment ripple through the crowd and more beer is ordered, perhaps a bottle of Regia from El Salvador, a gorgeously smooth golden lager in a vessel like a quart of motor oil. Sort of the beer equivalent of the foot-long hotdog.

BALOMPIÉ CAFÉ

Daily, 8 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

3349 18th St. (also at 525 Seventh St. and 3801 Mission), SF

(415) 648-9199 (558-9668, 647-4000)

Beer and wine

DS/MC/V

Loud but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

 

Jannah

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paulr@sfbg.com

DINE The brightness of Yahya Salih’s new restaurant, Jannah, belies — or redeems — what went before. Jannah’s immediate predecessor was a place called Gabin, a Korean-inflected karaoke bar that drew some spicy Yelp commentary. Before that, it was Café Daebul, also Korean-influenced, maybe a bit less commentable. Both places were, apparently, on the gloomy, claustrophobic side.

Jannah, by contrast, is all about openness. Huge plate-glass windows look onto the lively Fulton-at-Masonic street scene, while the interior consists of a vast, pillarless dining room embroidered by a bar set off by a half-wall. The main floor is an expanse of wood planks worthy of a basketball court, but the ceiling is a little low, so it would probably have to be Nerf basketball. And BYO hoops.

Salih’s other city endeavor, the four-year-old YaYa (on Van Ness at the western edge of Russian Hill), manages to combine Iraqi and Californian influences to impressive effect, and Jannah does much the same thing, at a lower price point, as befits its quasi-college-town location. (USF and its hordes of collegians on budgets is practically across the street.) All the main courses are $11, and, as if that weren’t enough, the list includes dishes and ingredients you don’t often see, including fesenjoon (the chicken dish associated both with Iraq and Iran) and a version of masgouf, the grilled-fish preparation that is one of the gastronomic signatures of Iraq.

Of course, the menu offers plenty of items that will seem familiar, including that trinity of tasty mushes from the Middle East, tabbouleh, hummus, and baba ghanoush — or, as it is spelled at Jannah, ghnooge. There’s even falafel, but it’s not like the falafel we generally see, chickpea fritters the size and shape of golf balls. Instead the batter is worked into a small disk ($5) and, like a pizza, topped with a tasty Mediterranean mélange of eggplant, roasted red-bell pepper, scallions, red onions, shiitake mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and feta and goat cheeses. The crust, in the best triangle-slice tradition, is sufficiently rigid even at the point to support the toppings without wilting or crumbling, and it’s tasty enough to stand on its own. In an odd way, the pie reminded me of the chickpea-flour tort known as a farinata in Liguria and a socca in the south of France.

Kelecha ($3) are ravioli-like dough pockets, stuffed here with dates, cardamom, and cinnamon and topped with yogurt that’s been coarsened with chopped walnuts and subtly eniched with Parmesan cheese. The menu lists this dish as a starter, with other salads and dips, but it’s also just sweet enough to qualify as a light dessert. The yogurt sauce, in particular, is reminiscent of the cream-cheese frosting often found on carrot cakes.

We did think the variety of pickles ($3) tended a little too much toward saltiness — especially the cauliflower florets. But the plate (which also included radish, cabbage, peppers, and olives) was a festival of slightly surreal colors worthy of the Enterprise cafeteria on the original Star Trek, with lime green, bubble-gum red, and electric yellow being well-represented.

The main courses include an array of phyllo-dough preparations that vaguely resemble pot pies: the principal ingredients are sealed in a pastry crust and baked. In the case of kubsee ($11), the pastry is formed into a squat cylinder, then filled with prawns, scallops, fava beans, chickpeas, and rice. The rather staggering roster of seasonings includes cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, almond, tomato paste, hot pepper, and sun-dried lime, and the whole thing is ringee by a smoky tomato-eggplant purée.

Sun-dried lime, incidentally, is one of those ingredients that’s almost unknown in the occidental kitchen and helps give this kind of cooking a lot of its distinctive aura. To get a better idea of its flavor, you can have it as a lightly sweetened drink, a kind of Middle Eastern limeade whose sunset color won’t give you any sort of clue as to what it’s made of.

The masgouf ($11) features a subtly seasoned, butterflied trout — a freshwater fish (often sustainably farmed now) whose pinkish flesh is reminiscent of salmon. The freshwater angle is appropriate here, since Iraqis tend to grill fish taken from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and it also lends the final result a certain similarity to gravlax. The rest of the plate consists of a heap of rice, another of tomato-eggplant compote, and a colorful honor guard of cauliflower and broccoli florets and carrot and yellow summer squash coins, all steamed and arranged around the periphery.

For dessert (assuming you don’t want the kelecha or had them earlier on), how about kahi ($5), a pair of fried pastry triangles, like a child’s set of military hats from the 18th century, bronzed for posterity? They are stuffed with cardamon whipped cream (which has a cheesy-thick texture, neither pleasant nor unpleasant) and are set afloat on a small red sea of raspberry purée, which is nearly an event in itself. Bright, too.

JANNAH

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

Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–2 p.m.

1775 Fulton, SF

(415) 567-4400

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Echoey noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Metro Cafe

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paulr@sfbg.com

A half-score (or so) years ago, there came to the border country between the upper and lower Haight a restaurant called Metro Café. The place was an offshoot of Baker Street Bistro, and, like its progenitor, it was rather wonderful and quite affordable. In the mid-aughts the restaurant morphed into Metro Kathmandu, which served a Nepalese-Indian menu. The change was improbable, but the food was just as good in its way. Now, after a too-short run, Metro Kathmandu has disappeared, only to become … Metro Café again.

Actually, it hasn’t altogether disappeared: the look of the dining room remains the same, with a tendency toward red and umber tones and fanciful light fixtures that look like bubbles of colored Plexiglass that someone sawed off the bottoms of. Nor is it quite accurate, perhaps, to speak of the new Metro Café as a return of the original. There are points of similarity, yes, mainly in the emphasis on a three-course prix-fixe menu. At $25, it’s quite a bit more than in the good old days (on the order of $10 more), but what isn’t? It’s still a good deal, especially when you consider that you can have any starter, main dish, and dessert. And no surcharges for the fancier stuff like New York steak or duck confit. I call that sporting.

But the food doesn’t seem to be quite as pointedly French as the last time. The pediment of Chef Jacques Rousseau’s style is unmistakably Gallic — he offers snails, and need we say more? — but the menu is Californian, not French. There are dishes here you’d have a tough time finding in Paris — and not just macaroni and cheese ($8), although Metro’s version is quite tony, with cheddar, Swiss, and Parmesan mingling under a thick crust of garlic-bread crumbs. The only thing missing was a bit of salt, but this was easily added from a shaker already on the table. We liked the serving dish, an earthenware crock in the shape of a paddle.

Equally in a Ameri-Cali, if more elevated, vein was a plate of grilled squid ($6.50), accompanied by white beans, bits of frisee and chopped black olives, and a beguilingly fragrant olive oil infused with preserved lemon. The pieces of squid were beautifully tender — no small trick; squid overcooks and toughens easily — while the lemon oil cast a spell like sunshine over everything.

And I do not think you’d easily find in Paris any preparation to match the baby back ribs ($15), with their glaze of honey, cardamom, and coffee — darkly sweet but also a little smoky, like a demitasse of espresso with a half-cube of sugar. Since pork is naturally sweet, a sly mix of sweetness and smoke produced a complex harmony with the meat. The ribs arrived atop a generous slathering of green lentils, properly cooked al dente.

As for the ultimate French treat, les esgargots ($7): they came discreetly swaddled in pastry pockets that looked like empanadas. There was plenty of garlic on hand and, on the floor of the plate, a garish pool of red-pepper purée; these were quite useful flourishes if you needed some distraction from the advertised main ingredient. But the real main ingredient turned out not to be snails but pastry.

Duck confit ($16) is another quintessentially French dish, and Rousseau’s kitchen handles it with aplomb. The result: tender, juicy meat inside appealingly crisp, golden skin. The potatoes landaise did not particularly impress, however; instead of the traditional Pyrenees-style version, of potato cubes fried with onion, garlic, and ham, Metro offered what appeared to be handful of roasted, and underseasoned, potato quarters. An underseasoned potato is a piteous thing, naked and flabby, even if there’s some red-pepper purée on the plate for consolation.

The dessert list is the most purely French sector of the menu. Tarte tatin? Check. It costs $6 and is distinguished by large chunks of apple that are the shape of Gary Oldman’s strange, puffy hair in Dracula. The apple also retained some of its texture — a plus — but I did suspect the kitchen had used big, sweetish apples (maybe some sort of Delicious) rather than one of the smaller, sourer, denser varieties that, in my experience, work better in this tart.

The one non-French note struck among the desserts involved the chocolate cake ($6), which turned out to be a layered mousse cake that included a stratum of raspberry preserves. Sort of a variation on the Viennese specialty Sachertorte, with the raspberry preserves substituted for apricot. I like these kinds of small flourishes, which go a long way toward lifting the pall of enslavement that can sometimes hang over French-influenced restaurants in our corner of the New World. If, at some point, Metro Café becomes Cosmo Café, I would gladly clink my champagne flute.

METRO CAFÉ

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

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 552-0903

www.metrocafe311.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Red Crawfish

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paulr@sfbg.com

The color of cooked crawfish isn’t red, exactly — more a garnet. If it were a wine, it would be a medium-bodied pinot noir. Certainly it would never be mistaken for cooked lobster, which (pace Red Lobster) isn’t red at all, but more of an inflamed orange. You see plenty of crawfish being rushed from the evening kitchen at Red Crawfish in the Tenderloin; the crustaceans make the journey in shallow white bowls and reach tables full of eager patrons who’ve fitted themselves out with plastic bibs in anticipation of mess.

Red Crawfish, like the Green Hornet, has something of a dual identity. By day it’s a quasi pan-Asian place tending toward Chinese and Vietnamese favorites. But as the sun sets, it dons a Cajun guise, and a menu filled with familiars like five-spice chicken and beef noodle soup suddenly develops a bayou section that includes (besides crawfish) treats such as gumbo and Cajun fries.

The dual-identity restaurant is a rare phenomenon, but not an unknown one. Some years ago there was a spot on lower Haight Street that appeared to be an all-American café by day but turned into a Senegalese joint on certain nights of the week. And, in the present moment, we have Coffee Bar, which daytimers know as a coffee bar but becomes host to Radio Africa Kitchen several nights a week. Red Crawfish is close kin to these spots, but it has the additional charm of joining compatible, if unlikely, cuisines without fusing them. The Cajun dishes remain Cajun and the Asian dishes Asian, but they do make a nice harmony: a communion of spiciness.

The cathedral in which this union takes place is unprepossessing, in true Tenderloin fashion. The dining room is deep and very narrow — a half-storefront — with a long mirror along one wall to give the illusion of greater spaciousness. Ceiling fans do offer a hint of New Orleans. But the furniture, though plain, is well-made, the tabletops are clean, and you are greeted and seated promptly when you step through the door.

The Cajun dishes are dialed up according to the patron’s preferred level of heat (on a four-step scale) and style of seasoning. For the seafood combo ($13.99), for instance, you choose among lemon-pepper, garlic butter, and red crawfish flavor palettes. The last turned out to be a deep red, slightly oily, iridescent soup flecked with dried chili and giving a faint charge of fruity acidity; had it been spiked with a mild vinegar? In this shallow pond frolicked shrimp (partly shucked), oysters (fully shucked), and chunks of calamari and white fish. The second-lowest level of heat ("spicy") proved to be more than sufficient, while the pre-shucking, while probably indicative of slackerdom on our part, also made the dish much easier to eat and enjoy and at the same time limited the mess. That’s a lot of upside.

Cajun fries ($3.99 for a semi-gigantic plate) were fine but ordinary. We did detect a faint dusting of cayenne pepper on them, but not enough to make a serious impression. Better, for flavored-up starch, were the garlic noodles ($6.50). They would have gone brilliantly with the gumbo ($10.99), but the gumbo was somewhat late in arriving. In fact, it arrived last and, like a folk act following a death-metal group, its luster was at first somewhat dimmed by the potency of the seafood combo that preceded it.

But the gumbo found traction after a bite or two and was thick and satisfying even without rice — or garlic noodles. The thickener was okra, whose flavor has a ghostly bite, and the result wasn’t particularly pretty: a bowlful of lumpy gray-green sludge. The lumps, though, consisted of delectables such as shrimp, chicken, and pork, and added enough heft to make the gumbo into a (potential) meal in itself.

An unexpected rival for meal-in-itself (although not heart-healthy) honors might be the beignets ($4.50), a quartet of deep-fried pastries shaped like little top hats and served with a pair of massive ice-cream torpedoes. The ice cream was vanilla, and the torpedoes were cross-hatched with chocolate sauce, and that alone would have been enough for two people — even two hungry, greedy people bewitched by the crunchy fattiness of the beignets. (To describe these as "deep-fried" does not quite capture the reality.)

In sunshine — or fogshine, as the case may be — the restaurant slips into east Asian character. Salt and pepper calamari ($5.50) are batter-fried and presented with a nuoc nam-based dipping sauce whose sharpness helps cut the grease. Mixed vegetables with tofu ($5.95) sets a low mountain of broccoli florets, carrots, cabbage, and tofu cubes on a huge pediment of white rice. The vegetables are crisp and fresh; the soy-heavy brown sauce, a little bland. Five-spice chicken ($7.50), on the other hand, with egg rolls and vermicelli, is enhanced with mint, which brings both color and sweet breath to the rescue. That color is green, by the way. *

RED CRAWFISH

Sun.–Fri., 10 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., 5–10 p.m.

611 Larkin, SF

(415) 771-1388

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Liberty Cafe

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paulr@sfbg.com

Not all restaurants have authors — central figures that breathe their essence into a place — but the ones that do tend to be special. They are also uniquely vulnerable, for if that central figure disappears, a restaurant can be left adrift without its animating force, like a fully-rigged sailing ship on a breezeless sea.

In January, Cathie Guntli, the founder and guiding light of the Liberty Café, died. She opened the place in Bernal Heights in 1994, in a woody Victorian storefront space along then-backwatery Cortland Avenue, and the restaurant quickly established itself as one of the city’s new neighborhood jewels. It was the Firefly of Bernal.

Since Guntli’s death, Liberty Café has passed into new hands associated with Hard Knox Café and Sally’s. So far the change in ownership is not visible; the restaurant looks the same and the general new-American tenor of the food is familiar. The menu still features the famous chicken pot pie. The real changes can be found outside the restaurant; Bernal Heights was a sleepy little hill town 15 years ago, but it isn’t anymore. The commercial district along Cortland has bloomed with shiny new restaurants in recent years, and Liberty Cafe, which began as an outpost or beacon of sorts, no longer holds that distinction. These days, in fact, its homey Victorian look seems almost quaint.

The restaurant has long adhered to a no-reservations policy. This can complicate patrons’ planning, but it does help keep tables full, particularly if there is a steady stream of passersby on foot and a loyal clientele. Liberty enjoys both advantages, and it isn’t hard to see why: it’s kid-friendly and modestly priced, and it’s in the middle of a walk-friendly zone.

Still, there are signs of stress. The dining room strikes me as slightly understaffed; although Liberty Café is barely bigger than tiny, with 32 seats divided between two rooms, you can almost see the front-of-house staff — a single server, maybe two, aided by a couple of bussers — panting to keep up. People must be met and greeted, summoned from the wait list, and then seated. The no-reservation system is an efficient way of filling tables, but it adds an extra step or two to the service, and that is enough to stretch the staff.

The food is a quirky mix of modesty and elegance, although the balance now tips more toward the former. As if in compensation, portions are quite generous. If you like caesar salad, for instance, you’d have trouble finding a better deal than Liberty’s ($7): a looming plateful of immaculately crisp romaine spears tossed with croutons and tabs of Parmesan cheese under a light fall of grated Parmesan — like the first snow of winter. No anchovies, though, alas.

The house-baked breads and dinner rolls flow out to the tables in a steady stream. While they are tasty and satisfying on their own if smeared with a bit of softened butter, they’re also useful if you happen to have ordered soup. The soup ($7 for a broad bowl) changes daily; it could be of portobello mushroom, a thick pottage tasting intensely of the earth and decorated only with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. I had mixed feelings about this soup; there was no doubting the purity of its flavor, but it looked like mud. A bit of colorful festooning wouldn’t have hurt.

There was plenty of color on a plate of seared ahi ($18): purplish fish in thin slabs, pale-green chunks of ripe avocado, brilliant red pear tomatoes, halved and very ripe. The tuna had been well-coated with cracked pepper for some extra jolt, and the dish as a whole fluently spoke the language of summer. But the tomatoes and avocado didn’t seem quite coherent; they were meant to be a salad, but they behaved like junior-high boys and girls reluctant to mix at a dance.

Impressive coherence was achieved with the vegetarian pot pie ($13), a meatless version of the chicken pot pie. Under a disk of golden pastry (a treat in itself) lurked a potpourri of cauliflower florets, carrots, and lentils in a thick mushroom slurry. The effect was surprisingly autumnal (on a warm night, no less), and at first I hoped for and missed the flavor of curry, but the milder flavor accreted bite by bite in a swelling crescendo. Even so, I couldn’t finish it. Two fairly hungry people could share one and come away happy, and I call that value. They could also probably share — but might end up fighting over — the exceptionally tasty country-fried pork chop ($17), slathered with white gravy and served with cheesy grits and bacon-braised kale.

Given Liberty Café’s bakery chops, the pies — I speak now of the dessert kind — are generally estimable. Cherry ($7), for instance, featured an avalanche of wondrous sour cherries the color of a good red Bordeaux and with just enough sweetness to qualify as a dessert. If not a slice of pie, then perhaps some butterscotch pudding ($7), served in a goblet and deeply tasty despite some feathery remnants of scalded milk. It was good but could have been, should have been better. And for now, that’s the way it is at Liberty Café. *

THE LIBERTY CAFÉ

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

418 Cortland, SF

(415) 695-8777

www.thelibertycafe.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Baby Blues BBQ

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paulr@sfbg.com

Who needs the fleshpots of Sodom — or for that matter SoMa — when we can find all the flesh we can handle at barbecue restaurants? All right, it’s not quite the same thing, but close. The real issue pertains to the restaurants. San Francisco isn’t much of a barbecue town; we are a village of pastels, and barbecue is a primary color.

We are also a realm of hipsters, and where there are hipsters, it follows that there might also be hipster barbecue. If you were to start sniffing around for something in this line, you would do well by beginning along those blocks of Mission just south of Cesar Chavez, where Bernal Heights and the Mission mix and mingle and hipsters are known to congregate. Your divinations of hipster habitat would soon lead you to a building with some old Rexall Drug signage still affixed, even as profound change arrived late last year.

You have found — eureka! — Baby Blues BBQ (outpost of a small SoCal chain), which doesn’t especially look like a barbecue joint either outside or inside but does sound like one. It’s filled with a well-mannered raucousness, not to mention touches of kitsch, among them an alabaster cow’s head mounted above the bar like a trophy from some strange safari. Also above the bar: a flat-screen TV showing rodeos in which young men are thrown from bucking, heaving bulls with serious-looking, Pamplona-worthy horns. It seemed to me that the people sitting at the bar were riveted by these dust-ups, but maybe this just proves the Warholian dictum that people would rather watch something than nothing.

Elsewhere on the floor — the layout is an archipelago of trapezoids — people seem more interested in the food than the rodeo. If you don’t find high-def rodeo footage to be particularly appetite-kindling, you might well be relieved, as I was, to find yourself among people who are tucking with real application into impressive platters of ribs, chicken, brisket, and so forth. (There are two communal tables, for the communal-minded.)

Some of the best flavors to be found at Baby Blues involve the side dishes, or, in menu-speak, "fixins." They’re $3.50 each, a la carte; they also come two (of your choice) to a dinner platter and, as a quartet (also of your choosing), make up their own dinner platter. Among the best of these are the "blues on a cob" — an ear of shucked corn, roasted and then slathered with poblano-chile butter and crumblings of mild white cheese — and the macaroni and cheese, which features fat tubes of pasta (perhaps ziti) in an intense cheese sauce under a lid of broiled bread crumbs.

We were somewhat less impressed by the coleslaw, which suffered from wateriness. Not enough mayo? The cabbage was fresh and crisp, though. And the baked beans were more looks than flavor. The roll call included black, pinto, and kidney beans — as in a three-bean salad — but the overall affect was a mild, tang-less sweetness. The wonderful, smoky-dark cornbread, presented as a brownie-like square with nicely crusted edges, did provide some balance and extra texture here.

As for the flesh: it’s served in ample portions that nonetheless don’t overwhelm. It is one of life’s dismaying facts that too much good food, or any food, can turn the delight of eating into the curse of bloat, and this danger is especially high, in my experience, at places that traffic in heartiness. Barbecue certainly qualifies. But Baby Blues has its portion sizes expertly calibrated.

A half-rack of Memphis-style long bone pork ribs ($17.95) featured meaty slats, cooked with a strong hint of smoke and left with plenty of juiciness. The sauce slightly failed to amaze, I must say. It lacked presence and (probably a related issue) seemed to have been thinly applied. In fairness, it must be said that too much sauce can be as bad as too little and can leave one with the impression that a cover-up has been attempted. Baby Blues has nothing to hide, ribs-wise.

Beef brisket ($13.95) is one of the classic cuts of tough but tasty meat. Here it’s braised in beer, which lends a pleasant sourness, and served in shreds, like a disintegrating garment. Its nearest relation might be ropa vieja, a Cuban dish of shredded flank steak. Shredding tough cuts before serving them is wise; it not only makes the customer’s job easier but adds a final layer of insurance that any remaining toughness demons have been exorcised.

Desserts are of the down-home school. We reached a split decision on a peach pie ($5) littered with blueberries; Dr. No thought it wasn’t sweet enough, but I liked the homemade-ness of it, including the fine, flaky pastry. But we both loved the banana mousse ($5), which was like a gelato that managed to stay solid at room temperature and was enhanced by pulverized vanilla cookies. There was also plenty of it, so, like spackle, it helped fill any last gaps left by the savory dishes. We did get up feeling a pound or two heavier.

BABY BLUES BBQ

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.;

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

3149 Mission, SF

(415) 896-4250

www.babybluessf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Quite noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Corner

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paulr@sfbg.com

For the evolution-minded, the past is a living presence, and such all-American phrases as "start from scratch" or "clean-sheet design" cause anxiety. In our culture of disposability and revolution, the past is about as attractive as a worn-out razor blade — and we know what happens to them. So to find a new restaurant that simultaneously manages to be contemporary yet respectful of the past gives quiet delight. The restaurant is the Corner; it opened last spring and is indeed right at the corner of 18th and Mission streets, adjoining its older sibling, Weird Fish.

The Corner is better-looking than Weird Fish, which is by no means homely. Both are boxy and tall, but the Corner has a cozy mezzanine that not only looks upon the bustling bar below (part of the place’s identity is as a wine bar) but at the long south wall, a piecework of glass blocks, transom windows, and tall drapes through which the deepening twilight filters. There is even sidewalk seating for the al fresco-minded — brushed-aluminum tables nestled against an Art Deco exterior of black glazed-ceramic tiles that look original to the building (once a Chinese grocery) — or for those who find the noisiness of close quarters indoors to be intrusive. Like me. The mezzanine has the feel of a private room, but it can get nearly as loud up there as on the main floor. You’re not quite on the balcony of the Saint, circa 1980, but close.

The food is the sort you could eat every day, an assortment of Cal-Ital dishes prepared with a light touch. Restaurant food can be debilitating — too many calories, too much attention-seeking — so to find a restaurant whose cooking navigates the tricky passage between humble or indifferent on the one hand and grandiose on the other is a gift. The Corner’s style has an obvious root in the accomplished home kitchen, but the techniques are sharper, the effects intensified. These are among the major reasons for going out to eat in the first place.

And prices, it must be said, are astonishingly moderate for what you get. I’ve had plenty of cauliflower soups in recent years, but at most places even a cup would cost you more than $3.95. Here it buys you a broad bowl, and the cauliflower is purple, and the base of the soup is deep and rich — beef stock? Vegetarians would scream, of course, but using beef stock is the sort of simple touch that can subtly enhance certain dishes.

No one would mistake the Corner for a vegetarian restaurant. The menu includes a gratifying plate of charcuterie ($10), with sizzling coins of andouille sausage, slices of salami, and tissue-like sheets of coppa and prosciutto. This is a meaty array, and there is surprisingly little in the way of filler beyond a dab of mustard, a few bread rounds, and a small heap of pickled-onion shreds.

There’s also a wonderful leg (and thigh) of Muscovy duck ($10.95), given a bewitching, vaguely oriental treatment of star anise and Turkish dates, and a similar section of chicken ($9.95), herb-roasted, with goat cheese worked under the skin in place of butter. I wouldn’t have expected this substitution to succeed, mainly because goat cheese can be sharp and bossy, but under the spell of the heat, all the parts seemed to melt into a harmony.

Also ruled by the spirit of harmony (and even veganism!) was a plate of bruschetta ($5.95): toasts adorned with almost indecently ripe red tomatoes, basil, garlic, and olive oil. This venerable combination is about as Italian as Italian gets; it needs no improvement and can’t be improved upon. The mac and cheese ($3.95), on the other hand, could have used a tweak or two. It was served in what looked like a small paella pan, so we award a point there for presentation, but it was seriously undersalted and, even when brought up to salt snuff, didn’t distinguish itself. Given the renaissance in restaurant mac ‘n’ cheese in recent years, often involving the use of such premium cheeses as Gruyère, the Corner’s version was curiously disappointing.

The comfort-food redeemer turned out to be a cherry crumble ($5), made with seasonal sour cherries that had been judiciously handled: sweetened just enough to qualify them as a dessert, and baked just enough so they didn’t lose their shape or texture. The bits of pastry added crunch interest, with a softening pillow of whipped cream on top. The crumble was served in a vessel that resembled a coffee cup with no handle, and this turned out to be just the right size for sharing by two people: several ample bites each, and done. Beautiful.

Servers have a lot of ground to cover — up and down stairs, in and out doors — and they do it ably. Water glasses are reliably refilled, and plates come and go in a smooth rhythm. And how about a not-small glass of good tempranillo for $5? Even plonk costs more than that now at most places, while glasses of better wine often run near or over $10. I have been patiently awaiting a revolution on this matter; could the Corner’s $5 tempranillo be the shot heard ’round the city?

THE CORNER

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 4 p.m. midnight;

Fri.–Sat., 4 p.m.–1 a.m.

2199 Mission, SF

(415) 875-9258

www.thecornersf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Moss Room

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paulr@sfbg.com

The basement restaurant is an odd duck — odder still if the basement is in a museum in a relatively remote park. Yes, my 16-ton hints do pertain to the Moss Room, the venture orchestrated by Loretta Keller and Charles Phan that opened last fall in a subterranean sector of the new Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park.

A word, if I may, about that building, which faces its nemesis, the DeYoung Museum, across the concourse the way Minas Tirith faced Minas Morgul in The Lord of the Rings: one fair, the other sordid. The Academy of Sciences building is, for me, the far superior design because it subtly but unmistakably refers to its predecessor and because, with its expanses of glass and filaments of steel, it sits in its sylvan setting far more lightly. It does not imperially impose itself on its surroundings. Also, it has the Moss Room.

Strange to say, but the restaurants the Moss Room most resembles are both downtown, where the Academy should have been moved. One is Shanghai 1930, a similarly elegant basement, like a lavish bunker. The other is Bix, above ground but with underwaterish light and a bold staircase. At Bix, the staircase rises to a mezzanine; at the Moss Room, it descends from a cafeteria to the subterranean sanctum and adjoins a channel-like aquarium and a wall garden.

These design details suggest the restaurant’s commitment to sustainability, and as weary as sometimes one grows in using that word, it’s probably worth repeating with respect to a place that is inside a science museum in the middle of a large urban park. If any restaurant should be attentive to food’s ecological dimension, it should be the Moss Room. And it is, with the passion extending all the way to the wine list, which is organized under the rubrics "organic," "biodynamic," and "sustainable."

The Moss Room’s look doesn’t suggest its kinship to Keller’s other restaurants, Bizou and Coco500. The former was like the best restaurant in a quaint Provençal town, while the latter offers a slightly deracinated spareness meant to appeal to urban youth. The food, though, is another matter. Keller has long been a leading exponent of a cooking style I associate closely with Zuni Café: the cuisine of Italy and the south of France, fluffed and freshened. We could call this style "rustic" or "lusty," to use two clichés much favored in a certain cliché-choked competing venue — but let’s not. How about "lustic"? Or perhaps "lustique"?

Because the Moss Room, despite being below the water line, is a more elegant venue than either Bizou or Coco500 — a carpeted hush, dim lighting, high ceilings, the zen spectacle of drifting aquarium fish and herbs growing from the wall above them — there is a certain tension about the food. Should it be elegant or lustic? Can it be both? When you try to be both, you risk being neither.

The small plates reflect a certain restlessness. They range from a humble plate of hummus and pita bread ($10) — glistening like naan — embellished with roasted red-pepper and manouri cheese, to the more elaborate batter-fried squash blossoms ($9) zipped up with goat cheese, mint, and roasted-garlic aioli.

A bowl of corn chowder ($8) did strike me as quite Kelleresque. The corn came from Brentwood, and the chowder was made with chicken and shrimp stocks, along with bits of bacon for deeper flavor. Summer corn is famously sweet, of course, and shrimp stock can intensify this effect. So can under-salting. Luckily, fate provided us a small bowl of sea salt.

Equally Kelleresque was a bowl of squid-ink spaghetti ($12) tossed with a meaty mix of squid and sun-dried tomatoes sharpened with chili flakes and what the menu called "herbs." This dish was visually striking, with the zinfandel-colored strings of pasta looking like a clump of kelp, and its flavors glowed with a steady dark heat.

I caught a milder wave of the same effect with the local albacore ($26), a pair of seared chunks looking like roulades embedded on a textured carpet of roasted eggplant shreds and tomato quarters, with a pale green purée of summer squash piped around the perimeter. Albacore is wildly underrated and is worth searching out.

As for salmon: I like it but don’t love it, and when our server explained that the wild Alaskan version ($23) consisted not of a filet but of flaked flesh tossed with English-pea cavatelli and a north African blend of radish, mint, and preserved lemon, I silently cheered. Salmon can be overbearing and rich, but here the kitchen induced it to cooperate with its platemates.

Speaking of platemates: Greg’s cookie plate ($9) offers a petit-fours-like array of tiny treats. It’s ideal for sharing, and you get lots of bites with not much heft. For the heft-minded: a roasted-peach tart ($9), accompanied by a lump of crème fraîche custard and grainy peach sorbet. Close your eyes and think of the Stairmaster.

•<\!s>Le boo-boo: In a recent piece about Bistro St. Germain (July 22) I described Paris’ Faubourg St. Germain as being on the Right Bank of the Seine. Well, no, it’s actually on the Left Bank. *

THE MOSS ROOM

Mon.–Tues., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.;

Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

55 Music Concourse (in the California Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park), SF

(415) 876-6121

www.themossroom.com

Wine and beer

Not noisy

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Bistro St. Germain

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paulr@sfbg.com

Few neighborhoods in Paris are more full of cultural flavor than the Faubourg St.-Germain, the Right Bank district whose main thoroughfare, the Boulevard St. Germain, is the home of the Café Flore (the original!) and the Deux Magots. Picture Sartre thoughtfully smoking a clove cigarette, with a demitasse emptied of espresso sitting on the table in front of him.

Although the Faubourg St.-Germain is very near the Sorbonne, its bohemian life is mostly a relic. These days the area is expensively residential, and its shops and restaurants reflect this affluence. So when our own bistro impresario, Laurent Legendre, recently opened his latest venture on lower Haight Street under the name Bistro St. Germain, was he looking backward or forward, toward nostalgia or aspiration?

If the lower Haight can’t quite claim anyone of Sartre’s stature as part of its boho past, it can claim that it has kept something of a boho present. The neighborhood retains elements of true grit and is full of young people, and its restaurants still tend toward the cheap. But the area’s socioeconomic furniture has been rearranged in recent years, and since the opening of nearby RNM in 2002, the upmarket trend has been palpable. Last year saw the arrival, in the next block, of Uva, a sleek enoteca, and now there is a proper bistro.

Legendre isn’t the only propagator of neighborhood bistros in San Francisco — nearby L’Ardoise, for instance, was launched by Thierry Clement — but he is a force majeure. His previous undertaking, Le P’tit Laurent in Glen Park, is unusually authentic. Before that, he was a longtime principal in Clémentine (in the old Alain Rondelli space) and Bistro Clémentine, both in the inner Richmond.

I do find myself wondering how many traditional French bistros we need in this city, which, as it happens, is not Paris, home of the traditional French bistro. Are others wondering the same thing? The evidence, at least at Bistro St. Germain, suggests not. The place has the boxy spaciousness of a swimming pool or a pool hall, yet it fills up quickly with people and noise. (Sartre: "Hell is other people.") Are the crowds drawn by the tasty location, the huge wall mural (a silhouette of the Paris skyline, including such familiar spectacles as the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, and Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre), or the crisply executed, fairly priced food? The answer to this sort of trick question, or trick rhetorical question, is almost always, all of the above.

The food does not disappoint, certainly. From the arrival of the first basket of bread at the table, it’s clear that care is being taken in the kitchen. The bread is a simple sweet baguette, still warm from the oven, sliced and presented with a pat of softened butter. The addictive properties of warm bread have, I believe, been under-investigated. Your bread basket will be endlessly, cheerfully replenished, but try to save some slices for mop-up duty in the event you have mussels — and you should have mussels. At $9 for a sizable platter, they aren’t expensive and can be had in a number of sauces, among them a basquaise of white wine, tomato, and peppers. Hugely soppable. And don’t forget some frites ($3.50) — sublimely crisp — for some additional counterpoint.

The menu ranges gracefully across the French classics. There are snails ($6.25 for six), served on a dimpled earthenware plate and redolent of raw garlic. There is a roast poussin ($14), beautifully bronzed yet with moist white meat — a quiet miracle — and served with a large stack of frites. Duck confit ($16) is nicely done, with a crisp crust still faintly sizzling; it is set on a broad bed of lentils that are the proper gray-green color but are too big to be the traditional Puy variety. As lentil-cookers will likely agree, a large virtue of Puy lentils is their determined resistance to overcooking. They don’t easily turn to mush. The bigger sorts have to be handled more carefully, but Bistro St. Germain’s kitchen passes this test.

I found a bourride ($17) — a seafood stew, complete with aioli-smeared rounds of toasted bread — to be defined by the presence of what I took to be some form of cheeks, perhaps halibut cheeks. The rest of the players, including shrimp, mussels, and chunks of salmon, I could easily identify by shape, texture, and flavor. The suspected cheeks, however — rectangular tabs of flesh, thumb-sized — offered a strong, almost cheese-like flavor. Can fish be gamey? I offered tastes around the table as a cross-check, and the reactions returned were mild. Nonetheless, I hesitated for a bit before finishing the last piece.

Vegetarians can find French cooking a tough go, but Bistro St. Germain is accommodating. The meatless choices are explicitly identified and aren’t shabby — a shallow bowl of ravioli ($15), say, stuffed with squash purée and bathed in a mushroom cream sauce. Not quite legendary, perhaps, but pretty good.

BISTRO ST. GERMAIN

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

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sun., 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

518 Haight, SF

(415) 626-6262

Beer and wine

MC/V

Very noisy if busy

Wheelchair accessible

Flour + Water

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paulr@sfbg.com

In an era when the naming of restaurants resembles the naming of Japanese cars — the ideal being a single, elegant, mysterious word like "Incanto" or "Lexus" — it seems rather daring to give a new place such a defiantly plain, yet weirdly complex, name as Flour + Water. One suspects that the idea is to suggest simplicity and forthrightness, but a certain austerity is also implied — not to mention the ubiquitous ness of flour in this country. We eat way too much flour, too much of it white and refined. It silts up our insides. I do like the "+" for its distinctiveness.

As it happens, pizza crust consists largely of flour and water, and one of the bigger deals at Flour + Water (which opened by a pair of Davids, White and Steele, late in the spring on the ground floor of a big Victorian building in the innermost heart of the Mission District) is pizza. The pies are made in the Neapolitan style, which means a thin crust and a very hot oven. This style of pizza has become very, very popular in San Francisco in the past few years — a winsome development for those of us who suffered through a long Dark Age of foam-rubber crusts. Are Flour + Water’s crusts up to the high standard set by Pizzeria Delfina, Gialina, Pizzetta 211, and Piccino? That, Horatio, is the question.

The duet of flour and water also figures in pasta, but the routine here can be more complex, since if you replace the water with egg, you end up with noodles. Flour + Water’s — excellent — pastas are hand-rolled, just from semolina flour (the slightly yellowish stuff produced from durum wheat) and water, I would guess. The name we give to this combination, macaroni, faintly suggests that it came from a box on a supermarket shelf, but in fact Flour + Water’s pastas are not only brilliantly sauced but produced in unusual shapes with evocative names — "maltagliati," for instance, or "rags," a type of pasta made from leftover scraps. One evening I saw a plate of this arriving at the festive table next to ours, and it did look like a tiny pile of old clothes waiting to be stuffed into a Goodwill bag.

My own plate of pasta, already dispatched, had consisted of agnolotti ($16), a swarm of little ravioli-like pockets filled with seasoned minced pork and bathed in a sauce of butter, Parmesan cheese, and parsley. (Our well-schooled server said that the name meant "clouds," but I might have misunderstood her; "agnolotti" is also said to refer to the shape of priests’ hats.) The pasta itself had the slight, not-unpleasant toughness I associate with fresh macaroni; fresh noodle pasta is a bit more pliant and luxurious. It’s like the difference between wool and cashmere.

Given the apparent pedigree of the pizza operation (chef Thomas McNaughton’s kitchen has its own pizzaiolo, Jon Darsky), I was struck by the condition of the crust under a margherita pie ($12 for a decent-sized one). I am all for blistering, and the restaurant’s Web site boasts of an ultra-hot oven, but there is a difference between blistering and charring. Blistering good, charring bad. Charring makes an un-pretty spectacle and leaves an off taste — we are talking about burnt flour, after all — while research suggests that it’s bad for you. By the time we were done with the pie, the serving tray was littered with twisted little lumps of charcoal, like burned-out tanks on a miniature battlefield. The toppings were fine and included fior di latte (a mozzarella cheese made from cow’s rather than water-buffalo milk). The half-wilted basil leaves clearly had spent some time in the oven.

In a small irony, some of the restaurant’s best dishes have nothing to do with pizza, pasta, or flour. A trio of plump marinated sardines ($9) wore bikinis of roasted-pepper slivers — they looked like a chorus line in some musical about a beach — while a simple side dish of chickpeas ($5) turned out to feature fresh chickpeas. These have a wonderful spring-green color and a bit more juiciness than the reconstituted, beige kind. F+W’s lot was also enlivened by a fine dice of pancetta, carrot, and onion (a meaty twist on mirepoix) and broth, which we daintily sipped after the chickpeas were gone.

Best of all, Flour + Water’s brief dessert list includes an authentic star: a block of olive-oil-scented cornmeal cake ($8) topped with a globe of olive-oil ice cream — a dense, smooth reminder that olives are fruit — and flanked by split strawberries tossed with shreds of candied fennel. Fennel is a root, not a fruit, and candied or not, its looks are unprepossessing (like a frosted-glass lightbulb that’s shattered), but its licorice flavor takes well to sweetening and to a union with sweet-tart, ripe strawberries. Enchanting!

FLOUR + WATER

Dinner: 5:30 p.m.–midnight

2401 Harrison, SF

(415) 826-7000

www.flourandwater.com

Beer and wine

Pleasant noise

AE/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Aicha

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paulr@sfbg.com

The tagine is something of a unicorn in the kingdom of food. Many people will recognize the word as referring to a stew of Moroccan or other north African provenance, but it also refers to the pot in which the stew is cooked. And, though you may be an inveterate Moroccan-restaurant-goer, chances are you’ve never seen the tagine pot in its full glory. What typically reaches the table is just the lower half of the tagine — a kind of serving platter, probably of glazed ceramic, possibly hand-painted.

But the spectacular part of the tagine is the conical top, which looks like a space capsule or a hat from Beach Blanket Babylon. The top is aesthetically striking, but it also is a mechanism for moisture retention; like a still, it captures condensation and routes it back to the dish whence it came. The top has a knob at its peak that resists heat and so enables the cook to lift it up and see what’s going on in there.

I wish the removal of tagine tops would become a standard tableside flourish at Moroccan restaurants, the way lighting saganaki on fire is at Greek places. Tagine de-topping isn’t standard practice at Aicha, at least not yet, but I did thrill to the spectacle, deep in the open kitchen, of a bare-handed chef pulling off the top of a hand-painted ceramic tagine to inspect its contents. The tagine top looked very much like the one I have at home, and perhaps the tagine dish itself was the one that would soon be brought to me. More on this important matter anon.

Aicha opened late in the spring in a storefront space on Polk Street, in that transitional zone between the Civic Center and Russian Hill. The restaurant will definitely be seen as an upgrade to this emulsification-resistant neighborhood. Although it’s small, it’s handsomely appointed — a crisp, clean spareness with striking copper accents, and, of course, beautifully authentic tagines.

Authenticity is a central theme at Aicha. The restaurant will do its best "to preserve the authenticity of the cuisine," according to a statement on the Web site. This is never an easy undertaking in California, land of bravura salad-tossing, but so far the place is off to an impressive start. The food is modestly priced and not elaborate or precious, but it does offer an intensity of flavor many kitchens charging two or three times as much might envy.

There is great delight to be found not only among the appetizers, which cost between $3 and $6, but even in the more modest side dishes ($3 each) like the simple-sounding white beans. These are of the smaller, navy-bean size; are expertly cooked al dente (i.e. neither hard nor mushy); and are presented in a creamy, well-seasoned sauce whose glints of redness hint at the presence of paprika or some other extroverted but not bitingly hot red pepper. We do not eat enough beans and legumes in this country, perhaps because we associate them with poverty and the old country (whatever that country that might be), but maybe we would eat more if they were this good.

For just a dollar or three more, you can find yourself feasting on comparably gratifying appetizers. Blanched carrots ($4), are peeled, quartered, and tossed with chermoula, the distinctive north African spice paste that usually includes garlic, preserved lemon, and cumin, along with other herbs and spices. Like beans, carrots (one of the notably health-protecting orange foods) are neglected in our culinary culture and are often relegated to lowly duty in mirepoix or soup stock. But if you served these at a party, you would run out in five minutes.

Possibly even tastier, though not quite as finger-friendly, is taktouka ($4), a plateful of grilled red bell pepper squiggles tossed with some tomato, olive oil, and what the menu cryptically calls "spices." Cumin was in there, certainly, but grilled peppers have such a distinctive and alluring flavor that they don’t really need much else.

Somewhat less impressive — yet at the top of the appetizer price scale — was an artichoke salad ($6) consisting of pickled artichoke hearts, peppery green olives, crumblings of feta, and lots of immaculate romaine leaves. Lots. The romaine was too much with us and diluted the potency of other players.

It was thought that the b’stilla ($6), a pizzetta-sized round of phyllo stuffed with pistachio chicken and dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon, was a little too cinnamony. (Frasier‘s Dr. Niles Crane, complaining about a Café Nervosa cappuccino: "Can you believe the incompetence of that man? I very clearly asked for a whisper of cinnamon, and he’s given me a full-throated shout!") But a lamb tagine ($9) — tender shanks on the bone, surrounded by little green hills of peas and artichoke hearts — was all a heart could desire, even if the plate arrived topless.

AICHA

Daily, 11:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m.

1303 Polk, SF

(415) 345-9947

www.aichasf.com

Credit cards pending; call ahead and bring cash

Hard surfaces mean noise

Wheelchair accessible

Farallon

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paulr@sfbg.com

Since restaurants tend to age in dog years, a restaurant that reaches its 12th birthday — like Farallon — might be called venerable. It has survived its perilous youth to achieve, perhaps, the stability of middle age, and the good news is that while not all that many restaurants see their 12th birthday, the ones that do stand a reasonable chance of seeing quite a few more.

Mark Franz, who cooked at Stars while that glittering spot was still in the hands of founder Jeremiah Tower, has been the man at Farallon from the beginning — the man, at least, in the kitchen. The designer was Pat Kuleto, and the restaurant’s interior décor shows a definite kinship with other Kuleto projects from the mid-1990s; like Boulevard (1993), it is rich in fanciful lamps and light fixtures, and like Jardiniere (1997), it includes a conspicuous sweeping staircase.

But mostly there is the Captain Nemo effect, the sense of being in some magical grotto at the bottom of the sea. Many of the visual effects are not subtle: the huge faux scallop shell that forms part of the ceiling and the row of lamps like line-caught fish hanging in front of the exhibition kitchen are two that spring to mind. But Kuleto did not neglect the finer touches, even if it takes a bit longer to notice them. The tiled mosaics on the wall arches, for instance, are quietly spectacular in their byzantine colors and details. The mosaics have worn well. They lend an air of permanence and impressiveness, and they’re what you find yourself staring at long after you’ve stopped noticing the more outlandish stuff.

The menu describes the cooking as "coastal cuisine," an au courant designation for imaginative or contemporary seafood. The restaurant’s obvious peers are Aqua and Waterbar; it’s less monumental than the former and cozier than the latter, and because it’s just a few steps from Union Square, I wondered if we would find some pandering to tourists — some version of cioppino, say. I didn’t notice any such over-obviousness. The theme instead is one of discreet sophistication, cleverness that does not call attention to itself.

Sashimi of ahi tuna ($18), for example, is the kind of thing you could get at dozens of restaurants around town. But Farallon’s kitchen gave the glistening ruby tabs of flesh a sly Spanish twist, with an overlay of a boquerón (a white anchovy), a scattering of slivered almonds, and a nearby berm of ñora-chili purée, like an honor guard.

A buckwheat blini (part of a four-course, $65 prix fixe) was soaked — and I do mean soaked — in melted butter, then topped with alternating lengths of gravlax and sturgeon, themselves capped with crème fraîche and a brief hailstorm of salmon roe, like little pebbles of orange glass. The lesson here was butter, its delicate, singular richness. Accept no substitute, because there is none.

The combination of cantaloupe and prosciutto is friendly to the point of cliché, so a little inventiveness is welcome. Farallon’s summer melon salad (also part of the prix fixe) featured a core of cantaloupe dice wrapped in swaths of prosciutto and topped with what looked like simple shaved ice but turned out to be verbena granita. Since we intuitively associate color with flavor, it was startling to find so much punch packed into something that looked as if it had been reclaimed from a hotel ice bucket.

The menu does not beat you over the head with screeds about sustainability, and perhaps this restraint is wise, since seafood choices are so often fraught ones. I love arctic char — a milder, eco-friendly relation of salmon — and I very much liked the way it was handled here ($35): gently roasted, then finished in a cast-iron pot with some white wine and a succotash-like medley of corn kernels, summer squash dice, and cubes of Spanish chorizo. But: the fish had been taken in Icelandic waters, which are quite a few carbon footprints away.

Also carbon-footprinty, though delicious, was soft-shell crab, available as a starter ($18) on a bed of corn kernels, and as the third of the prix-fixe’s four courses, with Puy lentils (a bit overcooked, I thought) and basil-roasted tomatoes. In both cases the crab was fried "naked," which meant without being dipped in batter. Fried batter has its golden, crunchy charms, but it can be overbearing. When you are trying to enjoy crab — especially soft-shell crab, the essence of crab — the best crust is no crust.

Also, crustlessness shaves a few points from the calorie count, which leaves wiggle room for dessert: a warm (prix-fixe) brownie, say, with a pat of malted-milk-ball ice cream bisected by a chewy chocolate tuile, or, for the more restrained, an array of chocolate bites ($6), including a liqueur-filled truffle and two bites of a sublime milk chocolate-peanut butter pavé. Just the sort of thing the 12-year-old in each of us loves.

FARALLON

Dinner: Mon.-Thurs., 5:30-9:30 p.m.;

Fri.-Sat., 5:30-10 p.m.; Sun., 5-9:30 p.m.

450 Post, SF

(415) 956-6969

www.farallonrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Bar Bambino

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paulr@sfbg.com

Heresy is the true spice of life, and it was with this thought in mind that I sat one evening in Bar Bambino, a two-year-old wine bar in a most unlikely location — a heretical location? — and had a beer. The beer was a Moretti but also dark, a La Rossa. I’d never before seen Italian dark beer, either here or in Italy, and, truth be told, I didn’t know the Italians even brewed dark beer. The party of the second part, a beer skeptic, reached across the table to take a sip from the large, shapely goblet.

"Mmmm! That’s good!" was the verdict. "Chocolately."

The verdict, really, was unanimous and extended to Bar Bambino in its entirety. The restaurant sits on one of the bleaker stretches of 16th Street as it passes through the Mission District, and its narrow poker face is easy to miss. Once inside, though, you will feel as if you’ve stepped into an enchanted cave that includes a communal table (in the front window), a bar, a second communal table deeper in that can also be set aside for large parties, and, in the rear, a heated garden for a semi-al fresco experience.

Years ago, in the mid-1990s, we spent the better part of a Florentine afternoon lounging in a place called Cibrèo. Princess Di was said to be a habituée, and we could see why. Like Bar Bambino, it was off the beaten track and discreetly handsome, a place to sit and have a glass or two of wine and order a succession of plates of various sizes. It was my first in-country experience of polpette, the wonderful baby Italian meatballs that are typically served in a spicy tomato sauce.

Although Bar Bambino doesn’t look anything like Cibrèo (which sprawled like somebody drunk on a sofa), it does have a similar aura of relaxed but sustained festivity. It also has baby meatballs ($15); they come in a nice stack, with a potent tomato sauce and some shreds of chard, and they are very satisfying. Among other things, the polpette tell us that the kitchen takes its Italian cooking very seriously; the food is a lot like Delfina’s in this respect, though perhaps a bit more playful. You can get Italian-style "tater tots" ($5), nicely crisp on the outside and creamy on the inside, just like the ones you used to eat on a stick at the state fair.

The white-bean-and-tuna salad is an Italian classic. Here ($9.50) it’s made with slow-cooked spagna beans, which looked a lot like cannellini to me and tasted as if they’d been simmered in broth. The only other players were chunks of tuna, slivers of red onion, and a healthy splash of extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO, to the acronym-involved). The dish was very tasty but drab-looking at best, like uncooked brains. In Bar Bambino’s defense, I will say that I’ve had similarly dreary-looking versions in Italy — which is odd, since Italian culture manages to bring small flourishes of visual style to practically everything.

A plate of bruschetta ($11.50) topped Sicilian-style with stewed lamb leg, crumbled egg, parsley, and poor-man’s cheese, gets my vote as best bruschetta in the world. I’ve never had bad bruschetta, and I’ve had plenty of good ones, but this one, with its shards of profoundly tender meat, was unforgettable.

Among the pastas, the trofie ($13.50), sauced with cream and crumblings of mild sausage, attracted our attention. The pasta itself turned out to resemble hand-rolled cigarettes, vaguely tubular and tapered at the ends. It’s a Ligurian pasta and is notable for consisting only of flour and water — no egg. Its little rills and ridges caught the sauce nicely. This is the kind of simple Italian dish that leaves you wondering, How do they manage to do so much with so little? A dash of this, a touch of that, and a miracle.

Italian culinary miracle-working does not always extend to the dessert cart, but at Bar Bambino the charm lasts all the way to the end of the menu card (although there is no dessert cart). On the traditional side, we have the old Sicilian favorite, cannoli ($7), a trio of delicate pistachio pastry flutes filled with goat-milk cheese, ricotta, honey — the pistachio flavor dominates — and on the more playful end we find zepote di banana ($8), beignet-like banana fritters topped with melted Nutella sauce, which you pour out yourself from a little pitcher.

Will those around you be watching to see if you spill? Possibly. Bar Bambino’s snugness invites a certain degree of social espionage. On the other hand, the sophisticated look, including a long wall consisting of narrow wood planks and the wonderful chandelier made of wine bottles hanging over the front communal table, might help insulate you from over-overt scrutiny, which can help you enjoy your heresy, whatever it might be. *


BAR BAMBINO

Tues.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–midnight; Sun., 5–10 p.m.

2931 16th St., SF

(415) 701-8466

www.barbambino.com

Wine and beer

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Terzo

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paulr@sfbg.com

Fish might not need bicycles, but does a restaurant with an Italian name need pasta? Terzo does offer fish on its menu — and pasta too, though rather glancingly, considering that many of us would put pasta right at the center of Italian cuisine. But despite the name — "terzo" means "third" in Italian and is meant to suggest the public spaces where people gather when they’re not at home or work — Terzo isn’t quite an Italian restaurant. It’s both less (a minimum of pasta and pizza-like items) and more, in its use of flavors and influences from around the Mediterranean. A friend found that the restaurant, with its emphasis on small, shareable dishes, reminded him of SPQR, the Roman-style small-plates spot on Fillmore, but for me the deeper resonance was with SPQR’s predecessor, Chez Nous, whose tapas-style cooking drew on all sorts of Mediterranean roots.

It must be said that, similarities in food notwithstanding, Terzo doesn’t remotely look like either of those places. Behind a demure street face, the surprisingly spacious interior is a kind of warm metropolitan glam: caramel-colored wood, flickering candles, mirrors, and touches of glass; the look is like that of a monastery designed by Mies van der Rohe. The patrons, while casually dressed, have an air of importance about them — but then, we are in Cow Hollow, an enchanted land of importance. Sort of our Green Zone.

That Middle Eastern staple hummus ($8), then, to set the mood. Our server told us that chef Mark Gordon’s kitchen is particularly proud of its version, and so it should be. The chickpea puree was rich and smooth, with no hint of tahini bitterness, but it was the house-made pita triangles, warm and swabbed with olive oil and za’atar, that provided the burst of extraordinariness. Pita bread like this tells you that you’ve probably never had fresh pita bread before.

Subtle touches similarly raise many of the other small dishes to the heights. A marriage of crispy polenta and morel mushrooms ($14) was discreetly though powerfully enhanced by a splash of crème fraïche scented with thyme and braised green garlic. Baby artichokes ($9), halved and achingly tender, had been braised — evidently in or with lemon juice — before being heaped atop piquillo peppers, then covered with tumbled sheets of prosciutto. A panzarotto ($9), a kind of calzone, was filled with mozzarella, chard, and chili (whose bite was palpable), then napped with a radiant marinara sauce, but it was the bread pouch that caught my attention, with its serrated lips and faintly shiny crispness, like that of pastry. And a salad of shredded fennel and porcini ($12), although laid flat on the plate like a kind of unsettled carpaccio, jumped up impressively under the coaxing of lemon, olive oil, and truffle pecorino.

Spiedini ($12.50) were simple skewers of free-range chicken chunks, bread, and onion, brushed with a cilantro-chili marinade and then grilled until everything was soft and lightly caramelized. Campfire food, for rather boutique-y campers. The only small plate that didn’t quite come off for me was roasted asparagus ($9). The spears seemed very much al dente (how much roasting did they get?) and were scattered with toasted hazelnuts — a clever idea that did not work, since these hard hemispherical pellets made an already difficult-to-eat dish that much harder to eat: knife and fork for the asparagus, plus a spoon to scoop up the nuts. At some early point, we dropped the pretense and used our fingers.

We also used our fingers, greedily, on a huge bowl of fried-onion rings ($6). No ballpark I’ve ever been to offers anything better. The red-onion rings were dunked in buttermilk batter, then fried to a delicate, crisp gold; the shreds seemed almost to want to float.

"Don’t let me eat any more, I’m going to be sick," moaned an addicted party from across the table, who nonetheless kept right on eating.

As is so often the case at small plate-ish restaurants that also offer some big plates, the latter at Terzo do not shine quite as brightly. I wonder if this doesn’t have something to do with plentitude — delight diluted by too many bites. I did like the roasted halibut ($27), topped with a surprisingly gentle radish-lemon salsa verde and presented in a shallow bowl on a rubbly bed of chickpeas. The fish had the sublime moistness I associate with poaching, while the chickpeas were plump and perfectly cooked. I liked this dish fine, but I suspect I would have thought it was a knockout if it had been half the size.

The flourless chocolate cake ($8), with fleur de sel and whipped cream, would have been a knock-out at twice the size. It had the primal intensity of some ingredient lifted from a pastry chef’s secret cache. Entre nous: amazing.

TERZO

Dinner: Sun.-Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.;

Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11 p.m.

3011 Steiner, SF

(415) 441-3200

www.terzosf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Moderate noise

Wheelchair accessible

Fly on Sutter

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0

paulr@sfbg.com

Although Brick shuffled off this mortal coil toward the end of April, it did leave part of that coil behind, in the form of an impressive brick wall. That wall now belongs to the city’s second iteration of Fly and remains the dominant physical feature of the space, along with stretches of purple paint and hangings of wall art fashioned from bottle caps that glint in the changing light.

In good times and bad, the death of restaurants isn’t unusual. But what is noticeable in the current go-round is the spread of trusted brand names — Pizzeria Delfina, for instance (which opened a second outpost in the onetime ZAO noodle bar on California near Fillmore), Dosa, and now Fly, which for years has been a stalwart on Divisadero in the Western Addition.

The new Fly has a pool-hall feel and offers more natural light than its older sibling, while the Tendernob setting is more about real grit than the hipster faux kind. Even San Francisco, one of the most yuppified cities in America, still has its patches of dingy storefronts, ratty-looking apartment blocks, and populations of people with missing teeth. Stepping into Fly can feel a bit like stepping into an oasis, but one steps in with a distinct sense of ambivalence nonetheless. Prices aren’t particularly high and the setting isn’t at all posh, but it’s all still a world apart from the one on the other side of the large windows.

Apart from the name-giving brick wall, the chief legacy of Brick is the Brick burger ($9), a hefty lump of well-seasoned Angus beef, capped with melted white cheese and threads of pickled white onion, nestled in a soft, shapely bun, and served with either salad or fries. The fries are excellent, as is the burger. In fact I’ve never had a better one in these parts, and while the price isn’t low (Carl’s Jr. has made an entire ad campaign out of the exorbitance of the $6 burger), it’s not unreasonable either.

Otherwise, much of the menu resembles that of the original Fly. The food is friendly and non-narcissistic, the sort of stuff that supports and propels conversation rather than preening for attention and itself becoming a subject of conversation. We recognized a plate of hummus and tapenade ($6.75), served with warm pita triangles and some spare change of cucumber and tomato coins — just as satisfying as six years ago, and only 50¢ more. The kitchen also turns out a broad array of pizzas, some the regular kind, others covered Fly-style with salad.

This sort of all-in-one idea seems very American, but if you prefer your pizzas and salads to coexist rather than cohabit, your wish can be easily accommodated. We found the La Tortilla salad ($8) to be a jumble of mixed baby greens with corn kernels, black beans, tomato dice, shards of crisped tortillas, and a cilantro vinaigrette — it was as if a bowl of ordinary mésclun had collided with one of those Mexican salads served in a giant taco bowl. The vinaigrette didn’t quite appeal; it did taste like cilantro (whose flavor can dissipate rapidly once the leaves are cut), but it could have used a bit of counterpoint — some sweet or sour, or both — for fullness.

Considering that the pizzettas are showered with salad, the distribution of basil leaves atop a pizza margherita ($9) was notably continent. The other toppings (mozzarella, chopped tomato) were applied with equal restraint, which meant, for once, that the crust wasn’t merely a beast of burden but a worthy dimension of the whole in its own right. Fly’s crusts rise to the occasion by managing to be both thin and puffy at the same time.

The barbecue pork sandwich ($9) was just absolutely stuffed with dense, juicy meat and plenty of provolone. It reminded me of those meat-and-cheese Jack in the Box ads from a few years ago: no frills, just the good stuff, on a nice fresh baguette. And fish tacos ($8 for three) were very tasty and crunchy. Their only flaw had to do with their swaddling clothes, which consisted of flour rather than corn tortillas. Flour tortillas do have a silken softness their corn brethren can’t match, but they also raise an authenticity issue and aren’t as good for you. (Corn tortillas are made from masa, a whole-grain flour.) Most of us eat far too much wheat flour anyway, and too much of that is refined white flour.

The mood of the place is leisurely and undramatic, and it encourages drifters-in. Drifting is better than flying. Of course, what isn’t?

FLY ON SUTTER

Continuous service: Tues.-Sun., noon–2 a.m.;

Mon., 5 p.m.–2 a.m.

1085 Sutter, SF

(415) 441-4232

www.flybarandrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Potentially noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Contigo

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0

paulr@sfbg.com

For a small restaurant, Contigo is physically complex. As you enter, you glide along a six-seat food bar at the edge of a display kitchen, while beyond the host’s checkpoint opens a two-level dining room enclosed by white oak banquettes, like the remains of a Viking ship. (The wood was actually recovered from a Connecticut barn.) One sidewall consists of a bank of stainless-steel refrigerators, standing at attention like troops awaiting review; opposite is another bar — smaller, emphasizing wine, and partly recessed in the manner of a church nave. Beyond a wall of glass doors at the rear of the space is an enclosed garden, set with tables and space heaters and covered with a big sheet of clear plastic, since sunny Noe Valley can be surprisingly cold and windy.

Some years ago the city’s Board of Supervisors imposed a kind of restaurant cap on Noe Valley: new establishments could open only in spaces being vacated by departing restaurants. As far as I know, Contigo (the name means "with you") is the first endeavor to breach this line. It occupies what had been a computer store. The restaurant’s build-out has emphatically erased that past while honoring a green ethic, from the reuse of old siding as interior paneling to the deployment of glassware made from recycled wine bottles. To drive the point home, the paint scheme consists of green in several shades. I like green, but I like other colors too.

Apart from that small irritant, Contigo is as good-looking a new restaurant as I’ve visited in a long time. It manages to be modern, slick, and warm without growing sweaty from the effort, and it would probably look quite at home on a little street near the Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona’s Eixample. Chef/owner Bret Emerson’s Spanish-Catalán food would probably be a hit there, too, since the cooking honors both its traditional Iberian roots and our local ecological imperative; Cataluña, birthplace of Miró, Picasso, and Casals, has long been Spain’s most sophisticated and forward-thinking region.

The menu tilts toward smaller plates ("pica-pica") but also offers larger dishes and includes separate sections for hams and cheeses. (Spain’s air-cured hams, the most famous of which are serrano and ibérico, are worthy rivals to their more famous Italian cousin, prosciutto.) The smaller plates ($8 each, or $7 each for three or more) are divided among jardi (garden), mar (sea), and granja (farm) — or, roughly, vegetables, seafood, and meat. They could also be divided among the familiar, familiar with a twist, and unexpected.

Patatas bravas, for instance, could be the classic tapa, and Contigo’s version, finished with a peppery salsa brava and a big puff of aioli, is classic. But the potato quarters are wonderfully crusty, making them competitive with french fries and allaying the unease of persons (some of them known to me) who dislike soft, mushy, or mealy potatoes.

We did find the tacopi butter beans — big white beans, like cannellini — to be overcooked and a little floury. But the shallow bath they swam in, of erbette chard and sofrito (tomato-less here), was full of assuaging flavor.

Among the familiar we would also put albóndigas, the little meatballs — I have rarely seen a tapas menu without some version — but here they’re served in a shallow pool of ajo blanco, a white gazpacho made slightly grainy by the presence of pulverized almonds. And while croquetas (basically fritters) are a common dish and a clever way of using up leftover mashed potatoes, it’s not every day you find them filled with oxtail meat or plated with razor-like leaves of mizuna.

Among the most California-influenced small plates are a pulpo salad — braised squid tossed with shredded fennel, chopped black olives, and citrus segments that were supposed to be grapefruit but looked and tasted more like mandarin orange — and a pair of crostini-like toasts, each bread spear topped with a smear of avocado and a plump, juicy grilled sardine.

These little dishes are so good and so varied that the larger courses (called platillos, an odd use of the diminutive) seem almost beside the point. The most interesting ones are the cocas, Catalán-style flatbreads that resemble white (i.e. tomato-less) pizzas. And you probably won’t miss that tomato sauce when firepower consisting of artichoke hearts, green garlic, and arbequinas olives is mustered atop your pie ($13). Flavorful? Yes, and then some, with a subtle crust hinting of pastry. But also slightly salty even for my taste. Maybe a little acid, from tomatoes or some other source, wouldn’t be superfluous, or overcomplex, after all.

CONTIGO

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10 p.m.

1320 Castro, SF

(415) 285-0250

www.contigosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Two

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paulr@sfbg.com

When Hawthorne Lane became Two late in 2007, I quietly mourned. The original restaurant had been, from its opening in 1995, one of my very favorite places in the city — none better — and when you are sitting on top of the world, where is there to go but down? The idea of attracting a younger clientele made a certain steely-eyed business sense; nearby Bizou had become Coco500 largely for this reason, so there was precedent. But young people also tend to be noisier than their elders, and Hawthorne Lane had been that rare thing: a nicely muted setting that managed to be lively at the same time. And beautifully upholsterd.

In hindsight, owner David Gingrass’s complex decision to simplify and shrink his glorious establishment was as prescient as that of a broker who got out of stocks and into cash as the febrile Bush "boom" entered its terminal phase. The restaurant’s second dining room is still there, darkened like a sound stage awaiting some new production, and maybe better days will bring that new production. For the moment it’s a quiet shrine to memory. All the action, meanwhile, is in the front room, which is still dominated by the gigantic, copper-topped bar. The crowd does appear to be younger — not too, though! — while the décor now includes a gorgeous communal table whose glossy wood top appears to have been salvaged from an old whaling ship.

And, glory be, the food is as sublime as ever. Gingrass himself recently returned to the kitchen after a long hiatus, and he means to emphasize his longstanding interest in charcuterie and bread. (Those with elephant memories might recall that he personally sold housemade sausages from a booth at the Ferry Plaza farmers market in the mid-1990s when the market set up every Saturday morning in the middle of the as-yet unrestored Embarcadero.)

But Two also emphasizes value. Nowhere is this more evident than in the "5 for $5" menu, which is presented as kind of five-course tasting menu but doesn’t require you to order the whole thing. You can pick and choose. The menu changes every Tuesday and might include a soup, salad, small pizza, meat course, and dessert. I did find a salad of crimini mushroom carpaccio to be underpowered, despite the bolstering presence of shaved celery hearts, grana padano cheese (a close relation of Parmigiano Reggiano), and a lemon-white truffle vinaigrette. Perhaps the disappointment flowed from the mushrooms, which are basically glorified button mushrooms; or perhaps the salad was overwhelmed by one of shaved brussels sprouts ($9), heavily showered with pecorino cheese (sharper than the grana padano), dotted with marcona almonds, and dressed with a garlic-chili vinaigrette. The salad looked like a sculpture made from lawn clippings and was fabulously tangy.

Other than that mismatch, the $5 items held up sturdily. Roasted tomato soup, topped with a dab of Parmesan cream, was silken and hearty. A four-slice pizzetta topped with a shmear-like combination of of smoked salmon, dill crème fraîche, and chives delivered a strong, smoky bite. And roasted Peking duck arrived in chunks aboard radicchio cups, buffered by totsoi and finished with a glistening sour-sweet Seville orange chutney that beautifully matched the richness of the meat. It was also a near-reincarnation of what had been one of Hawthorne Lane’s signature dishes.

Roasted marrow bones ($9) probably don’t count as charcuterie, but, like sausage, they do suggest an imaginative frugality, a bent for extracting wonder from unassuming sources. Bones often end up in stock pots, but here a pair was marinated in garlic and thyme, roasted, then served in a shallow platter with a caramelized onion broth (basically French onion soup without its cheese beret) and a baby loaf of crusty country bread. The marrow itself, dug from the bones with demitasse spoons, turned out to be flavorfully geutf8ous, like beef jam suitable for spreading. If all cooking were like this — simple in origin and execution, spectacular in result — it would be a happier world.

Lamb is always a little fancy, but what would spring be without at least a taste? Two’s kitchen grilled a boneless loin and fanned the slices over toasted fregola pasta (pebbly, like Israeli couscous) tossed with braised spring onions, almonds, unidentified greens, and jus. The crunch of the pasta gave particular satisfaction, as did the rosiness of the meat.

The humble cupcake need not be humble. It can be filled with chocolate cream, like a truffle, or topped with peanut-butter frosting, for a real American experience. Five bucks gets you … two!

TWO

Dinner: Mon.– Thurs., 5:30–9 p.m.

Fri.-Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

22 Hawthorne, SF

(415) 777-9779

www.two-sf.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/JCB/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Nopalito

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0

paulr@sfbg.com

Nopalito might or might not offer "far and away the best Mexican food in the Bay Area," as a hyperbolic toot harvested locally and posted on the restaurant’s Web site contends — I say not — but the food is very good. The menu card, moreover, gives a brisk tutorial in the persistence of Indian language and culture in Mexico and is worth scanning just as an intellectual artifact. In a world of burritos and quesadillas, often made with flour tortillas, it is revelatory to read about such possibilities as caldo tlalpeño (the traditional chicken soup), pollo al pibil (as part of a panucho), and huitlacoche (in a mushroom quesadilla). The Maya and Mexica who lived a half-millennia ago might well find aspects of these dishes, or at least their names, familiar.

Or would, if they could get in. Nopalito, although fairly sizable, doesn’t take reservations, but it does allow you to phone yourself onto a waiting list and be phoned back when your table is imminently available. You will likely be given an estimate on the wait when you join the list, but this information is not of high reliability, and, like flying stand-by, you should be prepared to move fast to claim your place. The advantage to the restaurant, meanwhile, is clear: tables are not held, but filled immediately.

As the punny name suggests, Nopalito is an offshoot of nearby Nopa. "Nopalitos" are also shreds of prickly-pear cactus that often end up in morning eggs. Since Nopalito doesn’t serve breakfast, this potentially signature ingredient is honored by being largely if not entirely invisible. But because "nopalito" is a diminutive form of "nopal" — the westernized spelling of the Nahuatl word for the parent plant — we can extract a useful clue, which is that words ending in a vowel and "l," such as "pibil" and "tamal," are often Nahuatl in origin and suggest that the food so described is more Indian than European.

Mexico is sufficiently huge and various to make generalization a perilous undertaking, but one way to think of Mexican cooking is as a modest overlay of European influence — much of it involving pork — on a broad and deep base of Indian ingredients and techniques. "Pibil," for instance, refers to a Maya method of wrapping marinated meat in banana peels and stewing it underground with hot stones. I didn’t see the Nopaliteños tending any barbecue pits, but chicken cooked in some pibil fashion did find its way onto the panucho ($4), a crisped corn tortilla also topped with black beans, pickled onions, and a feisty salsa of habañero chilis.

Corn tortillas are subtle but pervasive, a reminder that corn — "tamal" is the Nahuatl word — was, along with beans and squash, a principal pillar of the Mesoamerican diet. We found a quesadilla made with a blue-corn tortilla ($8) and filled with mushrooms, cheese, epazote, salsa molcajete, and huitlacoche (the fungus that grows on corn and is sometimes compared with truffles) to be quietly effective. A bit more loudly effective was a tamal enchilado ($4), a tube of masa, like very thick polenta, imbued with ancho chili and cooked with stewed pork, queso fresco, and crema (the Mexican answer to crème fraîche).

The ultimate in stewed pork has to be the carnitas ($14), which are excellent by any standard. The cubes of meat were marinated in beer, orange, cinnamon, and bay leaf, sealed in a pouch of parchment paper, then slow-cooked to exquisite tenderness and flavorfulness. The accompaniments were appropriately simple: a salad of shredded cabbage, a few halves of pickled jalapeño pepper, and a small tub of tomatillo salsa.

On the other hand, there was carne asada a la plancha ($15): grass-fed skirt steak in a nocturnal, slightly smoky pasilla salsa. The salsa was wonderful, but the meat was quite tough, almost unchewable, especially in comparison to the carnitas. Of course grass-fed beef isn’t as tender as corn-fed, but a few, or few more, whacks with a tenderizing mallet might have helped here. Somewhere in between lay a half chicken in mole poblano ($13), the meat nicely moist and pliant and the mole sauce (of chocolate, chiles, cinnamon, nuts, and toasted sesame seeds) richly fruity without a hint of bitterness.

Despite an improbable location adjoining the new Falletti Foods in what is basically a small mall, Nopalito has a Missiony glow, from the mod shades of green throughout the interior to the youthful staff. There is also a communal table — not quite a private table, but a shared table is better than no table, as the prickly pears among us know.

NOPALITO

Daily, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

306 Broderick, SF

(415) 437-0303

www.nopalitosf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Waterbar

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0

paul@sfbg.com

Waterbar is, obviously, a seafood house, but it doesn’t shout this fact in your face. The building is handsome in a generic way, and the interior décor is notable mostly for its artful blend of bustle and hush. There is water to be seen — the bay, to be precise, viewable through gigantic plate-glass windows, although your eye is likely to be drawn upward to the Bay Bridge, which looks particularly massive when observed from almost directly below and does set the mind to hoping that all these seismic retrofits will do the trick.

Inside, there’s more water, held in two tall glass columns that are, in effect, aquariums. A curious effect of these watery columns is that they, like the bridge, carry one’s glance upward, to colorful fish swimming near the ceiling. The fish are glancing right back; are they marveling at their on-high view or wondering when their luck will run out?

Waterbar, which opened early in 2008, is the fraternal twin of next-door Epic Roasthouse, and it’s the kinder, gentler sibling. The tone of the place is a little less assertive, prices are more modest, and the maritime menu probably raises fewer ethical and environmental hackles than Epic’s meat-driven one — although not no hackles, since the tale of the world’s collapsed and collapsing fisheries now includes a chapter about our very own king salmon. I was surprised to find skatewing ($30) offered, since skate is a flat-out "avoid," according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch service. Since it’s typically brought in from the East Coast, it also casts a larger-than-ideal carbon shadow. On the other hand, it is fabulous: a fan of ribbed white flesh, pan-seared to a crisp gold, splashed with a (too-salty) morel consommé, and plated with gnocchi, morels, English peas, and a pair of braised scallions.

Chef Parker Ulrich is a protégé of Farallon’s Mark Franz, and the pedigree shows. Seafood cookery benefits inordinately from a bit of flair, and Ulrich brings that flair. Exhibit A: the skatewing, which, after hesitating, I asked for and enjoyed. Another major example would be the grilled local sardines ($13), a set of plump, whole fish, nicely charred and plated with a celestial bread-crumb salad, golden and crunchy yet fragrant with mint.

Whole fish, including petrale sole, actually make up an entire subset of the menu. But petrale, a local favorite, might also recur as filets at the heart of a three-course prix fixe ($40), preceded by a sprightly green salad with pickled onions and crumblings of goat cheese and followed by a slice of lemon pound cake (slightly dry, intensely lemony), garnished with a strawberry dice and a puff of whipped cream. The fish itself was expertly cooked had been minimally fiddled with, although I was disappointed to notice that the accompanying ensemble (peas, gnocchi, braised scallions) was virtually identical to the skatewing’s.

Soups can be both fancy and less so. In the former category: a sumptuous lobster bisque ($9), poured tableside from a porcelain chalice over a lump of lemon chantilly cream and a clutch of tarragon leaves, which drift in the resulting thick sea like a school of exclamation marks searching for their dots. (The pouring, incidentally, is done by a member of a service team that practically swarms at key moments. When you first sit down, there is only one server, smiling and asking about drinks, but when the food starts to emerge from the kitchen, it’s brought and presented by a cast of … well, several, if not thousands.)

On the plainer side we find a clam chowder ($9), made with topneck clams, ample chunks of bacon and potato, and plenty of cream. There’s nothing subtle about this dish; it’s like running your pile-driver of a fullback straight up the middle on third and two and picking up eight yards. It’s good, in the full, unvarnished sense of that word.

I sound a gentle cautionary note as to items (other than alcoholic drinks) that are served at room temperature or lower. Coins of braised octopus ($16) — not quite room temperature, not quite chilled — were a little rubbery, although tasty. And the bread in the tirelessly replenished basket was both tough and under flavored; perhaps that was why the accompaniments included not only butter but a small dish of sea salt.

Still, Waterbar is lovely and worthy, a place that, despite its deluxe location and big ownership names (Pat Kuleto, Jan Birnbaum), offers something like value. Not many view restaurants can make that claim.

WATERBAR

Dinner: 5:30-10 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.-Sun., 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.

399 The Embarcadero, SF

(415) 284-9922

www.waterbarsf.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

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