› paulr@sfbg.com
Whether euphemism is entirely a separate language or just a dialect, we need translational efforts to understand what is really being said in its slippery idiom. When foreign ministers tell the media they have enjoyed "frank and cordial discussions," we peek behind the fluttering veil of words to see that they bitterly argued and threatened each other. And when we read hosannas in the San Francisco Chronicle to the city’s burgeoning "service industry" — mentioned in that paper’s recent piece about our present and delightful "golden age" — we should understand that we are reading largely about the business of tourism. We might not yet be the Monaco of the Pacific Coast — a huge, gleaming apparatus whose principal function is to relieve visitors of their money; a bizarro ATM that sucks in cash rather than giving it out — but we are well on our way.
In this connection, we are blessed by the fact that tourists must eat and can be charged for the privilege. Restaurants are becoming our casinos. Not long ago, on a holiday weekend afternoon, I found myself swimming through seas of people in the basement of Westfield San Francisco Centre, the great new mall in the midst of the city. The basement is where many of the food establishments are, and I was en route to a rendezvous at the Out the Door, second offspring of the now world-famous Slanted Door. (The first OtD is in the Ferry Building, along with the mother ship.) If I had squinted slightly, I could easily have convinced myself that I was in the international terminal of some busy airport closed because of bad weather, leaving thousands of stranded travelers nothing better to do than shuffle through shops peddling chichi stuff and eat at fancified restaurants that seem more alike the more they struggle to seem different from one another. (Any casino in Las Vegas answers to this description, incidentally, and so do Honolulu’s Waikiki district and much of Palm Springs.)
As the name implies, Out the Door is set up to offer takeout, and the restaurant offers a small but appealing array of Southeast Asian grocery staples, such as cellophane packages of rice noodles and bottles of fish sauce, at reasonable prices. But there is also a huge dining room whose far wall — a checkerboard of flat glass rectangles in various shades of cream, beige, and brown — looks like a giant version of that sensor panel Mr. Spock was forever scanning on the old starship Enterprise. One difference: Spock’s panels blinked; Out the Door’s panels don’t. Maybe they will someday.
Befitting the restaurant’s pedigree, the food is prepared to a high standard, with immaculate ingredients, although the dishes themselves are modest in origin: a simple steamed bun ($3), say, the size of a baseball and stuffed with minced chicken, shiitake mushrooms, and surprisingly muted ginger. A bit more lively are the Vietnamese-style sandwiches on perfectly tender baguettes, among them a Saigon roast-pork number ($8) whose juicy, five spice–scented meat is enhanced with sprigs of cilantro, and a braised-meatball edition ($8), which includes coarse-ground pork of the sort you often see floating in bowls of pho.
Out the Door doesn’t call its beef noodle soup ($9.50) pho, incidentally, but that doesn’t dim its luster: it’s the one truly exceptional dish we came across, with a golden broth of almost espressolike density and smoothness. If, as a friend said, the measure of pho is the broth, then Out the Door’s pho measures up.
There are dressier, less street-carty choices available, among them grilled prawns over vermicelli ($10.50), elegant but a bit underpowered despite the strong presence of fresh mint, and barbecued pork spareribs ($10.50), beautifully tender under their honey-hoisin glaze. If these are higher-rent possibilities than sandwiches and steamed buns, they are nonetheless honest and sturdy. Still, the sense of being in ritz-land is pervasive. Bloomingdale’s bags everywhere. Diagnosis: affluenza.
Out the back door of Westfield and just a block or so along Mission Street is another mall, less heralded — the Mint Mall — and within its gritty confines a restaurant, New Filipinas, that is one of the very few Filipino restaurants in the city or indeed the metropolitan area. The setting has a run-down, 1970s look, poured concrete and ceramic tiles stained by time, and if you squint your eyes you might think you were at the foot of some faceless high-rise in Manila or Taipei. The restaurant itself is about as modest as it gets: a glass counter for ordering, a clutter of tables and chairs. The feeling is (as a mean birthday card once put it) "You’ve seen better days, but not many."
The food, prepared and served by chef-owner Tess Tuala-Diaz, has the unprepossessing look of an Army hash line: a steam-tray selection of chunked mystery meats stewing in various sauces of varying shades of brown. (A particularly chocolaty-looking tray held, we were told, pork in blood sauce.) There are adobos of pork and chicken, spare ribs, beef with broccoli, a beef and cabbage soup. For $4.90 you get your pick of one, plus a heap of white rice, while $6.50 buys you two picks, plus rice.
An advantage of bleak settings is that, if the food happens to be good, you will not be distracted from noticing it. And New Filipinas’ food is surprisingly good, its flavors deep and direct, its meats slow-cooked to a peak of moist tenderness. It is peasant food, adjusted to a greater fleshiness to reflect the biases and possibilities of this rich, flesh-addicted country. But vegetarians, I will speak frankly and cordially to you: Look elsewhere! Go east, to Westfield, even. *
OUT THE DOOR
Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.
845 Market, space 80, SF
(415) 541-9913
www.outthedoors.com
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
NEW FILIPINAS RESTAURANT
Mon.–Sat., 9 a.m.–7:30 p.m.
953 Mission, SF
(415) 571-5108
No alcohol
Cash only
Bearable noise level
Wheelchair accessible