Restaurants

Oh snap!

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CELEBRITY PHOTOGRAPHY Before "stalkerazzi" was a word, before the first images of the Brangelina twins fetched a reported $14 million, and before the Internet spawned sites like tmz.com (stuffed with candid pictures of famous-ish trainwrecks like Kim Kardashian and Shauna Sand), there was a way of life that involved not knowing intimate details of every celebrity who dared to leave his or her house. Movie stars had a certain air of mystery and inaccessibility. But in 2008, there’s no privacy anymore. We now know that stars are "just like us." As in, Reese Witherspoon eats fro-yo with a spoon — just like me! Amy Winehouse falls down when she’s drunk — just like me! Uh, anyway. Hollywood studios used to stage advantageous photo ops of, like, Rock Hudson out on a date with his wife. These days celebrities have no choice but to put their entire lives on film, particularly if they’re given to the kind of Britney Spears-ish behavior that can make the operator of a well-placed camera exceedingly well-paid.

All this makes Gary Lee Boas’ Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan (Dilettante Press) all the more charming and understated. Boas has been touted as an outsider artist — and, at least when the book was released in 1999, he was working as a professional paparazzo — but first and foremost, the man is a fan. Starstruck collects Boas’ treasured snapshots (the oldest taken by a teenage Boas in 1966, the collection runs to 1980) of luminaries he encountered on the street, outside movie and stage premieres, at restaurants, waving from the backseats of cars, entering talk-show studios, on film locations, and in other spots he staked out in search of famous quarry. The photos are of variable quality — some are blurred, some have their subjects partially obscured by passersby. Some are clearly taken on the fly — outside the Mike Douglas Show in 1978, Ida Lupino (flanked by a pair of nuns) squints into the sunshine and seems to be just noticing the eager, camera-wielding man to her right. A Godfather-young Diane Keaton beams at Boas (who must’ve been a pretty engaging snapper, considering most of his photos feature smiles) as she stands, hands clasped, on a New York City sidewalk.

Some of the pictures demand extended captions, as when Boas shares the story behind a much sought-after 1978 photo of the elusive Greta Garbo. But most are accompanied by brief notations of who, where, and when. Boas himself appears in a handful of photos, posing stiffly beside the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman. His expression in each is, appropriately, Starstruck — reflecting a time when mystery and glitter and not just-like-us-ness suited stars just fine.

We be clubbin’? Just barely

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

One night around 11 this spring, I stepped out of a cab at Sixth and Mission streets, only to enter a chaotic scene. Enhancing the block’s usual charms — destitute dudes in wheelchairs, crack enthusiasts, an old man in a denim skirt clutching a baguette — was a row of police cruisers parked in the street. Officers roamed the block, herding people around.

Had I stumbled onto a grim tragedy? Nope. I was just trying to catch a hip-hop show. Like the other 150 people waiting outside Club Six, I was hoping to get into KUSH, a party hosted by the Demolition Men. My chances seemed slim. I was on the guest list, but the list was "closed." So I stood in the long but well-behaved line. Security yelled at us to keep on the sidewalk, though the sidewalk ended well before the line did. Finally a guard bellowed at us to leave.

Half the line drifted away. The rest remained, texting friends inside the club and trying to devise a way in. Soon, with a combination of threats and cajolery, police and security began clearing the sidewalk around the club. A short, powerfully built man pleaded with stragglers, the way tough guys plead with you not to force them to kick your ass. Someone addressed him. He was Angel Cruz, Club Six’s owner, whom I’d interviewed for this story by phone. I introduced myself. He signaled a guard, and suddenly I was inside.

If this was New York City or Los Angeles, I might have felt the smugness engendered by such special treatment. But this was San Francisco, and all I felt was weariness. The club had devoted two rooms to the party, yet only one was full. Still, the vibe was friendly, and Jacka tore it up with his radio smash, "All Over Me." Although I heard some dudes got salty over the guest list, there were no arrests.

Sadly, such scenes are typical. Actually, we were lucky: I’ve seen cops shut down shows entirely over trifling incidents, usually ones occurring outside the club. This state of affairs affects more than the club-goers. Owners make less at the bar, promoters make less at the gate, and performers have fewer places to perform. Hip-hop, in its myriad forms, is one of the most popular genres on earth, and San Francisco is a world-class city. Yet this town seems hostile toward this musical nightlife with such revenue-generating potential. Why?

Naturally there’s no simple answer, and even investigating is difficult. Owners don’t want to alienate the police, promoters don’t want to alienate owners, and the San Francisco Entertainment Commission wants cooperation among all concerned. Few people I interviewed would name names or particular events, and some would only speak off the record, due to the delicate web of professional relationships involved. Even so, common issues emerge.

"Hip-hop is synonymous with fights and shootings, to authority figures," said Desi Danganan, whose Poleng Lounge is one of the few venues committed to the music. "The police are very hesitant about any club that plays hip-hop. That was one of the first things that came up, ‘Are you playing hip-hop?’<0x2009>"

The association between hip-hop and violence is nothing new: violence is the theme of many raps. Yet this is hardly the case with all hip-hop. The Bay Area in particular has produced an abundance of progressive, nonviolent lyricists, from veterans Hieroglyphics to up-and-comer Trackademicks. Yet the distinction is lost on the city and the police, according to Fat City general manager Hiroshi Naruta. "They don’t know the difference between hyphy and backpacker," he said.

Unlike the Panhandle-based Polang, Fat City is in the SoMa District, a longtime site of contention between police and clubs. As a result, the venue is shying away from booking hip-hop. "I want to," Naruta said. "But I don’t want pressure from the city or SFPD."

"Pressure," of course, is a nebulous concept and hard to substantiate, but according to John Wood, political director of the SF Late Night Coalition, there are typical tactics. "If the police feel your venue is creating a nuisance, they show up every night, check your permits, walking into your venue, upsetting your customers," he said. "They do frequent inspections with the fire department and the building department, and get you for every little violation. Short of suspending permits and filing lawsuits, there’s lots of ways city bureaucracy can make it difficult to do business."

But just how much of a "nuisance" do hip-hop shows create? Are they really that violent? No more than other genres, according to Robert Kowal, whose Sunset Promotions has brought everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Jurassic 5 to SF. "The city has safety as its primary concern," he acknowledged. "Occasionally some shows have problems the police have to deal with. Almost without exception that label gets thrown at hip-hop, when most events, including hip-hop, are very cool."

"Right now there’s a gun problem in SF," Kowal continued. "Instead of addressing that, the city wants to blame entertainment and specifically hip-hop. But violence is rare inside the venue itself."

Wood concurred with this assessment. "There have been incidents where there were shootings," he said, "not in the clubs, but a block away, that may have possibly involved people who were at the club. Frequently police will blame the club for incidents in the neighborhood."

An SFPD spokesman, Sgt. Steven Mannina, wouldn’t respond to this contention. It’s worth noting that much of SoMa can get rough, even during the day. To the contrary, Kowal believes venues like Club Six have improved the tone of the neighborhood: "Angel Cruz deserves a lot of credit. That Club Six is open four nights a week has enabled other bars and restaurants to open around it. That area has been somewhat revitalized."

Wood suggests an influx of new neighbors may, in fact, be the main issue. "The city’s changing," he explained. "It’s older demographically, wealthier, more harried, and professional. Aside from hip-hop and violence, people are less tolerant about noise young people create." Yet that lack of tolerance among the condo crowd may also be rooted in fear. "Neighbors sometimes freak out when a club is bringing large groups of minorities into the neighborhood," Wood added, "whether they’re behaving or not."

That assessment was echoed, mostly off the record, by many I interviewed. But veteran hip-hop commentator Davey D didn’t pull punches. "They just don’t want black people there," he said. "For a city that prides itself on being progressive, when it comes to nightlife, it has the most reactionary policies that seem based around race, using words like ‘urban’ as cover."

Regardless of hip-hop’s alleged role in violence, this spring the city attempted to deal with the issue via two pieces of legislation: one required a hefty $400 permit per show, and the other was an anti-loitering law, empowering police to clear the area around a club. Both proposals were bad ideas: the former threatened to stifle local entertainment, and in an era of eroding civil liberties, the latter promised to give police discretion to arrest people just for being in the club’s vicinity. Even more disturbing is Sgt. Mannina’s assertion in April that "this is an enforcement strategy around clubs that field operations have already launched." How can this be, if it was not yet a law? "I thought it was already in place," he said.

Clearly the police act as though it is, given what I witnessed outside Club Six. In the meantime, it’s tough to understand why SF hip-hop fans must, for instance, travel to Petaluma to see local acts like Andre Nickatina. "You want to know the solution?" a club owner asked, off the record and out of frustration. "There is no solution."

SFPUC shuffle

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is arguably the city’s most important commission. It provides water to 1.6 million customers in three Bay Area counties and handles sewage treatment and municipal power for San Francisco. But right now, it lacks a governing body.

Until recently there were no minimum job requirements for its five commissioners, who are all appointees. The only way the Board of Supervisors could block the mayor’s picks for these all-important posts was through a two-thirds vote (that requires eight supervisors) made within 30 days of the selection.

That changed June 3 when voters approved Proposition E. The board placed this legislation on the ballot in response to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s "without cause" firing of SFPUC former General Manager Susan Leal last year, and his reappointment this spring of Commissioner Dick Sklar, a former SFPUC general manager whose anti–public power tirades and rudeness to SFPUC staff was at odds with the goals and values of the board’s majority.

Prop. E’s passage required that the current SFPUC be disbanded by Aug. 1, set minimum qualifications for future nominees, and stipulated that new commissioners cannot take office until at least six supervisors confirm the mayor’s picks.

Newsom responded by renominating Sklar, along with two other incumbents—former PUC President Ann Moller Caen, and F.X. Crowley, who works for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

Newsom also nominated two newcomers — Nora Vargas, executive director of the Latino Affairs Forum, a statewide nonprofit advocacy group, and Jell-O heiress Francesca Vietor, director of the city’s Department of the Environment from 1999 to 2001.

Kicked to the curb in this preliminary shuffle was David Hochschild, a solar advocate who steered the SFPUC away from building peaker plants and toward retrofitting the aging Mirant power plant. Also ousted was E. Dennis Normandy, whom Mayor Frank Jordan appointed in 1994.

On July 29, the board unanimously approved Caen and Crowley, and seemed inclined to favor Vietor, though she has yet to appear before them to answer questions.

But they rejected Vargas after Sups. Tom Ammiano, Chris Daly, and Bevan Dufty expressed misgivings about her lack of experience with local politics and the SFPUC, not to mention concerns about the $150,000 worth of community grants PG&E gave to Vargas’ Latino Issues Forum between 2004 and 2006.

And Sklar withdrew his nomination before the board could vote on it, apparently aware that the seven votes against his nomination last time meant he was destined to fall short of the new requirement.

These initial changes have led Leal to believe that Prop. E is already having the desired effect. "The rules before meant that the supervisors had 30 days to come up with eight votes, and that’s a very tough thing to do," Leal told the Guardian. "The fact that Dick Sklar had to get six votes, when he barely got four votes in February, is why he withdrew his name. And if you look at the way the supervisors handled the process last time around, this time they seem more vested in it."

Newsom has not yet forwarded any more picks to the Board, so the makeup of the body that will govern the SFPUC until August 2012 is still undecided. But it’s likely that the first matter of business for the new SFPUC will be responding to board recommendations that are sure to flow from an August hearing into CH2M Hill’s study on the feasibility of retrofitting Mirant’s Potrero units 4, 5, and 6.

Leal believes the retrofit plan is "sketchy at best."

"I think that trying to retrofit a 1973 plant is like one former PUC commissioner thinking you can repair the 50-year-old digesters out at the southeast wastewater treatment plant," Leal told the Guardian, referring to Sklar’s equally unpopular attempt to block a costly but necessary rebuild of the SFPUC’s sewage digesters.

"To me, this is Mirant and PG&E still deciding whether there will be something polluting in the air," Leal added.

On July 22, at its last meeting before being disbanded, the Sklar-led SFPUC voted to rescind its former plan to build a new peaker power plant in the city’s southeast sector, and to instead pursue the Mirant retrofit.

Sup. Bevan Dufty notes that a retrofit of this kind "hasn’t been done anywhere else in the world." Board President Aaron Peskin observes that, "unlike the peaker plan, which was subjected to thousands of pages of analysis, the retrofit plan was cooked up behind closed doors with no public hearings."

Noting that Mirant only needs a building permit to keep operating at the site, Peskin says that is why he joined Sups. Sophie Maxwell, Jake McGoldrick, and Dufty in introducing legislation to require conditional use permits of future power plants.

"ATM machines, bakeries, and restaurants need conditional uses, so why not power plants?" Peskin said.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi believes the peakers and retrofit are competing as the lesser of two evils, which is one reason why he and Ammiano wrote the fall ballot measure called the Clean Energy Act, which would create ambitious goals for renewable power. Mirkarimi told us, "There needs to be a robust campaign for a third plan that combines a transmission-only mandate and a strong renewable energy mechanism that compensates for the Mirant shutdown."

Orson

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ORSON

Dinner: Mon., 6–10 p.m.

Tues.–Sat., 6 p.m.–midnight

508 Fourth St., SF

(415) 777-1508

www.orsonsf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Fairly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Home field advantage

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little wonder they looked at you sideways and left.

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

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

Which … I think I could use me some.

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

TAQUERIA GUADALAJARA

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

3146 24th St., SF

(415) 642-4892

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Tres Agaves

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRES AGAVES

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

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

130 Townsend, SF

(415) 227-0500

www.tresagaves.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Millennium

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MILLENNIUM

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

580 Geary (in the Hotel California), SF

(415) 345-3900

www.millenniumrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Jardiniere

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JARDINIÈRE

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

300 Grove, SF

(415) 861-5555

www.jardiniere.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Well-muted noise, especially upstairs

Wheelchair accessible

Yum! Local food party!

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Munchies from Chez Panisse, Millenium, and Serpentine. Cubes of jack and cheddar from Spring Hill Cheese Company. Maybe a glass of sangiovese from Long Meadow Ranch or a rose from Berkeley’s Donkey and Goat winery. Cap it off with a slice of Mission Pie and scoops from Bi-Rite Creamery.

Damn. It would take all day to scoot around sampling all that, but they’ll be serving up together on Thursday down at Fort Mason, celebrating the annual release of the Bay Area Local Food Guide.

Coordinated by Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), the food guide is the primer of all things locally grown, grilled, and garnished. Listings include farms, wineries, markets, restaurants, caterers, bakers, and food artisans, and the implicit mission is to make more people travel less for sustenance.

CAFF’s raison d’etre is to link the people who grow the food with the people who cook it, sell it, and enjoy it. Skyrocketing food and fuel prices make the ideal of “buying local” even more of an imperative, so if you’ve been searching for the perfect CSA to deliver you a box of fresh veggies every week, or you’ve been meaning to somehow get more locally-grown food into your business’ bottom line…or you just like to eat lots of good food with fun people, maybe I’ll see you there.

The event is happening Thursday, June 26 from 4:30 to 8:30 pm.

Tickets are $30 and going fast at: www.BrownPaperTickets.com/event/34995

Check here for more details, a schedule of events, and a full list of foodies and drinkers.

Have another Soju

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Drinking with Hong Sang-soo is an intense experience. Supremely awkward conversations transpire over tables littered with empty soju bottles. The primary topic is sex — and the details quickly get personal. It’s exactly like a scene from one of his films. Or so it seemed during a group dinner honoring Hong at last year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Drinks vanished. Secrets were told. And all present tried to forget about it by the next day.

Scenes of clumsy inebriation are the essence of Hong’s cinema, and 2006’s Woman on the Beach is no exception. Over the course of seven movies (excluding the new Night and Day), Hong has repeatedly examined the complicated romantic entanglements of heterosexual Koreans. His scenes often take place in restaurants or domestic parlors, as people sit, drink, talk, and ultimately either seduce or reject each other during extremely long takes. Reportedly, Hong gets his actors drunk before shooting these scenes.

Invariably, Hong’s films focus on a male protagonist trying to bed a woman. These men are always artists; frequently they are film directors. In these respects, Woman on the Beach is quintessential Hong. It also revives his focus on troubled Seoul-dwellers who leave the city for peace of mind. But there’s an essential shift in emphasis: the woman in the story ends up as complex a creation as the men. A female musician pursued by a film director and his set designer, she’s no virgin stripped bare by her bachelors.

Woman on the Beach isn’t as formally rigorous as Hong’s previous films, and it spells out matters that might have been implicit in an earlier work. But this should only matter to hardcore Hong-heads. The biting observations remain, and they’ve never been funnier.

The woman at the center of Woman on the Beach says she "[doesn’t] respect Korean men too much." Hong’s male characters are indeed selfish, unreliable drunks. But they’re bastards with charm.

WOMAN ON THE BEACH

Opens Fri/20 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

www.sffs.org

To surcharge, without love

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OPINION With the first linen pants of 2008, this city commenced collecting employer contributions to the Healthy San Francisco universal health care program. Employers that don’t provide insurance now must pay the city for the public health care their employees use anyway. A number of restaurants have added "Healthy San Francisco" surcharges of 2 to 4 percent to diners’ tabs. These surcharges are at best sour grapes and at worst a diabolical plan to thwart democracy.

Present spite notwithstanding, I spend all my discretionary income on dining. My economic stimulus check stimulated some duck confit and tarte tatin. I’d trade a kidney for dinner at Coi. My disaster preparedness kit includes a Zagat Guide. The stokers of my culinary flame deserve to be treated well. Our restaurant scene should attract the best, the brightest, the most ingenuously-tattooed epicureans. The people of San Francisco deigned to achieve this noble goal by providing a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave, and now universal health care. Oh, the decadence! We’re drifting dangerously close to becoming a civilized society, which could get us invaded. Don’t be surprised when Blackwater goes hunting for Tom Ammiano in a spider-hole.

Some disgruntled restaurants have decided to assess a surcharge rather than raise prices. But all prices fluctuate. When the cost of electricity or halibut goes up, menu prices rise. Regulation affects cost. We knew that when we passed the laws. A surcharge instead of a menu price increase is restaurant owners’ way of saying that workers are less valuable than halibut.

Let them have health care. I enjoy clogging my own arteries so much more when the people feeding me get their cholesterol checked.

Owners claim their profit margin can’t absorb higher labor costs, hence the price hike. Restaurants have high failure rates and run a tight margin.

But raising prices wouldn’t be Armageddon for fine dining in Baghdad by the Bay. Heck, it’s not even Shock and Awe. Maybe I’d notice if Bar Tartine raised prices by 4 percent. Maybe I’d be annoyed. But if my $60 meal became $62, I wouldn’t head to a taqueria. The amount surchargers would have to jack prices before surchargees stay home is quite high. Most of us eating at Bar Tartine can suck it up like so many amuses bouches.

San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer is wont to blame every restaurant closure on our labor largesse. But restaurants fail for any number of reasons. Could be labor costs, or it could be that Bauer panned them, or that their concept, food, and location were bad, or that the manager was on coke.

Some restaurateurs can’t abide the people of San Francisco reguutf8g them. But that’s life in a democracy. The same people excusing the surcharge as mere kindly consciousness-raising are currently appealing the Healthy San Francisco law. In fact, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association opposes any improvement in labor standards. The folks there hope that diners, our fury stoked by surcharges, will finally rebel against our labor-loving local legislators, stop imposing our so-called values on restaurants, and demand to be served by disease-ridden, malnourished indigent waiters as God and Milton Friedman intended.

Instead of an irascible surcharge, menus could note: "Our food is organic, local, and sustainable. And the cook gets his asthma treated." People who care will be happy, and people who don’t will blithely resume checking the NASDAQ on their iPhones.

So quit grousing. Enjoy the short ribs. See your doctor. Everybody wins. *

Nato Green is a San Francisco-based comedian who has meddled with the primal forces of nature and must atone.

A heart once nourished

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Community court, every second Thursday at 10 a.m. Narcotics Anonymous on Wednesday. Apprenticeships for construction workers, Monday, bright and early.

The ancient letter board just inside the entrance of the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center tells much of the story of this neighborhood institution. Since 1981 it’s been a crucial hub for the Western Addition, a mostly level stretch of terrain west of downtown that rivals the Mission District and Bayview–Hunters Point as the source of the most despair from senseless gun violence.

For decades Ella Hill was a safe haven, a place where kids and seniors felt comfortable, where people could learn and teach and talk and work together, a little oasis in the world of urban hurt.

A placard affixed to one wall of the entryway honors Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first African American US Supreme Court justice. In a small office nearby, a tutor assists a young girl with the multiplication table. Elsewhere, a list of rules forbids profanity, play-fighting, and put-downs.

There’s also a poster of Ella Hill Hutch, the first black woman elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, where she served from 1978-81.

But in 2006, a man was murdered during daylight hours in the center’s gymnasium before dozens of witnesses. That slaying was one of at least five brutal incidents that took place in the shadow of Ella Hill between 2006 and 2007; three more murders occurred within blocks. Many remain open cases today.

And now the center is having serious problems — troubles that reflect those of the city’s African American population, which has been plagued by violence and socioeconomic changes that are closing opportunities and forcing longtime residents out the city.

Several census tracts in the neighborhood that at one time contained between 3,000 and 6,000 black residents are down to 1,000 or far less, according to a San Francisco State University study commissioned by the city last year. The report showed that between 1995 and 2000 San Francisco lost more of its black population than 18 other major US cities.

Ironically, the city is now preparing to close the final dark chapter on 50 years of federally subsidized redevelopment in the Western Addition. But the displacement that the bulldozers set off half a century ago continues today, unabated.

That exodus has compounded structural problems at the center just when its remaining clients need it most. The nonprofit late last year underwent an organizational shake up and brief takeover by the Mayor’s Office to save it from imminent financial collapse. The center’s executive director of two years, George Smith III, was fired with little public explanation last year, and a permanent head was named only recently.

As with many aspects of this troubled community, it was unaddressed violence that fed the fire. Simply subsisting in the heart of a violent neighborhood was strain enough for Ella Hill. But suffering an attack from within seemed too much to bear for an institution some call "San Francisco’s Black City Hall."

The 2006 killing took one man’s life, but Ella Hill itself — still facing an uncertain financial future — felt the searing rounds too. Now some wonder if the nonprofit can survive the very violence and poverty it was created to help end in a neighborhood that’s changing forever.

In Ella Hill’s noisy gymnasium at the building’s east end, two teams of middle schoolers practice basketball.

"My job is to be in the best position to box him out for a rebound," their coach says as they crowd around the free throw line.

The kids are radiant and attentive now. But from this same basketball court on April 27, 2006, the Western Addition briefly edged ahead of the rest of the city in extreme bloodshed.

Donte White, 22, was working part-time at the center. As he supervised a basketball game, two unidentified males entered Ella Hill. One brandished a firearm and shot White at least eight times in the face, neck, and chest as several kids looked on in utter horror. Among them was White’s young daughter.

Police arrested 25-year-old Esau Ferdinand for the attack five months after White’s murder. But within two weeks prosecutors decided they could no longer hold him and declined to press charges when a key witness disappeared on the eve of grand jury proceedings.

Even with other witnesses filling the gym, police gathered few additional leads, an all-too-common story in a neighborhood where residents often prefer to avoid both law enforcement and vengeful criminal suspects.

The center installed cameras and an alarm. A buzzer was placed on the front door. But the new security measures cut against Ella Hill’s image as a demilitarized zone, and the center remains shaken by White’s murder. Some parents began barring their children from going there.

"Can you imagine something like that, someone coming into a rec center in the middle of the day with a firearm and shooting and killing a guy?" asks Deven Richardson, who resigned from Ella Hill’s board in 2007 to focus on his real estate business. "That really set us back big time in terms of morale. It really was a dark moment for the center."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes Ella Hill, says that after he took office in 2004, he learned that the police weren’t stationed at the center during prime hours and had never created a strategy for attaching themselves to the center the way they had at other safe-haven institutions in the city, like schools. He told us he’s had to "really work" to get the nearby Northern Station more integrated into Ella Hill.

"Before the murder of Donte White, there had also been a series of incidences inside Ella Hill Hutch," Mirkarimi said over drinks at a Hayes Valley bar. "Nothing that resulted in anybody getting killed, but certainly enough indicators that really should have been taken more seriously by the mayor."

In June 2006, shortly after White’s shooting, the San Francisco Police Commission and the Board of Supervisors held a tense public meeting at the center. Residents, enraged over the wave of violence that summer in the Western Addition, shouted down public officials, including Chief Heather Fong, who was forced to cut short a presentation on the city’s crime rate.

That same month, the supervisors put a measure on the ballot to allocate $30 million over three years for violence-prevention efforts like ex-offender services and witness relocation. But Mayor Gavin Newsom, following a policy of fortifying law enforcement over community-based alternatives, opposed the measure because it excluded the police department. Prop. A, designed to finance groups like Ella Hill with connections to the neighborhood that the police will never have, lost by less than a single percentage point.

Meanwhile, four homicides in the neighborhood that year joined frequent anarchic shootouts in the Western Addition, including many that never made headlines because no one was killed. The fatalities led to promises by City Hall that the area would be saturated with improved security, including additional security cameras that have mostly proved useless in helping the police solve violent crimes.

On June 3, 2006, 19-year-old Antoine Green was standing on McAllister Street near Ella Hill early in the morning when he was shot to death in the head and back. On Aug. 16, 38-year-old Johnny Jackson’s chest was filled with bullets as he sat in the front seat of a Honda Passport on Turk Street not far behind Ella Hill. A woman next to him in the car suffered a critical gunshot wound to the head.

Two more killings occurred further east at Larch Way, a popular location for murder in the neighborhood.

Burnett "Booski" Raven, a 32-year-old alleged member of the Eddy Rock street gang, was found bleeding at 618 Larch Way early Oct. 7, his body laying halfway in the street and containing at least 10 gunshot wounds. On July 22, police found 23-year-old John Brown, another purported Eddy Rock member, wedged under a Chevy pickup truck, dead from up to seven gunshots.

Brown had reportedly survived two prior shootings, but the Western Addition’s cultural condemnation of "snitching" to police has so infected the neighborhood that he allegedly told police not to bother investigating either of the attacks.

Loïc Wacquant, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says neighborhoods like the Western Addition that once contained stable black institutions — schools, churches, and community centers that glued residents together — have been overwhelmed by the rise of a white-collar, service-based economy, the decline of unions, and the withdrawal of meaningful social safety nets.

Cities have responded to the resulting marginalization with more police officers, more courts, and more prisons. But the failure of those institutions to cure rising violence "serves as the justification for [their] continued expansion," Wacquant quoted Michel Foucault, the famous late UC Berkeley sociologist, in the academic journal Thesis Eleven earlier this year.

The roots of the Western Addition’s tragedy go back to the early post-World War II era. In 1949, Congress enacted laws giving cities extraordinary powers to clear out land defined as "blighted." In San Francisco, that meant neighborhoods where low income people of color lived.

The Western Addition was devastated. Huge blocks of houses were bulldozed. Clubs, stores, restaurants — the heart of the black neighborhood — were wiped out. Many residents were forced out of the neighborhood and sometimes the city forever; others lost their property and their livelihoods (see "A half-century of lies," 3/21/2007).

By the 1970s, neighborhood activists were hoping that at the very least the Redevelopment Agency would pay for a recreation facility for kids. But city officials wouldn’t put up the money, recalls the Rev. Arnold Townsend, a longtime political fixture in the city and associate pastor of the Rhema Word Christian Fellowship.

Townsend said activist Mary Rogers — whom he calls "the greatest champion kids ever had in this community" and a famous critic of redevelopment — gave up on City Hall and went to Washington DC, where she sat in at a meeting that happened to include Patricia Harris, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Jimmy Carter. Rogers, joined by a group of colleagues from San Francisco, bumped into Harris afterward.

"[Harris] shook Mary’s hand like politicians do, and Mary wouldn’t let her hand go until she had a meeting," Townsend said. "They were having a tug-of-war over her hand."

Rogers’ determination paid off, and enough political channels opened up that money for the center became available. Then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein cut the ribbon for the $2.3 million Ella Hill Hutch Community Center four months after the supervisor’s death, complete with outdoor seating for seniors, a gymnasium, tennis courts, and child-care facilities.

A young counselor named Leonard "Lefty" Gordon who worked at the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, one of the city’s oldest black institutions — it was founded in 1919 on Presidio Avenue, where it remains today — was named executive director of Ella Hill three years later and led the center to wide acclaim for 17 years.

A recreation coordinator at Ella Hill started a reading program for young athletes after discovering that a local high school football star wasn’t aware he’d been named the city’s player of the year: the teenaged boy couldn’t read the newspaper to find out. Other programs for tutoring and job training targeting young and old residents were likewise started under Gordon.

Many of the people we interviewed recalled the "kitchen cabinet" meetings convened by Lefty Gordon at Ella Hill as among their fondest memories. Everyone from the "gangbangers to police" attended Gordon’s meetings, Townsend said, and made them a repository of complaints about what was happening in the neighborhood.

Alphonso Pines, a former Ella Hill board member and organizer for the Unite Here! Local 2 union, eagerly showed up at the meetings for months after attending 1995’s Million Man March in Washington.

"I hate to see brothers die, regardless of whether it’s at Ella Hill," Pines said of Donte White’s 2006 killing. "But that was personal for me, because that was the place where I had sat on the board for years. That was real shocking."

Lefty’s son, Greg Gordon, said that his legendary father — who died of a heart attack in May of 2000 — worked so hard for the center that he allowed his own health to deteriorate.

Most beneficiaries of Ella Hill’s social services now live in the southeast section of the 94115 ZIP code, roughly bordered by McAllister and Geary streets to the south and north, and Divisadero and Laguna streets to the west and east.

The majority of Ella Hill’s approximately $1.4 million annual budget comes from government sources, either through grants or nonprofit contracts.

Newsom, through his community development and housing offices, has given $860,000 over the past three years to Ella Hill to help job-ready applicants obtain construction work and other general employment in the neighborhood. The center launched its JOBZ program in 2006, targeting formerly incarcerated young adults and others with a "hard-to-employ" status.

Caseworkers must convince some participants to leave gangs, deal with outstanding warrants, pay back child support, expunge criminal records, or eliminate new offenses, all of which can exacerbate a desire to give up. Sometimes the center has to buy people alarm clocks.

"None of these other programs that are being funded in this community want to deal with the kinds of kids or people who come to Ella Hill…. [It] is the last stop for everybody," said London Breed, head of the African American Art and Culture Complex on Fulton Street and a Western Addition native. "That’s where people go who have no place else to go, which is why it’s so important."

Most nonprofits working for the city must regularly report their operational costs or show how program funds are being spent on graduation ceremonies and trips to university campuses. The required forms are mind-numbingly bureaucratic and reveal little about what a place like Ella Hill might face on a practical level each day. But last year, former executive director George Smith betrayed a crack in Ella Hill’s veneer.

"Once again violence has impacted the community with three incidents in close proximity to the complex this month alone," he wrote to the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which supports the center with college preparation grants. "One of the victims was a young man scheduled to graduate from high school in June."

On May 25, 2007, 19-year-old Jamar Lake was leaving a store on Laguna and Eddy streets, northeast of Ella Hill, when a teen suspect opened fire on him. Paramedics were so worried about security in the neighborhood that they fled before attempting resuscitation, according to a report from the San Francisco Medical Examiner. Lake died at General Hospital that day.

Weeks later, a manic 12-hour long feud erupted between several gunmen on McAllister Street. Seven people were wounded during two daytime shootings that took place in the Friendship Village Apartments, across the street from Ella Hill.

Then in July, a suspect randomly and fatally stabbed 54-year-old Kenneth Taylor in the neck as he sat on a park bench near sundown at Turk and Fillmore streets, within easy view of the SFPD’s Northern Station. Police didn’t respond until Taylor stumbled to the sidewalk and collapsed; a witness had to flag down a patrol car.

Following the Lake shooting, the mayor and police department promised, as they had the year before, that foot patrols would be increased in the 193-unit Plaza East Housing Development and other public housing projects in the Western Addition.

But the city’s most visible response has bypassed Ella Hill — which has some street credibility — altogether. Instead, City Attorney Dennis Herrera went to court to get injunctions against street gangs in June 2007.

Herrera’s initial filing came days after the wild shootout on McAllister Street, but the timing was coincidental. The city attorney also had been preparing injunctions against gangs in the Mission and Bayview-Hunter’s Point for months. For the Western Addition, the city attorney noted a "recent rise in violent crimes perpetrated by the defendants," and asked that the members of three gangs be banned from associating with one another inside two "safety zones" marked along the contours of their respective territories, a 14-square-block area that straddles Fillmore Street and rests just north of Ella Hill.

"The conditions within the two safety zones have become particularly intolerable in 2007 as the deadly rivalry between the Uptown alliance and defendant Eddy Rock has intensified," Herrera’s office told the court. "In 2007 alone, this rivalry is the suspected cause of at least three homicides and numerous shootings within the two safety zones."

Some critics viewed barring people from congregating with one another a civil rights violation. And worse, they feared it would merely shove more African Americans and Latinos out of the Western Addition, which would benefit the city’s wealthiest white residents.

"All of this stuff about gang injunctions is a bunch of malarkey," said Franzo King, archbishop of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church on Fillmore Street. "You don’t really have gangs here…. [In San Francisco] they’re a big club."

Herrera nonetheless convinced a Superior Court judge to issue the injunctions after filing 1,200 pages of evidence arguing that the three "clubs," which include only about 65 people named by the city, are endless public nuisances and force organizations like Ella Hill to battle with them for the affections of Western Addition youth.

Police admit that the injunctions since last year have, in fact, led people to simply leave the neighborhood. Still, they insist the injunctions have reduced trouble in the Western Addition. The Knock Out Posse, for instance, is evaporating, they say.

Paris Moffett, a 30-year-old alleged Eddy Rock leader, told the Guardian in a separate story on the gang injunctions last November that he and others were organizing to quell violence in the neighborhood and would do so in defiance of the gang injunctions (see "Defying the injunction," 11/28/07).

But on the day that story ran, Moffett hampered his new cause when, according to a March 27 federal indictment, police arrested him in Novato for possessing a large quantity of crack and MDMA, as well as a Colt .45 semiautomatic.

After Lefty Gordon died, the center went through a couple of directors in relatively short order. Robert Hector, a second-in-command to Lefty Gordon, helmed the center briefly; he was replaced with George Smith III, who left in 2007.

Meanwhile, problems at Ella Hill grew.

"The seniors just stopped their participation," Anita Grier, a former Ella Hill board member who first ran for the San Francisco City College Board of Trustees in 1998 at Gordon’s encouragement, told us. "Things were never excellent, but they just got much worse once [Gordon] was no longer director."

The center, a standalone nonprofit, had long struggled financially in part because it relied so much on contracts and grants from the city rather than pursuing funds from private donors. Mirkarimi says Ella Hill’s structure is unlike any other community center in the city. Many other centers are directly maintained by the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.

Contract revenue from one Ella Hill program, such as providing emergency shelter to the homeless, was often diverted to keep another on life support or to simply cover the center’s utility bills.

By early 2007, the center faced a financial catastrophe. Donald Frazier joined Ella Hill’s board as president in January 2007 and embarked on a reform effort to turn the center around. He commissioned what came to be a blistering audit that revealed the nonprofit owed over $200,000 in state and federal payroll taxes. As a result, the center faced $63,000 more in penalties and accrued interest.

Mirkarimi blames community leaders in his district for refusing to acknowledge a crisis at the center and for not turning to City Hall for help when Ella Hill appeared to be slowly rotting from the inside out.

The mayor’s staff, he adds, wanted to believe Ella Hill was working on its own and should’ve continued to do so because, despite its financial reliance on the city, it was technically an independent nonprofit. In reality, Mirkarimi said, "They were afraid to piss off black people, is what it comes down to. They were afraid to tell it like it is — that things weren’t working."

Sending delinquent invoices to the city, failing to institute reasonable accounting standards, and falling far behind on its payroll taxes all threatened the government contracts and grants that kept San Francisco’s Black City Hall afloat. By extension, the audit concluded, that meant Western Addition residents who relied on Ella Hill were "victimized" by the center’s improper use of its limited resources.

Aside from the audit, which Ella Hill instigated itself, there’s no indication in the records of agencies funding the center that any problems were occurring, which implies the city wasn’t paying attention.

"As far as I’m concerned," Mirkarimi said, "we had a renegade institution, and the only reason it wasn’t renegade in an illegal sense was because the lease allowed them to have a parallel governance structure. But it was renegade in the sense that the city neglected to supervise properly."

In November 2007, just after residents hijacked a chaotic board meeting with an extended public comment period, Frazier told the directors in closed session that the Redevelopment Agency was planning to restrict future funding for the center due to its management problems.

One month later, the mayor dispatched an aide, Dwayne Jones, along with redevelopment agency director Fred Blackwell, to a meeting at Ella Hill with an ultimatum. Jones told the assembled that new interim appointees would be taking over the center’s bank books, recreating its bylaws, and electing a new board and executive director. The old board would essentially be dissolved. According to observers at the meeting, Jones told them that if they resisted the plan, funds received by Ella Hill from various city agencies would be jeopardized, as would its low-cost lease of city property.

Two defiant board members viewed the move as a "hostile takeover" of a private nonprofit organization by the mayor and voted against it, but the rest of the board agreed to the restructuring. Mirkarimi says there was simply no alternative.

"Right now it needs to be shrunk to what it can do really well, instead of doing what they had to do in the last five years, an incremental sloppy way of programming," he said.

The interim board in April named a former Ella Hill employee and Park and Rec administrator, Howard Smith — unrelated to George Smith — to be the center’s new executive director. But after all the changes Ella Hill made to fix its leadership problems, there are no assurances the city won’t leave Ella Hill without the money it needs to keep the doors open next year.

It’s noon on a recent Friday and Ella Hill’s new executive director is scrambling to keep things together. An employee wants him to glance at a form. Another man wants to come in and play basketball. Smith has a board meeting minutes from now, but he’s scheduled an interview with the Guardian at the same time.

Smith’s a well-built man dressed in a pressed suit, polished shoes, and a sharply-knotted tie. He’d mostly avoided our calls for weeks. Word spread in the neighborhood that the Guardian was planning some sort of hit piece on Ella Hill.

But it won’t be a newspaper that capsizes the center.

A significant portion of the center’s funding will be threatened over the next year. The redevelopment agency is scheduled to end its 45-year reign in the Western Addition by then, a blessing of sorts since so many people in the neighborhood feel it’s done nothing but upend the lives of black residents. But the end of the agency means that redevelopment funds for Ella Hill’s job placement programs, about $400,000 annually, will disappear.

In addition, about $300,000 more a year will dry up since the San Francisco Human Services Agency hasn’t renewed an emergency homeless shelter contract with the center. Mirkarimi believes the mayor, too, will try to stop providing Ella Hill with funding through his community development office next year.

If Newsom does back away, Mirkarimi warns, there will be "a very loud showdown."

"What I’m worried about is that the Newsom administration is basically cutting and running on this, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, at least not without a fight," he said.

The alternative is for Rec and Park to take over managing Ella Hill’s facilities with DCYF continuing to fund youth programs there while the Redevelopment Agency commits community benefits dollars from a legacy fund to the center — the least it can do after a half-century of transforming the neighborhood, locals be damned.

An interagency council made up of the center’s primary funders could collectively watchdog its performance, Mirkarimi says. Once Ella Hill’s leaders prove that the center has fully returned to its original mission, it can consider expanding to serve other populations in the neighborhood, or even seek a plan to detach further from the city.

The mayor’s spokesperson, Nathan Ballard, did not respond to an e-mail containing detailed questions, and his aide, Dwayne Jones, did not return several phone calls. But Smith said during a later lunch interview at the Fillmore Café that he agrees with Mirkarimi’s idea.

"There are so many programs out there that say they’re doing something on paper, but they’re really not doing it," Smith said. "They’re running ghost programs. So what I’ve been saying at Ella Hill since I got there is, ‘We will do exactly what we said we were going to do.’<0x2009>"

In the meantime, Smith is determined to prove that Ella Hill’s history has only just begun. The mural of Lefty Gordon outside the center received a fresh coat of paint recently, and the color pops. The sidewalk is being repaved and new handrails installed. The walls inside are clear of the aging posters and letter board that hung there a few months ago.

Before heading off to his board meeting, Smith teasingly asks an adolescent boy meandering in the center’s entryway for 75 cents. The boy’s always hitting him up for pocket change.

"I don’t got any," the boy responds.

"You don’t have any," Smith corrects.

Smith suddenly realizes what time it is.

"Hey, why isn’t this guy in school?" he wonders aloud.

At that moment, only the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center was asking the question. *

A lady’s choice

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS There is a kind of chocolate bar with bacon in it, so you know. There. You can go back to sleep now. You can believe in God again, or call and cancel your next 40 years of therapy, or board that airplane, or fall in love. I can’t do any of those things, yet, but you have my permission to go ahead without me. I’ll catch up.

First I’m going to sit here and work on my sweet tooth, which I’ve been trying to work on my whole female life. Before when I passed on dessert, opting instead for another helping of greens, it seemed kind of, I don’t know, cute almost — or quirky. Judging from the looks on people’s faces now, for a woman to not like chocolate … that’s unseemly, grotesque, and just wrong.

Now, y’all know how I love to reinforce stereotypes …

Actually, I do. It’s fun! I mean, ideally I’d be in on the ground floor of the stereotype, like the one where transgender chicken farmers make better lovers. (Neil Young has a song coming out about that.)

All kidding aside, did I ever tell you what I tell people who tell me that "women don’t spit" or "ladies don’t use that word" or "girls don’t go around with a chicken in one hand and a hatchet in the other"? I tilt my head a little, bat my lashes, and go, "They do now, dear." Then I spit and say, "If you’ll kindly excuse me, I have to go chop this fucker’s head off."

But belligerence, like my pickup truck, only gets you so far. It doesn’t get you back to sleep at 3:30 a.m., or into heaven or off the couch or onto airplanes and into hearts. So I am willing to learn to like chocolate, same as I had to teach myself to like applesauce: by putting bacon in it.

Only this time I can’t take credit for the idea. That goes to Vosges Haut-Chocolat, purveyor of Mo’s Bacon Bar. Sockywonk and/or our friend Funiamorari bought me one while they were in New York and gave it to me for my birthday. There’s a picture on the box of a strip of bacon next to a square of chocolate, and a two-paragraph essay on the back by someone named Katrina, chronicling how she’s been working on the bacon + chocolate equation since she was six.

No mention of how old she is now, but since her grammar is pretty good and her spelling impeccable, and since she seems to own a chocolate company with retail stores in Chicago and New York, if I had to guess I’d say she’s at least seven.

My point being: come on! It took me one day to add up bacon + applesauce. Admittedly, it’s easier math. But 365 times easier? Well, six-year-old girls do sometimes have a hard time staying focused, unlike 45-year-old chicken farmers.

Where was I?

Thank you, Sockywonk! Thank you, Funiamorari! This isn’t the first time my wonderful, sisterly girlfriends have helped me become more stereotypical, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Which is a subtle and complicated joke, but would be less so if we could include a group picture here of my wonderful, sisterly girlfriends.

I can’t express how much more confident I will feel now, on dates, when the waitperson asks if we would like dessert, and my date looks at me like, well? and instead of saying, "No, just another pork chop please," I can now say, "Oooh, do you have bacon chocolate bars?" Tilt of the head, bat of the lashes, and the deep-down knowledge that restaurants generally don’t serve candy bars. But at least it will seem like I have a sweet tooth. "I really shouldn’t," I will add, for effect, "but … "

They’re so good! Of course, of course they’d be even better if they were basically bacon with little flecks of milk chocolate in it, instead of the other way around. But my date doesn’t need to know every single silly thought flitting through my sweet mind.

Does he?

—————————————

My new favorite restaurant is Panda Country Kitchen. It’s also one of the windiest restaurants I’ve ever eaten at. Richmond District. I went there with the Maze on a foggy night, and we had tea-smoked duck and I forget what else. Oh, hot and sour soup, which was great, but it became cold and sour soup real fast. Turn the heat on!

PANDA COUNTRY KITCHEN

4737 Geary, SF

(415) 221-4278

Lunch: 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m., Mon.–Fri.

Dinner: 4:30 p.m.–10 p.m., Mon.–Fri.

Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

Club Waziema

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› paulr@sfbg.com

As the fireworks display known as Indian cuisine finds a measure of American celebrity, some of us are left to wonder about an equally spice-rich tradition that remains slightly obscure even in a sophisticated international city like San Francisco. The foods I’m referring to are from East Africa — from Ethiopia and its northern neighbor (and once unwilling province), Eritrea — and maybe the African connection gives us our first clue about their relative obscurity. In my lifetime, most of the food news from Africa has been bad news, beginning with a terrible famine in the West African land of Biafra in the late 1960s to, more recently, a similar crisis in the Sudanese region of Darfur.

Starvation is a chronic threat in modern Africa, and it seems tasteless, somehow, to go out and eat Ethiopian food at a well-provisioned restaurant in a rich city while actual Ethiopians are starving. What would they think of us? What should we think of ourselves? Yet the food is marvelous, and it doesn’t seem quite right to ignore it — and the people who are trying to make a living by offering it in their restaurants — as an awkward gesture of sympathy or solidarity. Our uneasy compromise seems to be to have a certain number of Ethiopian restaurants and to enjoy them, as long as they don’t become too high-profile or glossy. When the first bistro opens with a menu of "modern Ethiopian cuisine," we will know the wind is shifting.

Meantime, there are such lovably unaffected places as Club Waziema, which has been dishing up platters of Ethiopian food on Divisadero Street in the Western Addition for nearly 10 years. When they say "club," they’re not kidding; the deep space has a sort of sports-bar aura in its streetside quarter but acquires a pool-hall feel (complete with pool table) in its raised rear room. In between, opening off the narrows that connects front and rear, is a cozy nook for two that might be a made-over closet but feels like a spot you’d be delighted to find on a 19th-century railcar.

You’d probably be delighted, too — not to mention flabbergasted — to find food like Waziema’s on any 19th-century railcar. Restaurants cooking spice-charged food are like huge aromatherapy candles, bathing their environs with bewitching scents, and Waziema is no exception. Even out on the street, you can smell it before you see it, and once you’re through the door, you’re in the zone.

The menu describes dish after dish as "spicy," without saying what those spices are. (Even the Ethiopian lager Harar is spicy.) The best-known of Ethiopian flavoring agents is a paste known as berbere, which often is made from many of the same spices — cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander, turmeric, fenugreek — that turn up in the Indian garam masala (known to us as curry powder), along with the softening, sweetening presences of allspice and nutmeg. Then there is mitmita, a cayenne pepper-like powder ground from dried red African chili peppers.

If I was taking a quiz, I would guess that Waziema’s lamb stew ($11.50) — boneless chunks of meat simmered with garlic, ginger, and spices — had some mitmita in it, mostly because of the sauce’s red clay color and a distinctive chili, almost Tex-Mex flavor. The menu described the lamb as "mild," but we thought we detected some heat. The beef stew ($10) was similar, with cubes of meat in a rich sauce, except the sauce lacked its sibling’s sunrise glow. It looked more like beef burgundy, and in fact berbere paste can include red wine. If cubed meat isn’t your thing, you might go for the spicy chicken ($10.50), which features a pair of legs braised on the bone in a golden sauce. (Our server asked us if we wanted the chicken "mild, medium, or hot," with the assurance that "hot isn’t that hot." And it wasn’t. It was just right, really.)

Can’t decide? Get the combo ($12.50), which provides half-portions of two of the meat dishes. On the vegetable side of the menu, the combo will bring you sizable samplings of all the meatless dishes. These include spicy lentils (quite dal-like), garlicky collard greens, a vegetable stew (of carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage in garlic sauce), and mushroom chunks in a thick brown sauce like the beef’s. Everything is presented family-style on a large platter lined with a disk of injera, the spongy Ethiopian flatbread made from teff flour. (Teff is an Ethiopian grain with a pleasantly sour taste.) More injera is provided on the side for tearing into pieces and scooping up bites of the various stews.

One lesson to be drawn here is that Ethiopian cooking, like Indian cooking, tends to be vegetarian-friendly. Even carnivores could graze happily for a long while on a platter of the vegetable dishes. (One possible issue for hard-edged vegans: much of Ethiopian cooking is typically done in clarified butter.) Another lesson is that Waziema gives unusually good, I might even say exceptional, value. Prices are moderate, servings are not small, and the sense of bounty is enhanced by the festive heaping of everything onto a colorful platter that lands in the middle of the table like an edible flying saucer.

Divisadero between Castro and Geary remains one of the city’s most vital and interesting restaurant rows. Although there has been some cautious infiltration by upscalers, the neighborhood still has a few days’ growth of beard, and it still has a good supply of places like Club Waziema, where those with a few days’ growth of beard are among friends and the matter of hunger is both an occasion for reflection and celebration.

CLUB WAZIEMA

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

543 Divisadero, SF

(415) 346-6641

www.clubwaziema.com

Full bar

MC/V

Bearable noise

Partly wheelchair accessible

Roti

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Since the crash of Tallula a few years ago, the Department of Innovative Indian Food has undergone some slight shrinkage. True, the overall standard of Indian cooking in the city has continued to rise, and we’ve been treated to spots that emphasize regional Indian cuisine, such as Dosa. But where oh where is the restaurant that will cook a well-spiced duck in the tandoor, then serve the meat in slices as part of a salad with arugula and bing cherries? Tallula was brilliant at this sort of cross-cultural flourish, and I was hopeful it would be the first of its profuse kind.

Perhaps, despite its too-short life, it was. The second of its kind could be Roti, in West Portal — a much better-looking restaurant than Tallula, though shyer about proclaiming its more distinctive dishes. (There is a sibling restaurant in Burlingame.) You could feast quite happily at Roti on the subcontinental foods that have become familiar and perhaps even beloved in certain quarters of blue-state America: tandoori chicken, lamb vindaloo, palak paneer, chana masala. But you might suspect you were missing something, your first clue being Roti’s appearance.

The phrase the restaurant applies to itself is "Indian bistro," and this means, first, no stainless-steel steam tables pushed against the back wall for all-you-can-eat buffets. It also means a Manhattanish look of glossy surfaces and striking lamps and light fixtures arrayed behind a barrel façade of window panes that arc inward toward the door. The effect is a little like that of the original Slanted Door, though with a curve instead of a slant. Certainly the intent of the two places seems similar: to do justice to an ancient cuisine while reconciling it with the reality of modern California.

Hence Roti’s splendid tandoori duck salad ($12), with meat dense, moist, and tender, almost like confit. Tallula’s menu was filled with these sorts of combinations; at Roti, there is a stronger sense of restraint regarding the ecstasies of Californication, along with heightened attention to some traditional Indian dishes that are less well-known in this country. If you think Indian cooks only use lentils to make dal, for instance, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by dal ki mathri ($8), a set of fritters made of several varieties of legumes, including chickpeas. The fritters could have been warmer (they seemed to toughen with cooling) but were complex in flavor and texture. Also, they were endearing in appearance — little golden footballs that could have been part of a Pop Warner awards presentation.

Calamari rings ($8) were given the "Bombay" treatment: a heavy dusting of curry-scented chickpea flour, then a turn in the deep-fryer for some golden crunch. The rings were presented with little dishes of chutney, tamarind and mint, but they were tasty enough to be eaten straight up. They were also tender, which suggested skillful handling, since calamari easily turns rubbery with overcooking. One of the blights of Indian restaurants is that so many of the appetizers and starters are deep-fried, and Roti’s are no exception. But if you must go deep-fried, calamari is at least somewhat less usual than pakoras or samosas.

Chicken tikka — boneless breast meat — turns up in a number of preparations. Among these are the lovable old warhorse, chicken tikka masala ($14), cubes of meat awash in a mild, creamy sauce; and a lunchtime salad ($12) in which the breast meat is rolled up, roulade-style, roasted, and served over mixed greens with naan. Considering the dryness of roasting and the paucity of fat on boneless, skinless, chicken breast meat, the chicken tikka here was remarkably juicy — a credit, maybe, to some ingenious marinade.

Lamb vindaloo ($15) arrived with the chicken tikka masala and in some ways resembled it: cubes of meat in a rich-looking sauce. But vindaloo is generally hotter and sharper than its sibling, and here it was markedly gingery, too. (Vindaloo comes from Goa, once a Portuguese colony, and, as the name implies, wine was a long-ago ingredient. In these postcolonial days, some kind of mild vinegar is generally used.)

As so often is the case in Indian restaurants, vegetarian offerings are strong and varied enough to banish any vagrant yearnings for meat. The only one of these dishes we found wanting was, surprisingly, the palak paneer ($11), lightly spiced spinach cooked with chunks of cheese. The spicing here consisted mostly of nutmeg, which really didn’t have the wattage to compete with chana masala ($9), chickpeas cooked in a spicy tomato-curry sauce. Somewhere between these two extremes lay the mattar kurchan ($10 at lunch, with a disk of poori), cubes of cheese cooked with green peas in a moderately athletic tomato sauce. The sauced cheese would have been excellent spooned over the poori to make a kind of pizza, but I didn’t think of that in time. And it would have been tricky to eat.

How about dessert after all that? We stuck to the ice creams and were well satisfied: two scoops of peach-colored lucuma ($5) and a plate of kulfi ($6), flavored with saffron, cardamom, pistachio, and rosewater, shaped into a sausage, frozen, and sliced like a banana.

As we were getting up to leave, the disputatious person seated to my right said, "It’s good, but not as good as Metro Kathmandu." I felt obliged — politely! — to dispute this diss. Roti is quite as good in its way as Metro Kathmandu, and that’s saying something. (It’s also indisputably better-looking, and that’s saying something else.) The death of Tallula was a real loss but, as Roti proves, not an unredeemed one.

ROTI

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

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

53 West Portal, SF

(415) 665-7684

www.rotibistro.com

Beer and wine

Quite noisy

AE/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Tataki

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Earlier this spring, a young colleague wrote to ask if I knew of seafood restaurants in the city that emphasize sustainability. While I could recall plenty of sightings of sustainable seafood items on various menus in recent years, I could only think of two seafood restaurants that answered to his description — places, in other words, where sustainability is central to the restaurant’s consciousness and is a basic element of menu composition. One is the Hayes Street Grill, whose menu card gives detailed information about where and how particular fish have been taken. The other is a small sushi spot named Tataki that opened about three months ago in an old Subway space at the southern foot of Pacific Heights.

Tataki does and doesn’t look like a typical sushi spot. It does have a small bar in a far corner of the snug dining room where you can sit on ergonomically peculiar stools of black plastic and watch the chefs deftly go about their business, and the bamboo tables were handmade by owners Raymond Ho and Kin Lui. But the pumpkin-colored walls are unusual, and the slate floor, while handsome, does contribute to a noise level that can be surprisingly high for such tight quarters. Of course, nowhere is it written that sushi bars and other Japanese restaurants must be quiet and serene; here it is merely written that, so far as this writer is concerned, it’s nice when they are.

Still, as holes-in-the-wall go, Tataki isn’t bad looking. The real interest lies in the menu. To a glance, this document resembles many others around town: there are selections of nigiri, rolls, tataki, soups, salads, and starters from the grill. But, as at HSG, each menu entry includes information on how the fish were obtained. Many are farmed, and while aquaculture raises all kinds of uncomfortable issues about pollution, antibiotics, and food-chain inefficiency, it does offer one inarguable virtue: aquaculture helps protect wild fish populations from collapse.

Since salmon, whether farmed or wild, is problematic now, Tataki uses a close relation, farmed arctic char, instead. The fish, with its delicate rose-peach flesh, makes a handsome nigiri ($4.50); it also turns up in one of the rolls and as carpaccio. Other nigiri might feature hiramasa ($4.50), also known as kingfish (a yellowfin relative, farmed in Australasia), and California striped bass ($4.50), whose flesh is like a disk of translucent ivory someone spilled Grenache on.

No sushi joint in San Francisco would be complete without a clutch of wittily named rolls to call its own, and Tataki is no exception. The best name probably belongs to the Divisaderoli ($6), chunks of avocado bundled with either tuna or kampachi (a Hawaiian member of the jack family) and scattered with glistening orange grains of tobiko. Tastier, if bearing a less-fun-to-pronounce name, is the Mix It Up roll ($11), a blend of spicy tuna and crab meat that achieves an almost sausage-like intensity of flavor and texture.

But the king of Tataki’s rolls is surely the Extinguisher ($13), which offers not only a serious spice kick but a moment of real visual spectacle. If you like saganaki (the flaming cheese of Greece), you’ll love this scene. But first, the roll itself: flaps of kampachi marinated with chiles, packed in rice, topped with chunks of avocado, squirts of what the menu calls "hot sauce" (chipotle mayonnaise?), and heavy sprinklings of habañero tobiko, fire-alarm red rather than the usual orange. The redness of the tobiko should be enough to caution anyone who’s remotely paying attention, but just to make sure, the chef sprinkles the side of the platter with rock salt, sloshes some rum over the crystals, and lights the whole thing on fire with a blowtorch. This might make an interesting DIY project for the patronage, assuming no licensure issues — probably a large assumption.

The flame, which is mostly blue and not at all raging (its more like something you’d see under a chafing dish), burns down quickly, and you might not even notice it expire, since eating the actual roll is a memorable experience of fire and spice. I love spicy food and I responded to the clever combinations here, but at the same time it did seem to me that the subtleties of the fish were all but irrelevant. Nuance can get lost in firestorms.

A nice chaser to the Extinguisher would be the cold spinach ($4), with the greens "boiled … in soy broth," as the menu grimly explains. The dish sounded almost Dickensian in its bleakness, but it turned out to be four compressed-spinach cylinders cut on the bias and arrayed upright on a plate, like a little diorama of some ancient temple. (Minor complaint: the tightly packed leaves were tricky to hack through.) A more easygoing cold dish — the Sancho Panza of such dishes in Japanese restaurants — is the seaweed salad ($4), which Tataki, in a nice twist, presents in a large porcelain ladle.

Despite mounting evidence that fisheries are collapsing from human exploitation throughout the world — the plight of the king salmon is a recent, local, and particularly disturbing example; see also the death of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland — we seem to have a vestigial confidence that the oceans are too vast to suffer real harm at our hands. If we don’t see it happening, then it can’t be quite real. But it is happening and it is real, and if there is going to be any kind of future for sushi and other seafood restaurants, it will be because Tataki, in its eco-prescience, turned out to be the dawn of a new day. *

TATAKI

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

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

2815 California, SF

(415) 931-1182

www.tatakisushibar.com

Beer, wine, sake

MC/V

Surprisingly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Walk the line

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS "It’s hard to find people to eat pork bellies with me," he said, over pork bellies, and I thought: I’m your girl.

This was my second date of the day. I’d had a chef salad for lunch in another town, with someone else, and was not his girl. I could tell. Still, we walked down the hot sidewalk and into a famous bar with trophied animal heads all over all the walls. I’d always wanted to go there, and liked it inside, so I asked if he wanted to stay, have a Coke, or something. Stare at a moose.

"No," said the guy whose girl I was not. He had better get going, it was the weekend, hard week, and he wanted to be home, had things to do. Long drive.

My therapist wants me to speak on the topic of dating at a conference on gender identity issues. I suppose that I can take this as a compliment. Maybe I will, and maybe I will speak at this conference. Or, hey, hell, maybe I’ll write an actual restaurant review! It’s been a while …

The pork bellies were delicious. Thick, crisp, fatty slices of fried pig in a dark, salty sauce with Chinese broccoli. The duck came with celery and lychee, the Chinese fruit, which is way weirder to the teeth, tongue, and taste buds than any animal organ that I’ve ever eaten. The name of the restaurant is not important.

My date insinuated that I must have some kind of skinny gene.

I speared another square of almost pure fat and, chewing on it, both literally and figuratively, reckoned that hmm, maybe I did. Plus there’s the soccer … sometimes two or three games in one day, ooga.

Really, I don’t know a lot of people who like duck.

"When I was a kid," I said, "my brothers and sisters used to pass me all their pork fat and chicken skin."

My therapist thinks I am articulate and well-spoken, but he’s never been on a date with me. I actually said that — about pork fat and chicken skin — on a date, and knew almost immediately that I wouldn’t be seeing this guy again, even though there was no doubt in my mind that I was his girl.

It was cold outside, after dinner, so he gave me his coat. We walked to a book store. I picked up a book that I have but hadn’t read yet and said, "Did you ever read this?" So he bought it. I wondered if I looked cute in his too-big coat, my hands lost way inside its dark sleeves.

I’m trying to understand guys who like girls like me. The best thing I’ve heard, so far, is that they love femininity, and that I represent a very complicated form of femininity, and therefore they love me. Except they don’t, because — and this is just a guess, but it’s one thing to eat pork bellies with a pretty woman, I’m guessing, and something else entirely to envision them engulfing a pile of table-scrapped fat or three chickens’ worth of chicken skin.

I can understand their problem with the image. Honestly, I get it, only not quickly enough to not hand them the picture.

It’s like: they want you to watch football with them, but do they want to watch you play football? Probably not. What we have here is a balancing act. Everyone knows you have to walk a line — everyone — and that’s hard. For all of us. I begin to suspect that for girls like me and for the guys who go for us, there’s not a thin line. There’s nothing at all beneath our feet. Try to look graceful, and act balanced, while free-falling away from yourself. Or toward yourself. Or both at the same time.

I get motion sickness. Last night, to distract myself, I opened the book that I have but had not read, and I started to read it. The name of the book is not important.

My new favorite restaurant is Soi 4. It’s just a couple of bucks more than other Thai restaurants, but definitely worth it. Especially if someone else is paying. The short ribs are fantastic. Perfectly tender and juicy and then, as if they needed any help, the most amazingly smooth-tasting peanut curry by way of a smother. So good it’s kind of terrifying. I can’t stop thinking about it and have been having nightmares. *

SOI 4

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

5421 College, Oakl.

(510) 655-0889

Beer & wine

MC/V

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was having lunch with an old friend the other day, and, as usual, we got through our lives and kids pretty quickly and wound up talking about tax policy. I’m a great date.

I was explaining to her — well, yeah, I was lecturing, at some volume — about the problem with sales taxes and the value of parcel taxes and income taxes, and somewhere along the line I realized that the progressive leadership in San Francisco needs to think a bit more about small business.

See, my friend’s husband runs a small company, and she isn’t happy about the way the city’s universal health plan is financed. "If this is so important to San Francisco," she asked, "why aren’t we all paying for it, instead of just businesses?" Her idea: finance the program with a new sales tax.

Well, I support Healthy San Francisco and I think that, all things considered, Sup. Tom Ammiano did an amazing job of putting together a plan that is actually working. Ammiano told me last week that more than 20,000 people — formerly uninsured people — have signed up. This is a very big deal.

I realize it’s also a pain for a lot of smaller businesses, in part because the rules — specifically designed to keep unscrupulous employers from cheating — are complicated and hard to follow. And for companies that are barely making it, the tab for insurance can be brutal.

That, of course, is the overall problem with employer-based health insurance. But it’s the system we’re working under, and the complexity of creating a completely different model in one city would be, to say the least, daunting. In fact, there were a lot of employers in this city, many big retail outlets and national chains, that could well afford to pay for employee health insurance but instead dumped their workers on the overburdened public health system.

And restaurants, which are whining the loudest, have managed to stick their customers with the added cost, which frankly isn’t such a terrible thing: people who eat out a lot can afford an extra buck so the kitchen help can see a doctor when they’re sick.

And as I (ever-so-gently and quietly) explained over my $12 sautéed prawns, sales taxes are horribly regressive, even worse than small-business taxes. I’m right; she’s wrong. We had a hell of a lunch.

But I think her frustration ran a bit deeper than this one issue, and I hear it from a lot of others too: small businesses don’t seem to be part of the progressive coalition.

I understand why: a lot of small business people are conservative, particularly on fiscal issues. It’s really annoying how often small merchants side with the Chamber of Commerce and the big downtown forces. You can’t get small business groups to support any new revenue measures.

And the progressive supervisors have done a lot for small businesses — starting with enacting limits on chain stores, which have protected locally owned shops in several commercial districts.

There’s a lot more we can do: I’m still pushing for a progressive business tax (cut taxes on the bottom, raise them on the top). And a city income tax would pay for health insurance and a lot more.

But right now, many community merchants are feeling ignored, and our next progressive candidate for mayor needs to think about that. It’s a potentially powerful constituency — but for all the wrong reasons, it’s going in all the wrong directions.

Poesia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Since my Italian is limited to a few cuss words plus "prego," I was not able to follow the ins and outs of the Italian film being shown, Foreign Cinema–style, on the rear wall of Poesia, a lovely restaurant opened by Francesco D’Ippolito in March in one of the Castro’s most haunted locales. The movie looked like a close relation of The Dick Van Dyke Show, to judge by the costuming and black-and-white cinematography, and it lacked both sound and subtitles — not necessarily a huge loss for Anglophone diners who prefer to keep their attention trained on their dinners and on one another, instead of on the movie’s progress and whether or not the actors are swearing in Italian.

The movies at Foreign Cinema generally include subtitles and are not limited to Italian provenance. In these respects, Poesia is a not-quite-direct descendant of that highly successful, highly atmospheric Mission District restaurant. Nonetheless, the new place’s ancestry is plain. It’s also welcome, and I speak as someone who resists the multimedia antics that make too many restaurants too stimuutf8g to be pleasant these days. Poesia’s second-story digs, across the street from the venerable Midnight Sun, have recently been home to Ararat and La Mooné, a pair of worthy ventures that seemed to get lost in the Castro shuffle. This can happen when people can’t easily find you. A staircase is a slim sidewalk presence for any restaurant. So, sweeten the deal with a movie! Screen it, and they will come.

And if they come hungry, all the better. Poesia’s food is rich in friendly elegance and would be worth seeking out even without a cinematic enticement. It also reminds us that classic Italian cooking doesn’t (on the one hand) need tinkering with but (on the other) does accept flourishes, even California-style ones, without losing its essential honesty. I particularly liked the glasslike slivers of flash-fried green garlic that served as a bed for a trio of arancini ($6), risotto fritters aromatic with a stuffing of smoked mozzarella cheese. Once the arancini were gone, it was as if we’d been transported to the scene of an auto break-in, with shards of translucent green all over the place. The arancini themselves were sensually, addictively creamy, though short-lived. But we found ourselves nibbling at the green garlic as a satisfying coda.

Fennel root (finocchio) has been a player in Roman Jewish cooking for two millennia, and it clearly matters to Poesia’s kitchen too, at least at this time of year, the crest of the season of roots. The bulbs turned up quartered, breaded, and lightly fried ($7) as an appetizer — a kind of frito misto without the misto — and, shredded, in a salad ($7.50) tossed with arugula leaves and mandarin-orange sections and dressed with a blood-orange vinaigrette. Fennel root is often mentioned as an interesting substitution for celery, but these two dishes, whether considered separately or juxtaposed, suggest that it’s far more than a stand-in for a simple staple.

If not finocchio, then radicchio — the claret and white chicory leaves with the bitter edge — which turned up as a bed for a sophisticated seafood salad ($14). The seafood consisted of peeled shrimp, sea scallops, squid, clams, and mussels, simmered in a marinara sauce and laid atop the radicchio, whose leaves had been softened and made less sharp by braising. And since finocchio and radicchio need not be mutually exclusive, the plate (a long and narrow rectangle like a sushi platter) was finished with a salad of intertwined carrot and fennel-root ribbons at the far end.

Veal is among the most ethically problematic of meats — the calves it’s obtained from are largely a consequence of the none-too-pretty dairy industry (only pregnant cows lactate) — but it’s also mild-flavored and sublimely tender and buttery if handled with care. At Poesia the sautéed medallions ($19) were bathed in a pizziaola sauce, a puree of tomatoes charged with garlic, oregano, and hot pepper, and dotted with halves of pitted black olives. The rest of the dish was finished simply, with quarters of roasted new potato and heap of sautéed broccoli rabe, dark green and glistening.

Desserts, like the savory courses, are variations on classic themes. Tiramisù is beyond cliché now, but Poesia’s version ($7) uses Grand Marnier, for a hint of oranginess, and it doesn’t have the typical tiramisù’s sloppy-lasagne-square look but instead resembles a striped lampshade. Cannoli ($7) is more conventional in appearance — a flute of crisped pastry — and is filled with chocolate chip–studded whipped cream, while an honor guard of strawberry slices stand at attention to one side.

The restaurant’s layout remains unchanged from earlier incarnations. There is a bar in a cozy corner, but you can’t watch the movie if you’re sitting at it: bad angle. The dining-room windows still offer a commanding view of a festive block of 18th Street, although the windows’ bareness is disconcerting. People peeking out from on high at passersby prefer a bit of cover, some curtains or drapes or even miniblinds. I speak from some personal experience on this point. Window treatments also relieve starkness, as experienced from inside. But it’s early, and perhaps D’Ippolito will get to such matters at some point.

He’s a busy man, though, working the dining room, supervising the service staff, and offering customers the occasional tutorial in conversational Italian or Italian film history. I tried out a few of my swear words, and they met with nods of approval, even if we both knew we weren’t dealing in poetry.

POESIA

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–11 p.m.

4072 18th St., SF

(415) 252-9325

www.poesiasf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noise under control

Not wheelchair accessible

Bienvenidos to the jungle: munchies Italiano in Costa Rica

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A little bit of Italy down south: La Puerta Negra. Photo courtesy of Zancudo Times.

By Erik Morse

A-way down south past Baja, Calif., and the Rio Grande, through Mexico and the mountain ranges of Central America, which blossom into the fiery petals of Arenal volcano, there’s a tiny fishing village near the border of Costa Rica and Panama called Playa Zancudo. Along the town’s one gravel road that travels through the swamps and palm trees to the edge of the Osa Peninsula, passing shotgun shacks and mercados, sits one of the most delicious Italian restaurants this side of the Adriatic.

Christened La Puerta Negra according to the plywood sign near the dirt path entrance, this small trattoria is a simple concrete slab and garden just off the beach. But the chef and owner Alberto Ferrini has taken great care to make it his own: a colorful assortment of fresh flowers, white tablecloths, and twinkling lights sit beneath a quilted patio covering.

Photographs of forgotten guitar heroes from the American delta are pinned above the entrance to the open-air kitchen, and the constant rotation of jug bands and blues troubadours playing from the stereo portray an ardent musical soul. A small advertisement written in marker reads: Live Blues on Saturday Night. Later on I find out that Ferrini often brings his git box from the room above the restaurant to give his customers a lesson in old-fashioned gut bucket.

Pizza Place on Noriega

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› paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PIZZA PLACE ON NORIEGA

Wed.–Thurs., Sun.–Mon., noon–10 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., noon–10:30 p.m.

3901 Noriega, SF

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

Beer and wine

MC/V

Cheerfully noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Tipping your waiter health coverage

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receipt4.jpg

Here’s another example of a restaurant passing on the cost of Healthy San Francisco to its patrons. The lady and I had brunch at the Slow Club in the Mission on Saturday and this is our bill. Healthy San Francisco is the program created by Sup. Tom Ammiano to reach the more than 73,000 uninsured San Franciscans with a reasonably inexpensive form of health insurance.

The program is tied up in federal court right now because restaurants have sued arguing that it’s illegal for local governments to require employers to fund health insurance for their employees, which Healthy San Francisco does. About 19,000 San Franciscans had already signed up for the plan by last week and on Wednesday about 13,000 more were added as local businesses met a deadline for registering with the program.

Part of the idea is that without insuring more Americans, you and I pay for it each time someone who lacks coverage ends up making a costly emergency room visit at a public hospital with a preventable disease, illness or injury because they couldn’t access advance treatment, mental health assistance or any other type of care before they reached a tipping point. This program might actually prove that if the government extends coverage to more people who haven’t traditionally received it, we may all save money in the end.

For now, you’re stuck with the bill while the restaurant industry sues to ignore the true cost of our robust local economy.

ICE raids San Francisco restaurants

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We’re receiving early reports from the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition that federal immigration officials have raided restaurants around the Bay Area and are arresting undocumented workers including in the Haight. So much for our sanctuary city “awareness campaign” that San Francisco launched in April. Limited details below.

immigration1.jpg

*ENGLISH VERSION*
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, May 02, 2008

Contact:
Evelyn Sánchez, (415) 572-0639, evelyn@immigrantrights.org
Larisa Casillas, (415) 640-4557, larisa@immigrantrights.org

ICE Unleashes Immigration Sweeps Against Bay Area Restaurant Workers, Arrests Dozens of Workers
Coalition Urges People to Call Hotline to Get Legal Help

We are calling on members of the Bay Area community to be alert to an immigration police presence in your neighborhoods or workplaces. Today, the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition started receiving reports of immigration police raids, carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE arrested dozens of restaurant workers in El Balazo restaurants in San Ramon, Lafayette, Concord, Pleasanton, San Francisco and Danville. ICE arrests were also reported in Oakland. The numbers of workers detained, which cities, and if only EL Balazo restaurants were targeted have not yet been fully confirmed. Please report the names of any individuals, your co-workers, neighbors and others, who may have been picked up by ICE to BAIRC.

More on the raids including who to contact for help and a Spanish translation of the presser after the jump.

What’s up with the restaurant surcharges?

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The last time I had lunch at the Slow Club, the check came with a little notice: $1 was added to the cost of every meal to cover the cost of complying with the city’s new health-care mandate. That was fine — if I can afford to eat at the Slow Club I can afford an extra buck so the people who work there can get health insurance.

But it’s interesting that the place didn’t just raise prices by $1 (which most people wouldn’t have noticed — restaurant prices go up all the time). They made a point of letting everyone know that the money was for a new government mandate. It was, in its own way, a political statement: Hey, sorry we have to charge you more, but the city is forcing us to do it.

That’s made some local activists a bit angry (there’s a fascinating little bit on it in the San Francisco Magazine blog — Sup. Tom Ammiano (who wrote the health-care bill) and labor leader Chriss Romero were eating at 2223 Restaurant on Market, and Romero got pissed off when the tab came with a four percent service charge that mentioned the insurance rule.

I get Romero’s point, and we supported the Ammiano legislation — and as someone who works at a small business that has always provided health insurance to employees and is still getting hit with some serious additional expenses to comply, I understand why the restaurants are trying to make a point about it.

And it’s absolutely true that restaurants never do this when other mandates, taxes, fees and expensive compliance rules take effect (you never see it for increases in the minimum wage, for example).

Mild statement or annoying protest? Thoughts?

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