Paul Reidinger

Patisserie Philippe

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Most of us have our favorite bistros, boîtes, bakeries, and pubs — but patisseries? That seems a little precious, and maybe hard to pronounce. And fattening, since patisseries are all about pastries, and pastries are all about — or largely about — butter and eggs and sugar, with some flour and yeast thrown in, not to mention chocolate, more often than not. Boulangerie is tricky to pronounce too for unschooled Anglophones, but boulangeries are about bread, and bread isn’t really fattening — unless it’s brioche, which is something you’d get at a patisserie, perhaps your favorite one.

Pâtisserie Philippe, which opened earlier this spring in a gigantic new building on the roundabout at the end of Eighth Street, is not a boulangerie, but it does have its boulangerie-esque elements. The handsome glass display cases are full of pastries, including tartes tatins and financiers, but they aren’t full of just pastries. There are panini too and baguette sandwiches and salads. If you said deli with a French accent, you would be striking near the heart of the matter. I don’t know how you say sports bar in French — le sports bar? — but there is one next door (not at all French), and it is loud. Pâtisserie Philippe, by contrast, is serene and civilized, and while you can’t get french fries with your panino, you won’t miss them, since you prefer a salad of mixed baby greens anyway.

The Philippe of Pâtisserie Philippe is Philippe Delarue, formerly of Bay Bread, the large and spreading consortium of bakeries and restaurants run by Pascal Rigo. Delarue’s place does resemble, a little, Rigolo, the Rigo restaurant in Laurel Village. The latter is bigger and has a more extensive menu (including wine), but while the food is good, it isn’t better than Pâtisserie Philippe’s. I was particularly taken by PP’s croque monsieur ($5.95), the classic grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich that here is caked with a béchamel sauce — a bit on the rich side, yes, but the sandwich is European in scale. It’s not huge, in other words; five or six bites and you’re done, and you’re well satisfied. If the sandwich were built out to American standards, it would be two or three times as big and perhaps worthy of the sports bar next door. But … inelegant. Anyway, there are plenty of other savories to sample, and the panini are quite large.

This has much to do with their being assembled on ciabatta bread. The name means slipper in Italian and refers to the loaves’ long, flat shape; sandwiches made from ciabatta are particularly well-suited to the panini press. Pâtisserie Philippe’s versions ($5.95) feature ham or chicken along with melted mozzarella and provolone cheeses. I liked them both but preferred the ham, which was a little more deep-voiced and assertive in the face of all that white goo. If neither appeals, there is a fine spinach quiche ($3.75 for a not inconsiderable slice) — a kind of open-face spanikopita, with a gorgeous flaky-tender, golden pastry crust.

Although the French aren’t known for their vegetarianism, Pâtisserie Philippe is surprisingly vegetarian-friendly. There is a vegetarian baguette sandwich, but even better is the wide array of salads and side dishes. You could make a nice little lunch out of these alone — perhaps a picnic lunch, if you can find a swatch of grass in the neighborhood other than the little lawn in the middle of the roundabout. (The host building, which seems to be at least a block square, or triangular, fills up what was once the parking lot for the handsome old Baker and Hamilton edifice and its warren of eclectic furniture stores.)

We particularly liked a pair of salads ($3.25 each for half-servings of about a cup) made from shreddings of roots that don’t often attain headliner status: carrot and celery root. We noted in each a texture like that of cappellini cooked al dente, and a firm but gentle embrace of well-mellowed vinaigrette. The potato salad (also $3.25) was good too, though heavily dotted with tabs of ham. And at the end of this road we find the drastically unvegetarian pork rillettes ($4.50), a mash of slow-cooked meat mixed with fat to become a ropy paste you spread on rounds of baguette and enjoy with cornichons, the little pickles. The rillettes were slightly undersalted, I thought, but did not lack for satisfying lipidity.

No consideration of a patisserie would be complete without a discussion of the sweets on hand. Plenty of familiar faces here, from a chocolate éclair ($2.50) — milk-chocolaty-ish — to an elaborately layered, single-serve apple tart ($3.50) — excellent pastry, mediocre apples — to a fine bread pudding ($3.75), laced with large blackberries and pregnant with custard. The one standout we found was a bouchée caramel ($2.50), a disk of brioche with a shortcake-like depression in the middle that was filled with caramel. It was a bit like a crème caramel with brioche instead of custard and no ramekin to have to clean up afterward. Here, it seems to me, was the no-muss-no-fuss wisdom of the sugar cone as applied to pastry: the serving vessel was itself edible, and delectable.

Pâtisserie Philippe’s greatest liability could be its location, in the middle of a dark-faced building a long block long with not much to distinguish the storefronts. I can’t say I mourn the erstwhile parking lot, but the design district, of all districts, seems like an odd place to raise such a boring building. *

PÂTISSERIE PHILIPPE

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–6 p.m.;
Sat., 8 a.m.–5 p.m.

655 Townsend, SF

(415) 558-8016

www.patisseriephilippe.com

No alcohol

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

A stitch in time

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Today’s lesson — do as I say, not as I do — pertains to knives. What I say is what all sensible people say: keep your knives sharp; keep the tips of your fingers bent under the knuckles when chopping, mincing, dicing, and so forth; and, most important, do not rush. I rushed, and I paid, by slashing my ring finger with the 10-inch chef’s knife I had perhaps neglected ever so slightly. The result was a scene of carnage and gore the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the long-ago TV footage of Rockingham and Bundy, plus four stitches. All this, as Sir Thomas More might sadly have said to me — if A Man for All Seasons had concerned cutlery and Indian food — for vindaloo. And the vindaloo was too vinegary, I was advised from across the table. Must tweak the recipe.

It is one of life’s glum facts that collateral damage occurs in kitchens. Virtually every everyday cook I know has a scarred finger or two or (in one case) is even missing a fingertip. Then there are the lesser insults: the spattered shoes and shirts, the spattered cookbooks. I have a large wardrobe of aprons, and I always try to keep open cookbooks away from spatter zones — not to mention open flame — but cooking, like war, is organized chaos, and one’s best intentions can easily go awry when the pot comes to a boil or the minced garlic gently sizzling in the pan starts to smell acrid and you must act in haste.

The injured finger was the bird-flipping one, and while this procedure wasn’t compromised by either wound or stitches (not that I had any public occasion to try, and not, of course, that I would have if I’d had), I did feel curiously diminished. I had trouble signing my name and putting in my contact lenses — even sleeping, that first night, since the installation of the stitches was followed by an extravagant wrapping with gauze and a metal pinch cap that made me feel as if I had been given the finger equivalent of a club foot, an unwieldy mass I could find no comfortable place for and that only stopped throbbing once I’d popped a Tylenol or two. Tylenol doesn’t cure vinegar breath, alas.

Myconos

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Our town, for all its glories, does have its little shortages here and there. We are, in particular, not as rich as some of the bigger cities in the "littles" and "towns" that give those great metropolises their distinctive scents of ethnic potpourri. Oh, we do have a Chinatown and a Japantown, and our Little Italy can be found living under a pseudonym in North Beach. There’s even a remnant of a French quartier on lower Nob Hill, along a run of Bush Street that includes the Alliance Française, the French consulate, and the Église Notre Dame des Victoires. But for all San Francisco’s affinity for the Mediterranean, many of the Mediterranean cultures are virtually invisible here. I was reminded, after visiting Chicago recently, that we have not only no Greektown but hardly any Greek restaurants, hardly any place where your cheese can be set on fire before your eyes with a cry of "Opa!"

Flaming cheese (not to be confused with the Flaming Homer) is known by the Greeks as saganaki, and it is on the menu at Myconos, a Polk Street stalwart that has survived since the 1970s and preserves an authentic sense of Greek rusticity, as such latecomers as Kokkari and Mezes do not. Greece, we should remember, is one of the poorest countries in Europe; it is quite near both Africa and the Middle East and was ruled rather harshly for several centuries by the Ottoman Turks. (One enduring monument to the struggle against the Turkish occupation is the semiruined Parthenon in Athens, which had been built in the golden age of Pericles in the fifth century BCE and stood intact for two millennia, until, in the 17th century, the occupiers turned it into a munitions dump, which then exploded.) If we ever start wondering why the argument between Christianity and Islam is so bitter, we can get much of our answer simply by considering the Greek case.

Fortunately, everybody likes saganaki, with the possible exception of the American Heart Association. ("I wish they’d never invented fried cheese!" Marge Simpson says in a fantasy graveside scene in which Homer has died of obesity and is being buried in a piano crate lowered by a crane. These are her last words, for the crane then gives way and the crate crushes everyone.) Myconos’s version ($9.95) isn’t detonated tableside, but it does reach the table still spitting blue flames, and it does develop a wonderful golden crust that contrasts nicely with the cheese’s natural citrusy (and not too salty) tang.

Saganaki is probably about as good for you as dessert, so after your sinful beginning, you will be relieved to find that the rest of the menu is dotted with salads, legume dishes, and vegetarian choices. We found the hummus ($4.95) to be non–Middle Eastern despite the accompanying warm pita bread; the chickpea puree was coarse rather than peanut-butter smooth and seemed not to have been mixed with tahini, the sesame seed paste. The dominant flavors, instead, were those of lemon and garlic.

The restaurant’s version of a Greek salad — mixed greens tossed with roma tomato coins, crumblings of feta cheese, and onion slivers — turns up beside many of the main courses. Among these is a rather splendid pastitsio ($11.95), a kind of Greek lasagna that combines layers of tubular pasta, seasoned ground beef, and béchamel cheese sauce into a shape that resembles a large square hamburger (with the béchamel cheese sauce looking like the top half of the bun). The wind blows from the east across the pastitsio, bringing the scent of nutmeg, perfume of the Middle East and even points beyond. This is not surprising; as Elson M. Haas, MD, instructs us in Staying Healthy with Nutrition (Celestial Arts/Ten Speed, $39.95), "the Middle Eastern nations consume a variant of the Indian diet," and Greece is on the fringes of the Middle East.

Novices, neophytes, and the inattentive might be forgiven, in fact, if they mistook the Greek condiment tzatziki — a sauce of yogurt, shredded cucumber, garlic, and onion — for the Indian condiment raita, a sauce of yogurt and cucumber. Tzatziki is the salsa of Greek cooking and has a way of turning up everywhere, but we found it only as an accompaniment to garides souvlaki ($15.95), two brochettes of grilled shrimp plated with roasted potatoes and salad.

I was not impressed with the falafel ($5.95 at lunch), despite the massiveness of the plate: five Titleist-size balls arrayed on a carpet of pita and topped with a blob of hummus that looked like lumpy gravy. The falafel balls were unwarm and undersalted; worse, they recurred on the vegetarian platter, which offered (in addition to the falafel and in place of the cottage potatoes) a dolma — a torpedo of seasoned rice swaddled in grape leaves — and a round of spanikopita, the phyllo pie stuffed with spinach and cheese. These teaser items were tasty enough to distinguish themselves from the falafel but not substantial enough to make up for it.

The wine list is brief but does include a variety of Greek bottlings both red and white, and these tend to be quite good value. Although the Greeks have been making wine since time out of mind, the country’s modern wine industry had fallen into disrepair until recently and was known mostly for retsina, whose turpentine quality can be overwhelming. There is also a selection of Greek beers, including a lovely golden lager from Hillas. After a few of these, even Homer might nod. *

MYCONOS

Mon.–Thurs., noon–10 p.m.; Fri., noon–11 p.m.; Sat. 1–11 p.m.; Sun., 1–10 p.m.

1431 Polk, SF

(415) 775-7949

www.sfmyconos.com

DC/MC/V

Beer and wine

Can get loud

Wheelchair accessible

Grapes of steel

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If the wine gods should decree that I must no longer be permitted any whites, I would weep — but survive too. While it may be true, as Deuteronomy instructs, that "man does not live by bread alone," he — or we or I — surely could make do with red wine only. The charms of red wine are considerable and inescapable, from the gracious lean strength of a good pinot noir to the cherry-and-pepper bouquet of a côtes du Rhône or zinfandel in its prime. Red wine is, somehow, gravid with life itself.

And yet … I am one of those people for whom white wine is not a second choice or second-rate. A well-chilled white for me can have some of the same limpid elegance as a martini — at least if it is a well-balanced white, crisp with acid and properly founded on minerality. The French make this sort of wine better than anyone else in the world, with excellent examples from Sancerre, Vouvray, and Chablis, to name just a few appellations, and if California-made wines in this style are much harder to find, that just makes looking for them more fun.

At a recent tasting of forthcoming Burgundian and Alsatian bottlings, I was reminded of the gold standard, which in this setting (at Masa’s) took the form of a Chablis: Domaine Faiveley’s Grand Cru Les Clos, a beautiful straw-colored wine made as if from grapes of steel. The fruit used is in fact chardonnay, and some of its appley character could be detected amid the sweeping sense of earth and sky — terroir is the French word — that make Chablis and Sancerre whites more alike than not. Although white Sancerres are made from sauvignon blanc grapes, the two districts are quite near each other and produce remarkably similar wines. (Chablis is one of France’s greatest appellations, incidentally, and how the name came to be slapped on supermarket jug wine in this country is a mystery.)

A few days later, I found myself at a sun-spattered winery open house, breathing in the tropical fumes of various California chardonnays — each quite good in its way, if you like that way, the Barry Bonds, unnaturally big, toast-with-butter-and-vanilla way. I found myself wondering: is there a red in the house, even a simple house red?

Caffe Bella Venezia

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The world traveler might arrive in some strange foreign city eager to find enlightenment at the table — to suss out the city’s most interesting and revealing restaurants and ponder the cultural clues they offer — but first there is the matter of jet lag. The world traveler has an urgent need for a good night’s sleep and perhaps a meal that’s somehow authentically local but not too difficult: not too expensive or far away or served at a place that’s difficult to get into. Tourist cities — of which ours is one — must have plenty of restaurants to provide this service, just as they must have plenty of other places to provide dazzle and memories while charging prices that keep the local tourist economy well watered and in bloom.

We don’t lack for the second, lofty sort of restaurant, of course, but you might be surprised that we have examples of the former too. While stepping into Caffé Bella Venezia one recent mild evening, I noticed a huge youth hostel on the other side of Post Street, and I was glad. For a city that so self-consciously links itself to youth culture, ours is a fearfully — I might even say prohibitively — expensive place for youth to visit. Youth tends to be impecunious, and that won’t get you very far at the Ritz-Carlton or even the Phoenix, no matter how charming and chic your pennilessness. If the concierge is nice, you might be sent down to the hostel on Post Street, not far from Union Square and the theater district, and welcomed there. And if you’re hungry, you might next be sent across the street to Bella Venezia, which isn’t exactly Venetian — except for all the wall art, with its many depictions of gondoliers and canals — but is appealingly pan-Italian, with a rich selection of pastas. If money is one language everybody speaks, pasta is another.

Venice has long been the most eastward-looking of Italian cities. For centuries it was the western terminus of the Silk Road to China, and after the horrendous Fourth Crusade in 1204 — in which Venetian forces sacked the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, instead of carrying on to the Holy Land — it was handsomely decorated with Byzantine gewgaws looted from that ancient city. One associates certain oriental perfumes, of cinnamon and nutmeg, among others, with the cooking of Venice, and while you’re not likely to catch a whiff of these at Bella Venezia, you might catch a latter-day Silk Road echo: the chef is Italian, and his Filipina wife runs the front of the house with the help of their son.

Meanwhile, much of the clientele speaks little or no English. While we did note several solitary, possibly Anglophone, diners roosting forlornly at tables on various evenings, we were more struck by the parade of high-spirited young people moving in packs and speaking, say, French. Of course the French like and serve pasta, even if they’re French Canadian. And just about everyone would like Bella Venezia’s fettuccine arlecchino ($9.95), a lively and colorful mélange of zucchini coins, black olives, and sun-dried tomatoes in a sauce of garlic and goat cheese and a heaping tangle of pasta. Even better is gnocchi ($5 for a small plate that’s not that small), which isn’t really a pasta but is often grouped with the pasta family. Bella Venezia’s house-made lobes are achingly tender, stuffed with gorgonzola, and bathed with a mushroom cream in which we detected, we thought, a hint of brandy breath.

I was surprised to find that I did not quite care for the lasagna ($9.95). So seldom am I disaffected in this way that I can’t recall the last time it happened, if it ever did. But BV’s lasagna, though served in an immense portion, had an unbecoming sweetness; too much minced onion mixed in with the ground beef? We noted a similar problem with the minestrone ($4.50), a run-of-the-mill vegetable soup heavy with carrots, onions, celery, zucchini, potatoes, and shreds of spinach — but no tomatoes, white beans, or pasta. Both lasagna and minestrone responded to salting, the latter more smartly than the former.

A nice feature of the menu is that you can get little versions of pizzas, pastas, and salads for $3 to $6 each. A pair of these makes a nice two-course dinner for someone who isn’t starving or is watching carb intake or feels a little jet-lagged. Pizza regina ($4.75) is a daughter of the full-figured pizza margherita, topped with the same combination of tomatoes, oregano, basil, and mozzarella — plenty of mozzarella. Pizza salsiccia ($8.95) is (to extend our familial imagery) an uncle, a brawny pie of meaty mushrooms and lots of fennel-charged Italian sauces. If the current vogue of thin-crust pizza has left you fatigued, you will appreciate BV’s slightly thicker, breadier crusts.

Two of the restaurant’s best dishes turn up as appetizers. Caprese salad ($6.95) is often routine, a tried-and-true medley of sliced tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, but here it is lightly doused with a pesto vinaigrette that enlivens each constituent while bringing them together. (All salad dressings are supposed to do this, but few do it this well.) And sautéed mussels ($9.95) arrive in a pool of garlicky tomato–white wine sauce that will have you motioning for more of the house-made focaccia to sop it up with, since it is impolite to do so with your fingers, even if you’ve just flown in from Venice and have jet lag. *

CAFFÉ BELLA VENEZIA

Dinner: nightly, 5 p.m.–midnight

720 Post, SF

(415) 775-1156

www.caffebellavenezia.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not loud

Wheelchair accessible

It’s the environment, stupid

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You must be a pretty good orator if you can bewitch a roomful of people who can’t understand a word you’re saying — except for, perhaps, your incantatory "stupido!"s while discussing America’s many foolish agricultural policies — and by this standard Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, is a pretty good orator. He held a media crowd rapt at a lunch recently at Greens, the point of which gathering was to proclaim the advent of Slow Food Nation a year hence at Fort Mason. Dutifully I cheer and huzzah the news, though I continue to think the word "slow" is all wrong for this country. In America, "slow" means "stupid" — or, as Petrini and his fellow Italians would say, "stupido."

"Stupido" — operatic accent on the first syllable — is great fun to say, much more fun than "biodiesel," which seemed to be Mayor Gavin Newsom’s mantra as he addressed the same crowd in its native English. Why, you ask, would the mayor be discussing biodiesel at a food-related gathering? Was he planning to haul away some of the restaurant’s used cooking oil for use in Muni buses? Or was he reminding us of the deeper political tectonics at work beneath Slow Food? Food is politics, and a rising theme in politics these days is the fate of the earth itself.

Newsom, despite the travails of the past few months, looked like one of the youngest people in the room — the man with the most tomorrows in the bank. The likelihood is that most of his political career is still ahead of him, and what does a politician of his age see when scanning the prospect? Crisis, of course, since that is the nature of politics and indeed of human beings, but crisis of a new sort, one in which the livability of this globe and the survival of its inhabitants can no longer be assumed. The younger you are, the more acutely you sense that the consequences of our poor planetary stewardship will make your stay here less pleasant — and maybe to suppose that biomass fuels and sustainable agriculture are important pieces of the same big puzzle.

I love slow food by any name, and I am older than the mayor by more years than please me, but on the matter of ecopolitics: faster is better.

Quixote’s Mexican Grill

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Literary nerds will note a slight irony in the naming of a Mexican restaurant after Don Quixote — a.k.a. Alfonso Quixano — the touchingly quixotic unhero of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, first published in Spain in 1605. The novel has nothing to do with Mexico, though Mexico has plenty to do with Spain, beginning with a shared language and faith and including a certain goriness in cultural mythology. The restaurant in question, Quixote’s Mexican Grill (which opened toward the end of winter in a little run of shops behind Muni Metro’s Forest Hill station), serves an excellent sangria. I love sangria and soak it up like a sponge, but sangria (the name is derived from sangre, "blood") isn’t Mexican. Sangria, as probably most of us know, is a wine cocktail, and Mexico produces almost no wine. Spain, on the other hand, produces tons; it is one of the world’s great wine-producing lands, and sangria is a distinctively Spanish drink, something to sip, or swill, late on a sun-splashed afternoon under a parasol somewhere on the Costa Brava.

I come not to pick nits, though, because Quixote’s is a charming neighborhood place that turns out some interesting, unexpected dishes, and sangria is lovely whether on the Spanish coast or at the wild intersection of Dewey and Woodside, with a cold city summer sweeping in on wings of Dickensian fog. Sangría de rojo ($7 for a goblet) slyly raises expectations, and the kitchen at Quixote’s, while capably turning out the Mexican standards that have become American favorites (tacos, burritos, enchiladas, and so forth), also offers a dish, Sancho’s borrecherra ($18.95), that features a sauce concocted from beer and wine. New World meets Old, and they dance; more on this anon.

Let’s begin in the middle of the degree-of-sophistication scale, with an old friend that gets restaurant treatments of varying appeal: the chile relleno ($5.95). My companion, a connoisseur of chiles rellenos, wrinkled his brow skeptically when the plate was set before him, but he was relieved to find the pepper — the proper kind, a poblano, deep green and tapered, with a breath of heat — had been roasted and peeled, not dunked in batter and deep-fried. He also approved of the cheese inside (molten queso blanco, oozing) and of the ranchero sauce. I agreed, while noting with satisfaction the sets of ketchup squirt bottles on each table, one filled with red salsa, the other with green. Caveat: the red kind is quite hot.

Caveat, continued: a number of the dishes can be quite hot, as we discovered at dinner one evening. We opened with a sweet-tempered queso fundido ($5.50), a crock of melted cheese presented with a foil envelope containing a huge flour tortilla cut into quarters. The most sensitive palate could have eaten this dish and enjoyed it as we did. That same palate would also have responded warmly to the ocean tacos ($3.50 each), filled with grilled mahimahi, shredded lettuce, and mango dice for a bit of ripe sweetness. But the firestorm was not far off.

Sancho’s borrecherra — a prawn dish — looked tame enough, its sauce the rich color of ale, the prawns peeled and easy to eat. But the seemingly benign amber liquid turned out to be so spicy that the prawns themselves, lightly splashed with it, were little torches, bearers of flame, though shrimp flesh is famed for a delicate marine sweetness. My companion, who has grown less tolerant of spicy food over the years, accepted my offer of a straight-up trade for my mahimahi tacos, and we agreed to joint custody of the borrecherra’s two side dishes, black beans and cayenne corn.

The black beans were fabulous, deeply tasty with no incendiary properties. But the cayenne corn was another matter. Corn, like shrimp, is naturally sweet and takes well to a judicious enlivenment with cayenne pepper. But … not too much! Too much, and you set people’s mouths on fire. My companion, having abandoned the shrimp to me, soon abandoned the flaming corn niblets as well, and while I have retained a higher tolerance for hot food, even I in the end found the corn and shrimp to be a bridge too far. It was as if the sorcerer’s apprentice were working the stoves that night and had by accident knocked over an entire jar of cayenne pepper into a pot, turning a pinch into a fistful. We sought refuge in dessert — in particular, the escudo ($5.95), which our server told us was a Mexican version of the s’more. He was right: What appeared in due course was a plateful of deep-fried pastry triangles dotted with half-melted minimarshmallows and a generous piping of chocolate sauce. If, in some alternate universe, nachos are dessert, then the escudo plate is from that universe. And the only heat we noticed was the physical heat of oven and deep-fryer, pleasantly waning.

Although Quixote’s occupies your typical midblock storefront, a certain amount of thought and effort has been put into making it attractive. The blond wood banquettes have a Scandinavian angularity to them — they could be in a sauna — while the walls have been coated in textured plaster and painted a sunburned almond color to give the sense of old adobe. I associate old adobe with Mexico, not Spain, but I probably do so a little less after a glass or two of sangria. *

QUIXOTE’S MEXICAN GRILL

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

406 Dewey Blvd., SF

(415) 661-1313

Beer and wine

Moderately loud

MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Nuts about wine!

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What sort of birthday present do you get for the wine fancier who already has everything: a cellar full of rare and prized bottles, a kitchen drawer with a full complement of cork pulls, a special refrigerator for chilling wine? You might tell yourself that not every wine fancier has everything — yet — but because oenophilia has become such a conspicuous component of lifestyle pornography, of status-consumption culture, the gap between aspiration and acquisition narrows a little every day. If wine in these parts is now a sort of wampum, constantly traded in an informal barter economy, it is still one thing to show up for dinner at somebody else’s house with a bottle of midrange chardonnay or pinot noir and quite another to present the same wine as a gift that’s supposed to signify in its own right.

The situation isn’t hopeless, however, at least for the moment, because at the Ross Valley Winery in San Anselmo, owner and winemaker Paul Kreider has begun turning out half bottles of vin de noix ("wine of nuts," specifically walnuts), a Provencal-style digestif little known in this country. The walnut-infused wine has a portlike presence, with a low center of gravity and some restrained though deep sweetness, but it is a different color and has an extra dimension in the mouth. The color is the easier of the two differences to describe; whereas port is typically a deep ruby hue, the vin de noix looks like a blend of well-aged balsamic vinegar and some kind of winter ale. As for the additional flavor: it is nutty. If there were a dessert version of Kürbiskernöl (the Austrian pumpkinseed oil), it would be something like the vin de noix.

Best of all, for the gift-minded shopper, is the price — $20. That’s not nothing, but it’s a pretty good deal for what you get. The smallness of the bottle, incidentally, adds to the aura by suggesting that the elixir within is potent and concentrated, a drink to be not quaffed but sipped, thought about, discussed, sipped some more.

And in other news, a reader wrote to remind me (apropos of my recent piece on Portuguese wine) that there is indeed a Portuguese restaurant in the Bay Area other than the Grubstake (if the latter even fully counts). That would be La Salette, on Sonoma’s town square. Obrigado.

Weird Fish

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The fishing-out of the oceans, like all disasters, has produced its share of odd delights. Fish that were considered junk a generation ago — monkfish, grouper, skate — suddenly didn’t look so shabby when cod and bluefin tuna became scarce. Today’s weird fish is tomorrow’s lovable fish, mostly because it’s still there. But these little discoveries of necessity tend to end up amplifying the problem, as species go from being overlooked to sought after and thus overfished. Skate: one of nature’s most fabulous fish to eat, and a no-no.

At Weird Fish, a distinctly Mission-style seafood joint that opened late last year, you aren’t going to find much in the way of weird fish on the menu. You will find, in a host of guises, tilapia and catfish, a pair of river species (the former native to the Nile) that have become favorites of aquaculture. Farmed versions produce filets of mild white flesh that, like chicken, lends itself to sassy preparations and accompaniments, which the kitchen at Weird Fish ably supplies. But you aren’t stuck with them; in the evening the menu opens out to include such interesting, though far from weird, specimens as trout and ahi.

The restaurant’s physical setting is striking, despite the ordinariness of the storefront space: a deep, high-ceilinged, and narrow shoebox with a single aisle, as on a cramped airliner. The interior design includes swatches of blue-green paint and mirrors that look like portholes, but the overall effect doesn’t say "seafood house" so much as "Mission hipster café." If you’re in any doubt, the loud, bad music should clear it up. Here is yet another restaurant that does not need to be adding decibels beyond the ample number provided by the clientele. We did like the tabletops of pressed-tin ceiling remnants under glass.

Seafood takes far better to spicy handling than conventional wisdom — with its delicate sauces of butter, shallots, and white wine — seems to understand, and Weird Fish isn’t afraid of laying it on. A catfish po’boy ($7) wouldn’t be much without its bayou-style rémoulade, just a slab of breaded, deep-fried fish filet on soft bread. But the sweet heat of the sauce, essentially a mayonnaise reinforced with mustard and cayenne, provided enough voltage to power the sandwich. For an extra $2.50 you can get a side of fries — a blend of potato and yam sticks — but, given the scale of the handsomely bronzed stack, sharing is a thought to consider. Salting up is another. In this connection, the vegetarian black-bean chili ($3 for a cup) deserves a mention; it was dotted with corn niblets and was excellent in a mild-mannered way once a few good licks from the saltshaker had been applied. A few good licks of chipotle pepper would have been nice too, but I didn’t see that shaker.

Not everything on the menu is strongly seasoned. A sandwich of grilled tilapia ($7), for instance, was quite tasty despite an absence of any condiment other than coleslaw, but then, grill smoke is basically a spice. And a split-pea soup ($3.50 for a cup) was hearty and textural and didn’t seem to miss a powerful organizing flavor. But another soup, the ballyhooed tortilla (also $3.50) — almost like a thick salsa decorated with chunks of avocado and a blob of sour cream, with thin strips of crisped tortilla arranged around the edge of the bowl like a rib cage — delivered a forceful wallop of capsicum heat that would have done the black-bean chili proud.

We found the Jamaican-style catfish ($7) to be on the docile side despite a thick smear of jerk sauce spooned over the top of the poached filet. The jerk tended toward sweetness rather than menace; it was like a defensive fortification, a blanket draped over some weak-kneed (though firm and moist) fish, rather than a swaggering man-o’-war presence. But a daily-special starter, ahi tuna tartare ($10), did swagger. The cubes of ruby flesh were gently tossed in a ginger-soy-cayenne bath before being arranged atop a trio of deep-fried wonton skins, like a set of magic carpets bronzed as mementos of some exotic childhood in Lilliput.

And the evening’s "suspicious" dish ($10; the price varies), a kind of chef’s surprise, turned out to be spectacularly tasty despite being a pasta — linguine, in fact, tossed with a medley of bay shrimp, clams, and prawns in a garlic–<\d>white wine sauce perfumed with cilantro. The sauce gave a pleasant tingle on the lips, and the clams and small shrimp were fine in their supporting roles, but we did find the larger prawns to be noticeably dry and mealy: had they been frozen and thawed? Frozen too long or mishandled in some other way? This was an unexpected shortcoming in a restaurant that announces its commitment to high-quality ingredients in a posting at the doorway.

Apart from some hinky shellfish and too much noise, Weird Fish gives us a mostly bracing vision of a modern San Francisco seafood house. It is not the obvious descendant of such old-timers as Tadich Grill and Sam’s, nor is it the clear relation of such temples of luxe as Farallon and Aqua — but it does, perhaps, have some wisdom to impart to these august places despite being a whippersnapper. Its emphases on sustainability and the ingenious making of lemonade from the lemons of fish farming do raise the hope, however modest, that the weird fish of today will still be there tomorrow. *

WEIRD FISH

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–midnight

2193 Mission, SF

(415) 863-4744

www.weirdfishsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Loud

Wheelchair accessible

The pyramid

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While fretting a few days ago about the menace of the $40 main dish, I spoke to my neighbor, who on a recent trip to San Diego had a close encounter with a $63 main course, some kind of veal with truffles. San Diego — not Las Vegas, not New York. She ended up with a $40-something main dish (veal, no truffles), and I went to New York to forage on the lower reaches of the city’s restaurant pyramid.

High-end restaurant food, whether veal or something else, doesn’t just happen: it is built, or cooked, or created, on an infrastructure of more modest restaurants. In these places, far from the lurid glow of the world’s Columbus Circles, cooks and eaters alike educate themselves; expectations are formed and preferences established. While I am not a partisan of the inventive, technique-driven school of cooking that seems to prevail in New York City, I have always found the standard of execution in Manhattan restaurants to be of the highest order. Had, I must now say, for after spending several days grazing in restaurants up and down the West Side, I became filled both with surprisingly mediocre food and with disappointment.

Let us begin by granting conditional pardon to busy-body New York chefs, who after all must spend months working their way around an inconvenience called a real winter. Still, is this any excuse for serving plate after plate of perfectly unseasoned food? At a place called Fairway Café (above the fabulous Fairway Market on B’way at 74th St.), I nearly wore out my salt-shaking hand in the struggle to revive a succession of dishes, beginning with grilled asparagus and a mushroom pizza and continuing to creamed spinach and some linguine with scallops and pesto. At Swagat, a fragrant, crowded Indian restaurant on Amsterdam, it was the same, with the chicken tikka masala sweet rather than tangy. And again at Louie’s, a handsome café with extensive outdoor seating, a big Sunday brunch–with–the–Times service, and a DOA huevos rancheros–style egg preparation.

We were warned beforehand, by an Upper West Side–dwelling friend, that the neighborhood was a dead zone for food. The better places, he said, are all downtown. I came to see his point, but I couldn’t help wondering how good the food downtown would have to be to impress people immiserated by bad food uptown. That is the $63 question.

Paul Reidinger

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David’s Kitchen

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In the kitchen of David’s Kitchen, a tiny restaurant in the Sunset, you will find David. The kitchen is of the semiexhibition sort, viewable from the snug dining room through a rectangular aperture that looks as if it once might have housed a picture window or maybe a large plasma flat-screen television. Was this space once home to a sports bar? David is David Chang, a native of China who opened the place with his wife, Terri, about four years ago. He could have called it David Chang, if he’d cared to join the trend of to-the-greater-glory-of-me chef-owners who name their restaurants after themselves. I have sometimes wondered how often these grand people can actually be found in their own kitchens. "David’s Kitchen" suggests to us that David is actually in the kitchen, and so he is, perhaps cooking your lunch after taking your order. At lunch it can be just you and him; it’s like having your own short-order chef. He seats you, writes down what you want, then makes and serves it. You are happy, even when he presents the bill, which your own short-order chef would never be so crass as to do. But then, even the best fantasies have limits.

It would be difficult to overstate the intimacy of David’s Kitchen. Like Thai Time, the fabulous and impossibly small restaurant on Eighth Avenue in the Inner Richmond, David’s Kitchen has only a handful of tables and fills to near capacity when a few parties of three or four come through the door at about the same time. If there had been an Asian restaurant on Skylab, the makeshift space station from the 1970s, it might have looked something like this. While David’s menu does include a strong Thai element, it’s pan-Asian in a way Thai Time’s isn’t; there are even a few New World items thrown in — for fun? Or because of neighborhood demand? One of them, the chicken barley soup ($3.50), we found to be insipid, but that was the only dish we came across that failed to sing in a clear, strong voice.

Even among the Asian dishes, one finds the occasional global touch. Although fat seafood noodles ($5.95 at lunch) spoke with a pronounced Thai accent — the sauce was coconut-milk green curry, with a strong subplot of chile heat — the noodles themselves were fettuccine, for a slight Marco Polo twist. The seafood, meanwhile (shrimp, mussels, clams, and whitefish, leavened with zucchini quarters), was immaculate, in keeping with the restaurant’s assurance that "we use only the freshest ingredients."

XO chow fun noodles ($5.95), on the other hand, were the broad, glistening Chinese rice-flour kind, tossed with shreds of boneless chicken, bean sprouts, scallions, and (the star ingredient) XO sauce, a Hong Kong–<\d>style paste of dried shrimp and scallop along with garlic, onion, and chile peppers. This saucing gave the dish a flat, fierce heat, like an August day on the Great Plains — quite different from the rounded punch of the fat noodles — with a strong hint of onion breath and some soy saltiness.

Although many of the appetizers will seem familiar to anyone who’s eaten at a Thai or Chinese restaurant in these parts (and who hasn’t?), David’s versions are mostly executed with a soupçon of panache, which helps make them memorable. The crispy fish cakes ($5.75), for example, will never be mistaken for tortilla chips, but they do minimize the characteristic rubberiness of the average fish cake and achieve a delicate stiffening around the edges. It helps that they’re quite flat, like small griddle cakes.

Spring rolls ($4.95) were nearly ordinary, despite a weighty filling — of shredded chicken, bean sprouts, and shiitake mushrooms — and a crime-scene-red dipping sauce redolent of chiles and garlic. But the veggie pancake ($5.25) was unlike anything I’ve had before, a kind of soft Asian crepe, like a socca or farinata, made from ground lotus and taro root (instead of chickpea flour) and spruced up with water chestnuts, scallions, and pesto.

We also detected European influences, or echoes, in a duck curry stew ($9.95), a crock of meat, potatoes, and carrots that resembled beef burgundy, except that the beef was duck (a little fatty, but tasty) and the sauce had no red wine but plenty of yellow curry, mildest of the Thai curries. Spicy sunflower chicken ($6.75), on the other hand, though not yellow, was straight from Thailand — a larb, really, of minced white chicken tossed with a lively combination of Thai basil, garlic, and chiles. The meat was heaped in the center of a large plate, with canoelike leaves of endive set around the perimeter like hour markings on a watch. The endive was convenient for the scooping up of the minced meat, of course, but even after the leaves had run out, all the members of our table, forks in hand, were jostling for a crack at the last of the chicken.

The kitchen at David’s Kitchen doesn’t much look like the kitchen at Canteen, Dennis Leary’s small boutique place downtown. Leary’s kitchen is L-shaped, for one thing, and also more exhibitiony: you can sit at the counter and watch the chef work the stoves.

But to be at either place is to be aware that the restaurant as a labor of love is a phenomenon that persists even in this overpriced city — and that there are a few fine chefs who still do their own cooking. And then some. *

DAVID’S KITCHEN

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Thurs. and Sun., 5–9:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.

1713 Taraval, SF

(415) 566-6143

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately loud

Wheelchair accessible

Eyes on the prize

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The recent news that a food writer from Los Angeles won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism puts us on notice that food writing at its best is an art form – also that LA is a serious food town, loath though we may be to admit it. The southland has access to all sorts of local agricultural bounty, a nearby wine country (in Santa Barbara County), and a polyglot population that represents much of the world. It also has something we don’t have – an international border just miles away, with a genuinely different culture on the other side. This must be massively stimuutf8g.

Criticism is a minor art, secondary and derivative – there must be some larger, primary subject at hand to examine and consider – but its subordinate position doesn’t make it less worthy. Authentic food criticism tends to overcome this limitation anyway, since, handled in a certain way, it becomes a species of social or cultural criticism, a meditation on how people live their lives. As anyone who’s traveled abroad will know, one’s first and indelible experiences of other cultures often have to do with food: what it is, how it is grown or gathered, how it is prepared and presented. If it is true that one feels most American when outside of America, then perhaps it is also true that our industrial-food folly becomes most apparent to us when we are sitting in some cafe in a faraway land, awash in local food habits and practices that are hundreds or thousands of years old, and no one has heard of Velveeta.

The difference between criticism and reviewing is a segment of the border between art and craft, with the former more keenly attentive to wider and deeper meanings. Many of our food-involved locals abide by a credo of living to eat, but because this is true to some extent of every animal on the planet, its meaning seems a little watery to me and appears to involve mainly the hunt for the "best" version of this or that. I have no particular complaint with this, just as I have no quarrel with gearheads or fanciers of pedigreed dogs. But, as with other forms of monomania, it does have a flattening effect, reducing the world to a single dimension. LA is flat, but it isn’t just flat.

Paul Reidinger

> paulr@sfbg.com

Piccino Cafe

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Although restaurants can be, and often are described as being, sexy, they aren’t really sexy in that way, the people way. So far as we know, and for reasons that I need not get into, they don’t actually indulge. Which means that Piccino Cafe, a petite jewel of a restaurant that opened a few months ago on a quiet Dogpatch side street between the furies of I-280 and Third Street, cannot be the love child of, say, Universal Cafe and A16. Although such a union is flatly impossible – Universal and A16 have never met, never been alone together – one can’t stop wondering. Piccino’s serious yet warm industrial look (stainless steel, blond wood, glass), the almost tissue-thin pizza crusts coming out of the kitchen, and the ingredients obtained from impeccable sources all seem profoundly familiar if not familial.http://www.youtube.com/
YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.

If Piccino were a child, we might have our answer by waiting for it to grow up a bit. But, as the name suggests, the restaurant is tiny, with just a half dozen or so tables (not counting sidewalk seats) in a space largely given over to the kitchen. It’s almost like a catering kitchen or the original Citizen Cake; the setup seems tilted more toward making food than serving it to people, and we did notice quite a few takeout pizza boxes being whisked away by people who clearly live in the changing neighborhood. But despite the tight space, service is sharp; each table is swiftly brought a Straus Organic Creamery milk bottle filled with water (chilled but not filtered) and a plate of crispy flatbreads, and even at the outdoor tables, one’s needs are continually seen to.

It is a fact that sometimes restaurants, like children and even love children, do grow up: Delfina began in quarters no roomier than Piccino’s and is now an order of magnitude bigger, plus an adjoining pizzeria. Part of Piccino’s charm is its snugness, but the food is so good that demand is bound to raise the issue of expansion sooner or later, probably sooner. While that question simmers, wedge yourself in at one of the knee-to-knee tables, pour yourself a tumbler of water from your personal stash, have a bite of flatbread, and scan the brief menu.

What do you see? A selection of pizzas, of course, including such staples as margherita and napoletana ($9.25) – the latter swabbed with blood-red tomato sauce and dotted with halved black olives and bits of anchovy – along with special pies that vary according to season and inspiration. The people at the next table could be overheard urgently discussing a pizza topped with, among other things, speck.

"Maybe it’s fish," one of them said doubtfully. Her companion furrowed his brow. Only moments before, we too had furrowed our brows in bafflement about speck before asking our server. His answer: smoked prosciutto. The speck pie ($10.75), a bianco, was also topped with fresh arugula and mild white cheese. Since we like arugula, we’d started with a simple arugula salad ($7) decorated with Parmesan shavings and drizzled with balsamic vinegar – a simple and perfect combination, like an unforgettable piece of chamber music.

A weightier opener is the antipasti platter ($8.50), a blending of some usual suspects – country pate with Dijon mustard, thin coins of salume, black and green olives (mind the pits!) – along with a few special guests, including a chickpea spread that wasn’t hummus (coarser of texture, no tahini) and a bouquet of pickled baby carrots and radishes. There was flatbread on the side, of course, for clean-up duty.

The evening menu differs from its midday confrere mainly in the addition of a few nonbready main dishes. We did not try the evening’s risotto, though a plate that arrived at the next table (opposite the speck-flummoxed folk) looked fabulously creamy. We did try the duck confit ($14), a gently crisped leg and thigh half-recumbent on a bed of dandelion greens given some sweetness and crunch by sections of pixie tangerines and rubbly little bits of crushed hazelnuts. Duck confit is one of those ideal dishes for restaurants – it’s elegant and slightly exotic, highly skill- and time-intensive, with most of the work being done days beforehand and not much to do at the finish besides crisping the skin and warming the meat through – and Piccino’s version does honor to the kitchen. I wouldn’t have minded some lentils on the side, though maybe they’re considered cliche now, or maybe Americans just don’t have much use for legumes other than the peanut. And even with peanuts, we prefer the artifice of grinding them into paste.

There was at lunch an interesting minestrone ($5.50) that consisted largely of a mocha-colored cranberry-bean puree in which orecchiette floated like inner tubes on a muddy summer river. Perhaps legumes are more acceptable to the American palate if pulverized so as to be unrecognizable? And where there is soup, there is likely to be sandwich: of salume cotto ($8.75), slices of warm cured meat on grilled country bread. With arugula! And a nice heap of vinegar-modulated lentil salad on the side, with the legumes daringly left intact.

The advent of Piccino tells us which way the wind is blowing in the Dogpatch. In the evening the neighborhood’s streets are quiet (all the traffic is on the freeway a few blocks west and Third Street a few blocks east), and the houses show a friendly dowdiness, like a grandmother’s dresses. But the restaurant’s crowds are young and knowing, and if they’re not sure what speck is, they expect to find out. *

PICCINO CAFE

Mon.-Wed., 7 a.m.-3 p.m.; Thurs.-Fri., 7 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; Sat., 8 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; Sun. (coffee bar only), 8 a.m.-3 p.m.

801 22nd St., SF

(415) 824-4224

www.piccinocafe.com

Beer and wine

Cash only (credit cards pending)

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Scott Howard

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As an aficionado of the men’s-club look, I was swept into Scott Howard as if into some beautiful dream. Beyond the set of fluttering drapes that shield the host’s station from errant breezes blowing near the front door lies a world of coffee- and tea-colored wood (floor, table and chairs, wall trim), gently dim lighting, a slightly sunken floor like that of some kind of arena, and a brilliantly backlit bar standing against one wall like a sentinel.

But … we weren’t really under any delusion of having stepped into White’s or the Athenaeum in London; although Scott Howard’s interior design relies heavily on traditional materials, it gives them a spare, modern look. Lines are clean and frivolities few, and you feel that the restaurant is meant to appeal to tasteful people who know how to make much of time. There is no wasted motion or idle effect. The Cypress Club (which long occupied the space) is indeed gone for good.

The masculine cast of things isn’t surprising, if only because the restaurant’s chef-owner and eponym bear a name of double-barreled maleness. Yet Scott Howard (the restaurant, and maybe the man too) is all about elegance, not ESPN, and elegance here is understood as flowing from understatement. In this sense the place makes an interesting contrast to nearby Bix (just around the corner, on brick-lined, lanelike Gold Street), whose aura, while also male, has a distinctly more fanciful, Great Gatsby retro element. You could easily stand at Bix’s bar and indulge a brief fantasy of waiting for Nick Carraway; Scott Howard, by contrast, is very much of the here and now, spotlighted by halogen sconce lamps in the ceiling.

The tables are set comfortably far apart – a subtle touch that helps the restaurant breathe more easily and allows the restaurant’s patrons to converse in ordinary tones. And what would they be conversing about? Why, the prix fixe, of course, an innovation Howard returned to the one-and-a-half-year-old restaurant a few months ago. The deal is $32 for a three-course dinner – starter, main dish, and dessert, with a couple of choices available in each category – or $47 for the same dinner with wine pairings. (No choices as to the wines, and none needed, so far as I was concerned. The pairings were superior.)

A la carte devotees and other iconoclasts need not fret, for an entire side of the menu card is given over to the regular menu, whose entries, from a pork chop to Maine lobster to hamachi, reveal Howard’s distinctive blending of European, Asian, and all-American cooking. His style is a bit like Bradley Ogden’s, but with a less overt Middle Western bent.

It is sometimes said by cognoscenti that when visiting London and Paris, you should always go to London first so as not to be disappointed. If you start in Paris, you might find London, for all its splendors, a little tatty. A similar advisory ought to apply to Scott Howard’s tuna tartare ($12), a disk of chopped fish atop a bed of cubed avocado, with a well-modulated chorus of piperade and crisped chorizo bits on the side and, throughout, a subtle perfume of vanilla oil. This dish is so sublime that you will struggle not to order a second one (we struggled unsuccessfully), and if you start with it, you might find that it casts a shadow over everything that follows. One solution would be to have it for dessert, but this would seem odd, despite the vanilla; another would be not to have it at all, but this would be a heavy loss.

Only marginally less rapturous but considerably earthier is the orzo "mac and cheese" with tomato jam ($7 for a sizable crock), which could pass as an especially creamy risotto. ("That stuff is evil!" our server said to us with barely restrained glee. He meant "evil," of course, in the best possible, the Dame Edna, sense.) If Howard’s sensibility glides gracefully between the earthy and the sublime, then the prix fixe cooking finds a balance somewhere near the middle, in happy-medium country. The cooking here is sophisticated rather than dazzling – the kind of food your table considers for a moment in quiet admiration but does not hesitate to eat, while talking about other matters.

A tomato soup, for instance, was rich and thick, with a few flicks of fennel pollen (which looked like black pepper) cast over the molten surface and a faint hint of smokiness that suggested roasting. A plate of smoked salmon draped over a potato pancake – really more of a fritter – and garnished with a dollop of sour cream was a classic presentation, the kind of thing you might be served at your club, if you belonged to one. (Wine pairing for both: a crispy-rich albarino.)

The recurrence of salmon – Scottish, as a main course, with hedgehog mushrooms and coins of fingerling potatoes in a tarragon broth – didn’t quite make it up the mountain for me. The poached fish was fishy, the broth watery. Much better was roasted lamb loin, ruby rose in the middle, laid in two pieces atop a bed of braised spinach and scallions and finished with dribbles of truffled jus. Your club would definitely serve this with pride. (Wine pairing for both: an intense but controlled California primitivo.)

Prix fixe desserts seldom set the world on fire, and Scott Howard’s are no exception, though the sparkling moscato sounded a festive holiday note. Warm chocolate cake with blackberry coulis and whipped cream? Nice, but a rerun deep in syndication. There was nothing showy about butterscotch pudding either, except that it was dense and good, sweet but not too. Can a dessert be manly? *

SCOTT HOWARD

Dinner: Tue.-Sat., 5:30-10 p.m.

500 Jackson, SF

(415) 956-7040

www.scotthowardsf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

The importance of being imported

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If you think of Mateus or Lancer’s when you think of Portuguese wine, then you may soon be thinking anew. Portugal’s food and wines have been overshadowed by those of Spain, its larger Iberian neighbor, over the last generation or so, but the Portuguese viticultural tradition has its roots in Roman times and produces wines that compare favorably with any in the world. The issue at the moment is distributing them to that world – in particular, to us – and that means finding importers.

To judge by the offerings of a recent trade show, Portuguese winemakers aren’t going to have much trouble convincing the public about the quality of their wines nor about their value. I found myself, after rapturous sips of this and that, asking what a particular bottling might sell for at retail in Europe and repeatedly hearing, "2 euros 50" or "3 euros" – in other words, $3 or $4. I would have bought several cases on the spot if I’d been able to, the whites being especially appealing.

At least one wrinkle for Portuguese winemakers who want to sell their stuff here is that there is no restaurant infrastructure to serve as a wedge into public consciousness. Our Iberian restaurants are almost all Spanish, and there aren’t even that many of them; I am aware of only the Grubstake, a Polk Gulch hamburger salon, as an offerer of a full-scale Portuguese menu in the city, and even there you have to know what you’re looking for, lest you end up with a BLT from the regular menu. Some years ago, Stars, in one of its post-Jeremiah Tower configurations, made a point of featuring Portuguese wines, but that program went down with the restaurant.

Perhaps there will be a breakthrough wine, a Portuguese answer to gruner veltliner and albarino. (The Portuguese grow the latter, incidentally, as alvarinho.) I might place a small bet on white wines produced from antao vez, a grape indigenous to Portugal and grown in the Alentejo region southeast of Lisbon. The name looks a bit forbidding to the Anglophone eye – an unhelpful detail in a brand-name culture like ours – but the wines are bright and fresh, with a green fruitiness gently crisped by acid. Wines like these at $3 to $4 a bottle would be too good to be true – but maybe $5 or $6 is feasible?

Paul Reidinger

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El pollo greco

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Herbs tell stories, and the association of certain herbs with certain experiences can be specific and powerful. Basil, for instance, is summer and tomatoes, while sage is Thanksgiving and bread stuffing. Oregano? Its strong perfume is the smell of pizza — but it’s also Greek. It is, in particular, the herb that gives Athenian or Greek chicken its bewitching character.

For years I tried without much success to create at home a plausible version of the Athenian chicken that we found so irresistible in Greek restaurants. The restaurant chickens often seemed to have been roasted on rotisseries, and while I couldn’t match that, I did have my trusty vertical roasters, which produced (with day-before rubbing of kosher salt and Herbes de Provence) wonderful Zuni-style roast chickens. My basic theory was to substitute oregano for the Herbes; this worked, but the results were underwhelming, certainly no match for their Zuniesque brethren. Smashed garlic and lemon slices under the skin? These helped a little, but the birds still seemed to lack the sought-after verve.

Of course, there is more than one way to roast a chicken. Roasting says oven the way oregano says pizza, but it need not be so. Let us not forget pan roasting, a near relation to braising, in which the item in question is cooked on the stove top in a small amount of fat or other liquid. I had a time-tested recipe for pan-roasted lemon-rosemary chicken; what if I dropped the rosemary in favor of (dried) oregano? I did: eureka!

Start with an oregano-and-salt-rubbed chicken, cut into pieces. Put the pieces in a large nonstick skillet over lively heat for a minute or two, turning occasionally until they’re lightly seared. Add a couple of tablespoons each of sweet butter and olive oil to the pan, along with a good pinch of salt, a heaping tablespoon of dried oregano, and three cloves of smashed, peeled garlic. Cook for a few minutes more, shaking the pan and turning the pieces. Add a cup of dry white wine, and bring to a boil; reduce the heat and simmer, partly covered, for 30 to 40 minutes, turning the pieces now and then. When the chicken is golden brown, remove from the pan and deglaze with the juice of one lemon. I use a gravy separator for the pan juices, but you don’t have to. Serve the jus on the side and say oompah!

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Esperpento

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Spanish food may have struggled for recognition in this country and will almost certainly never be as well loved as its near relation, Italian cooking, but in the last decade or so the Iberian peninsula has given us at least one big present: the tapa. Tapas, the little plates that could, are so big now that they’re often not even remotely Spanish: we find Cuban and nuevo Latino and even American versions, while small plates from other cultures end up being called "tapas" for convenience’s sake. People might not know about, and might be chary of ordering, a meze platter, but if you call it Turkish or Greek tapas, they’re in.

At Esperpento, which turns 15 this year (the name means "absurdity"), the tapas are still tapas, still Spanish — the kinds of things you’d have with a beer or a glass of verdujo or rioja in the middle evening at some restaurant near the Plaza Mayor in Madrid. The venue itself, with its forest of support columns and cheerful, well-scuffed yellowness, looks like such a place and offers us a reminder that restaurant interiors evolve or accrete meaning through use and are not necessarily complete when created, no matter how elaborately and expensively they are designed. But what most amazes about Esperpento is the paella, which is actually better than good — quite near excellent, in fact. While I cling to my view that the best paella is likely to be made by a home cook, I can no longer say that restaurants can’t pull it off. Esperpento can and does, though, as with soufflés, you are given notice that there will be a 30-minute wait.

If you have to wait a spell for your main dish, what better way to pass the time than by noshing on tapas in a house of tapas? Esperpento’s selection is huge, turn-around time is short, and a surprising number of the small plates are vegetarian friendly. You could easily order up a meatless feast here without disappointing meat eaters in the slightest. Especially fabulous are the alcachofas a la plancha ($5.50), disks of thinly sliced artichokes grilled with a simple combination of garlic and parsley. And not far behind are the patatas ali-oli ($4.50), crispy-tender new-potato quarters generously spattered with garlic mayonnaise. If you like your potatoes a little less free-form, you might prefer the tortilla de patata ($6), which the menu describes as an "omelet" of potatoes and onion but is really more like a cross between a quiche and a tart and is far tastier (and substantial: the pie yields six decent-size slices) than its modest list of ingredients might imply.

As in Italian cooking, simple preparations yield potent results. Mushrooms sautéed with garlic ($5.25) were as meaty and fragrant as chunks of kebab. A salad of roasted julienne red pepper ($5.50) dressed with a house vinaigrette was gorgeous, even though the peppers were just the ordinary kind rather than the fancier (and slightly hotter) sort from Navarre. Boquerones ($5), Spain’s famous white anchovies, were dipped in batter and flash-fried, so they resembled french fries, while calamares a la plancha ($6.50) took a turn on the grill quick enough to keep them tender. One plancha-style dish did disappoint: clams ($6.25), which were not bad, just pallid despite garlic, parsley, and olive oil. And a salad of white beans ($4.75) could have used a boost of something.

A common booster in Spanish cooking is pimentón ahumado, or smoked paprika. This is the spice that gives Spanish chorizo its distinctive flavor, and it turned up big in the sauce of the rabbit stew ($6.75), a quasi-signature dish. The meat itself, still on the bone, was fine if not remarkable, but we carefully sopped up all of the sauce with rounds of white bread from the continually replenished basket.

The paella — de carnes y mariscos ($26 for two, but plenty for four if sufficiently preceded by tapas) — arrived in due course and was inspected. We noted the traditional two-handled pan, the wealth of meat, mussels, prawns, and green peas, and the bright yellowness of the rice — an indication that there has been no stinting on the saffron. The grains of rice were plump and glistening, a sign that they had just been cooked straight through rather than parboiled, left to wait, then finished in haste.

Best of all was the caramelized crust that had developed at the bottom of the rice layer. One of the big differences between risotto and paella is that the former is stirred more or less constantly, with a creamy result, while the latter is stirred hardly at all. The result of this stasis is the crust, which is something of a delicacy, though scraping it off and folding it into the rest of the dish can be an indelicate operation.

Paella is one of life’s more festive dishes, and Esperpento, despite its advanced age, has to be one of the more festive restaurants in the not-exactly-somnolent Mission: large parties wait at the door, tables are pushed together, cheerful voices are raised, plates laden with tapas fly from the kitchen (to return a few minutes later, stripped clean), service staff move nimbly among the tables like performers in some high-wire circus act. It is chaos, yes, but functional chaos, absurd as that might sound. *

ESPERPENTO

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Fri., 5–10 p.m. Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., noon–10 p.m.

3295 22nd St., SF

(415) 282-8867

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Assault on batteries

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The urban forager is generally looking for something to eat, but this does not have to be the case. While there is an undeniable pleasure in bringing edibles (blackberries, nasturtiums) home to the table from the metropolitan wild, there is also satisfaction in gathering up rubbish and disposing of it properly. And just as the city is a remarkably fertile place, so too is it rich in articles it would be better off not being rich in.

We have all seen the plastic water bottles rustling in the gutters like autumn leaves — husks emptied of their pricey elixirs and tossed away. They are easy enough to pick up and put in the nearest blue recycling bin, and that was how I started. But once I began to see the gutters as traps for stray Evian bottles, I began to notice that they hold other sorts of trash, less conspicuous but more worrisome. They hold an awful lot of batteries, in particular, with a decided tilt toward the AA size. I would like to think that even blithe people do not make a practice of throwing objects as thick with toxic chemicals and heavy metals as batteries on the sidewalk or into the street, but I seldom travel more than three blocks by foot or bike without finding at least one, often smashed or mangled by traffic.

My little foraging project for the past six months or so (since winter is a bleak time for urban food hunting; the weekday chef’s menus have heavily featured cabbage and broccoli) has been to collect all the discarded batteries I come across and put them in an old measuring cup on the pantry counter. When the cup fills, every few weeks or so, I take it to Walgreens and empty its contents into the recycling pail. Batteries do not belong in landfills almost as much as they don’t belong in the gutters, and by accepting them and sluicing them into the recycling stream, Walgreens is performing a large, if undersung, public service.

My hope is that once people start to notice that yes, there are AA batteries all over the gutters and yes, they can be picked up and recycled, people will pick them up and recycle them. Walgreens stores are easy to find in these parts, and a city whose streets are cleansed of old batteries will be a better city.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

UB V2?

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The obvious question to ask about V2 is: what about V1? What happened there? Was it an experimental version that didn’t quite pan out, like one of Hitler’s 11th-hour rockets? Or is it still out there somewhere? Fearless of spirit, we put our obvious question to our server and were told that V2 — a small but spiffy Malaysian restaurant that opened toward the end of January in a rapidly changing quarter of SoMa — is in fact the younger sibling of V Café, which occupies the old Whiz Wit space on Folsom near 10th Street and serves a menu similar to its predecessor’s, with the cheesesteak at its center.

The line of descent seems a little skewed here. If you like V Café, you aren’t necessarily going to be prepared for V2, though you might like it as well or even more. Despite the laconic sleekness of the name and the modesty of the physical plant, V2’s kitchen turns out striking, full-flavored dishes at prices that almost seem as if they’re part of a throwback promotion. Virtually everything on the menu, even at dinner, costs less than $10, and portions are not small.

Tomorrow, meanwhile, rises like Kuala Lumpur a few blocks away, in the form of those huge residential pillars of glass under construction on Rincon Hill. There has already been a certain amount of hand-wringing about the self-containedness of these sky-suburb developments, but the popping up of V2 in the vicinity is a sign that the occupants of the towers are, at some point, expected to grow hungry and come forth in search of food — good food, the kind you find in your favorite neighborhood restaurant. While at the moment V2 is a neighborhood restaurant waiting for its neighborhood to take shape, its presence means the area will not be entirely given over to such chain gangers as Starbucks and Au Bon Pain.

Malaysian food per se isn’t yet a commonplace around here, but because Malaysia is part of Indochina and counts as its neighbors Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore — with China and India not too much farther away — the cooking is not all that foreign. Curry figures widely in V2’s seasoning repertoire; there is an obvious kinship to Indian and Thai curries, with the Malaysian varieties being a little smoother and richer than those of India and a little less fruity and hot than their Thai counterparts.

Malaysian curry beef ($7), for instance, consists of strips of meat and cubes of potato in a thick, reddish brown sauce reminiscent of the gravy (supposedly concocted of ketchup and cream to appeal to English tastes) that gives the Anglo-Indian dish tikka masala its endearing character. The curry nose was more pointed in (as the name implies) Indian mee goreng ($7), a stir-fry of spaghettilike noodles in a chili-fired, onion-breath red sauce. You can get chicken or (shelled) prawns for a buck or two extra, but even if you don’t, you will find items of interest folded among the noodles, among them flaps of wonton skin, like slices of gratin potatoes, and little stir-fried flour dumplings we thought at first might be tofu. There was an even sharper curry bite, along with a faint yellow iridescence, in cabbage with minced pork, one of the continually varying lunchtime specials. (You get two choices for $7.) There was a faint acridity here, and one suspected the use of commercially prepared curry powder.

If not curry, then sambal belachan (belacan is a more common English spelling), a paste of chiles and shrimp that’s used as a condiment in much of Southeast Asia. It turns up, mutedly, in a lunchtime stir-fry of chicken and neatly trimmed string beans; we detected a slight brininess and some heat, but the dish looked so Chinese that we had trouble understanding it as not Chinese. The distinctive flavor of shrimp, interestingly, also went missing in the prawn crackers ($2), those pastel-colored undulations of flash-fried rice flour that, when gathered on a plate, look like miniature versions of all those fake-rock Class M planet surfaces Kirk, Spock, and the gang were forever beaming down to. Despite the prawn deficit, we inhaled them.

One of the liveliest preparations on the menu is beef ribs in OK sauce ($6). The ribs are knuckle-size, and the meat’s a little tough — you must use your fingers for efficient separating of flesh from bone — but the sauce is sensational. It looks like cherry Jell-O that hasn’t yet set and combines elements of sweetness and barbecue savory to near-addictive effect. We were scooping up the last of it with spoons long after the final bone had been stripped bare.

Dessert means bananas, fried. We opted for honey ($2.95) rather than vanilla ice cream, on a wan theory of calorie containment. But it probably didn’t make much difference in the end, since either way you end up with a half dozen banana fritters: chunks of the fruit dunked in egg batter and deep-fried until golden. We couldn’t finish them.

V2 occupies a midblock storefront, which means it’s basically a large shoe box with a single set of windows, looking southeast. Nonetheless, the visual flavor is clean and modern, from the cinnamon-colored bamboo floors to the serene beige paint scheme on the walls, along with a few photographs of Kuala Lumpur. As in all such simple, Spartan spaces, noise is a concern; the shrieks and giggles of a trio of iPod-equipped young women several tables away filled the restaurant and actually made us flinch a few times. But that’s so often the way it is with neighbors. *

V2

Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–8:30 p.m.; Sat., 12:30–8 p.m.

518 Bryant, SF

(415) 974-1922

Beer and wine license pending

MC/V

Slightly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Open city

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There could hardly be a more welcoming name for a restaurant than aperto — "open" in Italian, and Aperto is an Italian restaurant — except, possibly, Welcome. The north face of Potrero Hill is home to lots of restaurants, but Welcome isn’t one of them, at least not yet. While we wait, we can wait at Aperto, which offers a handsome wooden bench outside the front door for the convenience of those whose tables aren’t yet available and are too weary to stand. Aperto is small, and it is busy, and everyone seems to know about it. This is fitting, because it’s been there since 1992 and over its 15 years of life has become the jewellike Italian restaurant every urban neighborhood should have at least one of.

For some or no reason, Aperto is a place I’d never been to until recently. Regular reports, most of them favorable, did reach me from friends who seemed to go all the time, and these debriefings perhaps soothed my curiosity. I had noticed that the restaurant, after reaching a crest of sorts in the mid-1990s as one of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s top 100 restaurants, seemed to have receded in later years from public awareness. This could be due to fatigue, but it is certainly not due to the focaccia, which flows from the open kitchen to the dining room in a steady stream and is just exemplary: soft (though with a hint of crust), warm, and gently scented with olive oil. It’s the bread equivalent of the perfect hotel pillow and is at least as good as the focaccia at Blue Plate. And that means it’s awesome.

When you are dishing out complementary focaccia of this quality and keeping water glasses full and prices modest for well-executed, lovable Italian dishes, you are likely to be a successful restaurant. Aperto isn’t up to anything radical; its look and food are classical and timeless, and the restaurant, as an experience, presents itself unobtrusively. It’s like a favorite coat, well made and warming, you might wrap around yourself on a chilly night.

Few cuisines can match the Italian for inventive frugality. Despite a public image of flamboyance, Italians tend not to waste food. Stale bread finds a home in panzanella or ribollita, while grape pomace (the mush left over from the wine crush) is fermented and distilled into grappa. (Then exported and resold to us at a tidy profit.) Because Aperto’s menu is pasta-rich and pasta is among the most flexible of starches, the restaurant’s recycling program uses it to impressive effect. One (chilly!) evening I found myself staring into a broad white bowl of papardelle ($13.50) sauced with a sugo of osso buco. Osso buco, also known as braised veal shank, is a tine-intensive production, not ordinarily to be undertaken just to come up with a pasta sauce. But, should there be surplus from the night before, the leftover meat makes a lovely pairing with pasta, rich and just hinting of the beefiness that makes veal so attractive. Throw in some spinach for color, add some grana shavings on top, and you have a dish of elegant simplicity.

Glancing slightly upmarket, we find striped sea bass ($17.75), coated with arugula pesto, roasted, then plopped into a beanbag chair of lemon mashed potatoes, with an encirclement of ratatouille and a hairpiece of microgreens. This was a handsomely composed, colorful plate of food whose lemon mashed potatoes actually carried a distinct whiff of the advertised ingredient and whose seafood star (as I learned ex post facto from Seafood Watch) is in the "best" category. I give Aperto a big gold star for this alone. If a smallish neighborhood restaurant can keep itself within the boundaries of sustainability without making a huge fuss or overcharging, then everybody can.

The restaurant doesn’t give short shrift to seasonality either. On one late-winter menu we found crab cakes ($9.75 for a crottin-shaped pair), presented on a bed of shaved fennel and radicchio, with pomegranate seeds scattered around the plate like rubies and squirts of spicy aioli atop the cakes themselves. The same menu yielded strands of fat spaghetti ($11.50) tossed with shelled fava beans, leeks, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese — a distinctively NorCal when-seasons-collide moment.

Given the limitless focaccia, which produces a filling effect similar to that of chips and salsa in Mexican restaurants, the first courses are in some danger of superfluousness. Among the best of the lot is the platter of oven-roasted mussels ($9.50), swimming in a buttery shellfish broth perfumed with fennel and garlic. The broth is nicely soppable with the accompanying spears of well-grilled levain (topped with the customary rouille), and when that was gone, we picked up the slack with focaccia.

Only the soups seemed flat: good, but a little slow out of bed in the morning. Lentil ($4.50) did feature shreds of crispy pancetta, but the floating chunks of celery seemed slightly clumsy, like flotsam after some sort of accident. And cream of roasted tomato ($5) was creamy — and cheesy! — but might have been made more interesting, visually, at least, by an addition as simple as minced parsley.

If the overhead chalkboard listing the day’s specials includes the mascarpone brownie ($6), you won’t be sorry if you ignore your diet and have it. Brownies sound juvenile, but this one isn’t; it’s marbled, moist, and just sweet enough, like homemade cake. Whipped cream? Yes, but not too much; same with the hot fudge sauce piped around the edges of the plate. The brownie might not be authentically Italian, but I suspect even a lot of authentic Italians would be open to its charms. *

APERTO

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

1434 18th St., SF

(415) 252-1625

www.apertosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Still Waters

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If you come away from Thomas McNamee’s riveting new book, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (Penguin Press, $27.95), not sure whether you’ve just read the story of a woman or a restaurant, do not panic. You have read both, the twist being that the two tales are so embraided as to become one. The book makes quite clear that Chez Panisse as we know it would not exist without Waters, and it makes equally clear that Waters as we know her would not exist without the restaurant she helped launch in 1971.

"Helped" helps remind us that Chez Panisse is not and never has been a one-woman show. Waters has long been the restaurant’s public face and spiritual guide, but from the beginning Chez Panisse has been a family affair with a distinctly nomadic flavor. People — chefs, servers, investors, bakers, winemakers, managers, others — have pitched in as needed, sometimes wandering off for a time, only to wander back, usually to the mutual benefit of both wanderer and restaurant. Yes, Virginia, there are bedouins in Berkeley, and they look out for one another as well as for the worthy institution to whose vitality and fame so many of them have contributed.

McNamee’s factoid that Chez Panisse did not become profitable until it was nearly 30 years old would be more surprising if it were not widely known that the restaurant wasn’t started to make money. Its deepest impulse was and is to reconcile the aesthetic and moral — to square the joy of eating with the responsibility we all bear for minding the health of our small blue planet. This is as unradical a proposition today as it was radical 35 years ago. The indifference to money, on the other hand, while hardly remarkable in Berkeley at the end of the 1960s, seems almost otherworldly now, after more than a quarter century of supply-side evangelism and CNBC.

Waters, of course, is also an evangelist, a bringer of good news. She tells us it is possible to eat well in the company of loved ones and to know, at the end of the meal, that the circle of life on earth has been strengthened, not frayed. We might not have eaten that particular meal at Chez Panisse — but if we did, lucky us.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Spam reconsidered

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We can’t quite say that spam has become a blight, since it was widely unloved (except for the Monty Python bit) even before the word’s great shift in meaning. Everyone hates the new spam — except, I suppose, the spammers themselves, forever importuning the e-mail world on behalf of the mysterious Fifth Third Bank — but the old spam had a good deal to say, much of it unpretty, about America. For those of us who grew up in the 1960s, Spam was the rectangle of salty chopped pork that came in a blue tin (with the little pin you turned to roll open the top, like a can of sardines) and was the basis of many an improvised or emergency meal. Spam (supposedly a truncation of "spiced ham") served early on as military food, sustenance for World War II soldiers at the front; later it made a curious marriage with the pineapple and became a mainstay of prememorable, and perhaps preedible, Hawaiian cuisine. Hawaii was and remains basically a huge military base, and Spam’s high visibility there can’t be coincidental.

I found some tabs of Spam recently, floating in a large bowl of saimin served to me at Eva’s Hawaiian Cafe, and under their saline spell I took a brief waltz through the portals of memory. Spam is ridiculous — ridiculous word, ridiculous product, a kind of pork surimi, processed beyond recognition — but I had not objected to it as a child. It came out of a can, like Campbell’s soups, and I liked Campbell’s soups. It was salty the way candy bars were sweet — excessively, deliriously so. But I gave up candy bars years ago, and I can’t remember the last time I even saw a can of Spam, let alone let a bit of the stuff actually pass my lips, until the fateful moment at Eva’s.

The saimin ($4.95), interestingly, was not only not ruined by the Spam but gently enhanced by it. Deployed sparingly, the Spam chunks turned out to be useful as a salt condiment, like soy sauce with a meaty texture. They played well against the smokiness of the barbecued chicken flaps and the mildness of the submerged mop head of noodles at large elsewhere in the big bowl, and their presence meant that the quite intense chicken broth could be undersalted without losing punch. Also: even today, nothing says "Hawaii" quite like Spam, unless it’s Spam with pineapple, maybe on a pizza, though not in a bowl of saimin.

Eva’s Hawaiian Café belongs to a chain (as I learned ex post facto from reading the fine print on a takeout menu) — in fact a rather large chain — but other than that, I couldn’t find anything wrong with it, except that the chili mayo ($3.25), served with French fries, was too sweet and not hot enough. We requested an emergency supply of ketchup, and this prayer was quickly answered, just as most others were anticipated: more water and napkins, plates quickly cleared, dishes brought promptly and in a pleasing sequence. And all this in a semicafeteria service! I can think of quite a few full-service places charging twice as much or more that don’t manage anything near this level of cheerful attentiveness or serve better food. Meanwhile, there always seems to be at least one staffer moving around the bright red, yellow, and blue dining room on a mission to clean; the perfect scorecard posted in the front window from a recent inspection by the health department did not come as a surprise to us.

Considering the coffee shop modesty of the place (people sit at tables reading newspapers, perhaps this very newspaper), the food is fresh, tasty, nuanced, and inexpensive. The basic model is the Hawaiian lunch plate: a big platter of something (often a sandwich), accompanied by some combination of fries, rice, and macaroni salad. Since this is California, the salad state, you can get a green salad instead of the macaroni if you prefer.

The mahi mahi sandwich ($5.25) didn’t rise much above the level of ordinary and echoed of McFish. For a batter-fried item, the shrimp ($8.95) are better; they’re butterflied, which means they cook more quickly and retain more of their basic character. Better yet: the kalbi short ribs ($7.95), marinated and grilled, juicy and tender, from which we discreetly gnawed the last of the meat from the bones.

It’s the small plates, the pupu starters, that give the most delight. Redondo Portuguese sausage musubi ($2.25) is like a piece of nori-wrapped sushi, except the treasure wrapped inside is a brick of garlic-chile sausage instead of fish. Fresh ahi poke ($5.25) — cubes of ruby red tuna tossed with soy, sesame seeds, and cayenne — offers immaculately fresh fish and enough chile heat to awaken the somnolent, while lumpia ($3.25), the Philippine treats that are something like a cross between pot stickers and flautas, have an almost phyllolike delicacy. Best of all might be the Portuguese bean soup ($4.25 for a gargantuan bowl, so not really a pupu), a jumble of kidney and white beans and macaroni tubes in a thick, spicy tomato broth scented with okra. It’s like a vegetarian gumbo.

Eva’s isn’t luxurious or even especially pretty — the primary colors have a kindergarten brightness — but the whole experience of being there is so agreeable that we are reminded how much the simplest human touches count. The service staff are cheerful and knowledgeable, and they work to keep their restaurant tidy; all this counts for a lot and proves that true hospitality need not involve charging patrons exorbitant amounts of money. If you can’t get to Hawaii, bundle up and come here instead. *

EVA’S HAWAIIAN CAFE

Continuous service: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

731 Clement, SF

(415) 221-2087

No alcohol

MC/V

Slightly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Mythic pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The perfect pizza, like its near relations the perfect golf shot, the perfect holiday, and the perfect sentence, is an apparition of memory. We all have some recollection of a pie (or three-wood from the rough to within 10 feet of the pin) that achieved sublimity. We might have eaten this pie in Rome or Naples, on Chestnut Street or Columbus Avenue, or even in our own kitchen. What we know for sure is that no pie before or since has topped it.

I was reminded, in the course of a recent jaunt into the mountains, how imperfect so many California pizzas seem to be and in what ways. The jaunt was spontaneous and came to an inglorious end at a "road closed" sign hanging from a shut gate in a blizzard at 8,000 feet. But an hour or so before that rebuff it had been lunchtime, and we’d stopped in the as yet unthreatening slush to eat at what looked like it might be one of the last restaurants we would pass before scaling the summit.

The pie, presented with great cheer, consisted of a soft, thick, bready crust, like a piece of insulation, carpeted with "Mexican" ingredients, mostly seasoned ground beef, melted cheddar cheese, and raw onions. Since we were hungry and had brought little food of our own, we ate it up and were grateful, and I probably wouldn’t have thought any more about it if we hadn’t eaten the night before at Gialina, Sharon Ardiana’s new restaurant in the reborn Glen Park.

Apparently, while I was blinking, this quaint and intimate village in its sleepy hollow under Diamond Heights has seen fit to give itself an extreme makeover. The most stunning change is the advent of Canyon Market, which opened last fall in a sleek if chilly space of concrete, plate glass, and bakers’ racks and is a full-scale supermarket, something like a cross between Rainbow Grocery and Whole Foods. The market offers meat, fish, and poultry, as well as a good selection of produce, much of it organic. For many Glen Parkers, the market (like the BART station) is no more than a few minutes’ walk away — a blessing, though parking in the village center isn’t difficult. We spent a few minutes wandering through the market while waiting for a table at Gialina, just across the street. The new restaurant is a lot like the original Delfina: narrow, deep, noisy, busy. And word seems to be out that these are among the best pizzas in the city — maybe the best outright — and, given the improvement in the city’s pizza culture in recent years (Pizzeria Delfina, Pizzetta 211, A16), that is saying something.

Let us begin with the crusts, which are hand-shaped into a form that resembles a circle with corners. Around the edges runs a thick bready bead that will sate the puff fanatics among you, but the central plain of each pie is about as thin as seems physically possible. "Cracker thin" is a cliché (and therefore punishable, in my perfect world), but these are even thinner than that.

Toppings, you might suppose, would be applied sparingly, so as not to snap all those points. But the pies are pretty well laded up, though not Sierra-style. The only pizza we came across that couldn’t fairly be described as hearty was the margherita ($10), and it was lovely anyway. The smear of oregano-scented tomato sauce and shreds of mozzarella had been baked to a slightly caramelized bubbliness; the fresh basil leaves scattered (postoven) across the top were like water lilies in a pond.

Ardiana must have a slight thing for pizza bianca — "white" pizza, i.e., without tomato sauce — since two of the better pies on her brief menu are tomato sauceless. The wild nettle pizza ($13) brings that au courant green together with chunks of green garlic, shavings of pecorino, and flaps of pancetta whose edges are lightly crisped by the oven’s heat. This is a fine combination, but it’s bound to change or disappear soon, when the green garlic season ends.

An even finer combination is a pie of broccoli rabe mingled with fennel-breath Italian sausage and blobs of gamy fontina cheese ($13). This is very close to a classic Italian sauce for orecchiette and is quite convincing on a pizza.

We did not get to the puttanesca pie — echo of another classic pasta sauce — but for red-blooded fireworks, the atomica ($12) will more than do. The ancillary toppings here are mushrooms and mozzarella, but the principal actor is the chile-fired tomato sauce, which packs some real heat.

Among the first courses, we found the meatballs ($9) in a spicy tomato-parmesan sauce to be tasty but slightly rubbery. Better was the antipasti plate for two ($11), an array of grilled bread, salume, spicy black and green olives, herbed ricotta, roasted red beets, marinated wild mushrooms, pickled baby carrots, and frisée salad with radish coins — plenty there to keep two people busy while their pizzas are in the oven.

The dessert Goliath is the chocolate pizza ($9), a squarish crust heavily drizzled with hot chocolate sauce and crushed hazelnuts and festooned with mascarpone kisses. It is fabulous, but it does represent starch overkill as some of the other choices do not. The place is noisy, and only in part because of the Scandinavian Designs–looking blond wood panels on the wall. Many of the patrons bring their tiny infants in for a night on the town — or village. In today’s Glen Park, this must be the latest adventure in babysitting. *

GIALINA

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m.; Sun., 4–10 p.m.

2842 Diamond, SF

(415) 239-8500

www.gialina.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Golden nugget

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› paulr@sfbg.com

New restaurants, like trees and kings, have a way of rising from the remains of fallen ones: the restaurant is dead, long live the restaurant. This only makes sense. In the typical hermit-crab situation, a kitchen of some kind is already in place, there might also be some serviceable tables and chairs, and the permit jabberwocky will be slightly less daunting. Easier all the way around.

But this is not the only means of passing fortune’s baton. Some neighborhoods — SoMa springs immediately to mind — are full of restaurants ensconced in spaces once given over to printing plants, warehouses, and other industrial concerns. I had never considered the possibility that someone might one day open a restaurant in an old hubcap emporium — I did not know there were such emporiums — and then, about a year ago, someone did. The restaurant is called Ziryab (named after a ninth-century Baghdadi who moved to Spain and won renown for his discernment in gastronomic matters), and it is to be found along Divisadero in the lower Haight, in a neighborhood still dotted with auto-body and radiator shops.

Given the building’s proletarian past, we might well expect more of a makeover than a fresh coat of paint and new tabletops. We might expect a little pizzazz, a little imagination. And our first glimpse of Ziryab is promising if not quite stunning: a smart golden facade, shining on the gray street front like a nugget in a turbid stream, with the restaurant’s name spelled out in striking, Arabic-styled letters. Just under and behind the facade lies a heated forecourt set with tables and forested with gas heaters. Divisadero is a little rough for the alfresco set, even in mild weather, so the semiwalledness of this garden is relieving.

We step inside and find … well, it’s not quite Vegas, but the interior designer clearly has visited that desert Shangri-la. The restaurant’s basic layout, narrow and deep, is like that of countless other places; there are a couple of tables set in the windows on either side of the door, while the swelling of the kitchen on the right creates a kind of narrows, as at Zinzino. But the Vegas effect has nothing to do with the floor plan and everything to do with the columns and arches of fake marble blocks, which give a faint sense of grotto and a much stronger sense of being in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. All that’s missing is the fake sky of perpetual evening overhead, filled with fake twinkling stars. Also the fancy shops. For some reason I find this kind of plastic fakery charming, perhaps because, like all kitsch, it’s knowing, and because it’s truly not bad-looking. You would never go so far as to suppose that you’d actually wandered into the sultan’s kitchens in the Topkapi Palace, but the thought might cross your mind.

Ziryab’s food comports with the faintly whimsical mood. The basic tenor of things is Middle Eastern (or Mediterranean if you prefer, or eastern Mediterranean), and this means such dishes as shawarma, kabob, dolma, hummus, and so forth: onetime exotica now well integrated into local practice. But there are also more involved and unusual dishes of a related provenance, as well as a few that have nothing to do with the Middle East at all.

In this last category I would put the house burger ($9), adding only that it was among the worst hamburgers I’ve ever eaten, notwithstanding the lovely fries (with their natural curl) and a thimble of Dijon aioli on the side. The patty of meat, though good-size, was cooked beyond well-done to a cinderblock condition, and even this merciless charring couldn’t conceal a certain gamy offness. I felt as if I’d wandered into the pages of Kitchen Confidential. "House"? I would lose that.

Apart from this blemish, we found everything else to be good or better. Lentil soup ($4) had a nice acid charge (from some red wine vinegar?), while paprika oil brought a bit of smoky counterpoint to a sensuously creamy Jerusalem artichoke soup ($5). Kefta kabob ($14) — ground veal and lamb, spiced and grilled — is a common entry on Middle Eastern menus around town, and it usually shows up in the form of meatballs or links. Ziryab’s presentation is quite a bit more stylish: the pieces of meat are given a cutlet shape, then nicely plated on a bed of couscous (or rice, your choice).

Another preparation almost universal in the eastern Mediterranean is the spinach phyllo pie the Greeks call spanikopita. Ziryab’s term is sambosik ($15), and while it includes spinach in a pastry crust, it adds mushrooms, almonds, and feta cheese for a subtle whirligig of flavors and textures.

Araies ($6), on the other hand, I’d never heard of. What turned up was a quartet of half moon–shaped breads heavily topped with spicy ground lamb and flecks of scallion and green bell pepper. It was as if we were eating some superconcentrate of a pizza so meaty even Round Table hasn’t come up with it yet.

My vote for best dish would go to the homemade roast beef sausage with braised white beans ($9). The sausage was perhaps less novel than advertised, the links notable mainly for their garter snake–like slenderness. But the beans, in a thick, rich sauce of tomato confit (dotted with quarters of well-stewed tomato), were really a solid winter stew and would have remained so even if there’d been no sausage.

Dessert? Why, warbat ($5), of course, cheese wrapped in sweet phyllo. Picture a fragment being thrown clear of a collision between a cheesecake and a calzone, and you’ll have some idea. The warbat isn’t huge, but it is shareable (with a spouse or whomever) and makes a nice cap to dinner. *

ZIRYAB

Continuous service: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., noon–midnight; Fri.–Sat., noon–1 a.m.

528 Divisadero, SF

(415) 269-5430

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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