Paul Reidinger

Frances

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Frances

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE What is the difference between Frances, Melissa Perello’s wonderful, 15-month-old restaurant in the Castro, and Palencia, whose place it took? The interior design? This seems to have changed little, if at all. Frances’ food is different, of course, an expertly sown patchwork quilt of influences and ingredients, whereas Palencia had given a stylish bistro treatment to the underrepresented and, to me, underappreciated foods of the Philippines.

But the most obvious difference is that Frances exists — and is packed — while Palencia is no more, and this has to do, I believe, with Perello herself. She brought her star power to a faceless block of 17th Street, and in so doing, she managed to put this handsome little space on the map. People had heard her name and the gilded words associated with it — Fifth Floor, Ron Siegel, Michael Mina, Charles Nob Hill — and this reputation has been enough, apparently, to induce patrons to seek a restaurant where they wouldn’t necessarily expect to find one, on a residential, tree-lined stretch of pavement far from other restaurants and, for that matter, other businesses.

When you step into Frances, from the lonely street into the lively dining room, long and narrow with lots of wood and cream tones, you have stepped from black to white, chilly to warm, and you are reminded of how commercial establishments tend to huddle together. It’s unusual to find a business isolated in this way; it’s like a secret, a great private party no one knows about, except that everyone seems to know about it. Thankfully, they’ve left their stretch limos at home.

If good things come in threes, then Frances completes a trifecta that also includes Firefly (opened 1993) and Delfina (1998). Three of the best restaurants in the city are neighborhood spots within walking distance of one another. They’re also run by pedigreed chefs who’ve chosen (wisely) to invest themselves in ventures of a manageable, human scale, where details small and large can be controlled and the restaurant can actually be what the chef means it to be.

But our trifecta is more of an isosceles triangle, because — at least food-wise — Frances is nearer Firefly than Delfina: a wonderful Californian arabesque of this and that, with a deep root in a rustic Franco-Italian tradition. The menu shows few to no Asian influences, and it also suggests that Perello loves smoky, earthy effects, as in the beignets ($6.50), crisp doughnut balls flavored with applewood-smoked bacon and easy to dip in maple crème fraiche, though they didn’t need to be dipped in anything.

Other whispers of smoke turned up in a soup ($10) of puréed white beans and roasted fennel root with caramelized garlic, shreds of Tuscan kale, and chunks of chicken confit, and in the ragout of toasted farro accompanying the grilled bavette steak ($25). As the steak aficionado put it, “the beef is fine” — a gorgeous rosy color that made up for its not-quite-tenderness, which we’d been advised of beforehand — “but this stuff is great!” Meaning the farro, enhanced by maitake mushrooms and baby fava microgreens; it was practically a meal in itself.

A proper seasonal menu for winter would naturally include mushrooms and citrus, and so we found black trumpet mushrooms contributing to a bowl of spugnole pasta ($13) along with long coins of cotechino sausage and plenty of pecorino cheese: a marvelous little quartet of tang and earth. Citrus, meanwhile, assumed the form of Meyer lemon, whose juice electrified a salad of lovingly tender grilled calamari ($6.50) on a bed of wild arugula, shaved fennel, and radish. It also appeared as bits of satsuma mandarin orange in a salad of little-gems spears ($12) laden with Dungeness crab meat and dressed with a tarragon vinaigrette.

The panisses ($6.50) were extraordinary, and only in part because you rarely find them offered. They are a slight pain to make, but Frances’ were beautifully formed and expertly fried to produce a good knobbly crust around a creamy interior. These, too, like the beignets, needed no dipping condiment, but the condiment presented with them, an aioli of calabrese peppers, was good enough (with a definite garlic-acid kick) to be taken straight up. This I did, discreetly I hope, with a spoon. And if the duck leg ($23), braised in red wine and served atop a medley of butter beans, escarole, and pitted Sicilian olives, seemed slightly less extraordinary — less smokin’ — that was only because there was more of it.

FRANCES

Dinner: Sun., Tues.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

3870 17th St., SF

(415) 621-3870

www.frances-sf.com

Wine and beer

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Limon

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Limon

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE In our epoch of wood-fired chic, gas-fired sounds, well, ordinary. If you have a barbecue at home, it’s more than likely gas-fired. Gas is cleaner, cheaper, and lights instantly, at the push of a button, without fuss. It’s the barbecue equivalent of an automatic transmission. Charcoal, on the other hand — to say nothing of actual wood — is a balky and oversensitive stick shift: tricky to start and unpredictable once started. If you lay too hot a fire, you’re stuck; you can’t just turn a dial (or downshift) to tame the inferno. Yet, just as a manual tranny is more absorbing and fun to drive than an automatic, charcoal and wood do impart character to food that gas doesn’t. They’re worth the trouble, provided it’s someone else’s trouble.

In this sense, it isn’t a huge surprise that restaurants have been touting their wood- or charcoal-burning bona fides, their grills and pizza ovens. They’re in a much stronger position to stoke the necessary apparatus, and there is presumably strong and steady demand from a public that has largely abandoned charcoal for gas in their home barbies. What does come as a bit of a surprise is that a fairly high-profile restaurant — one bearing the magic name of Limon, as in, Limon Rotisserie — makes a conspicuous display of its brasa, the gas-fired rotisserie on which dozens of chickens are, at any given moment, being roasted in the Peruvian style. It looks like a modern version of one of Mark Twain’s riverboat steamers, with jumping blue flames and the birds turning as if on a paddlewheel.

The evolution of the Limon franchise has been among the more stirring in recent memory. Martin Castillo opened the original Limon in 2002 in a modest 17th Street space now occupied by Maverick. A few years later it moved to grander digs in the heart of the Valencia corridor, with prices and tone rising accordingly. Limon Rotisserie isn’t exactly a throwback, but it does restore roast chicken to pride of place.

And the chicken is really splendid — a reminder of how good this most modest of birds can be if seasoned and cooked with care. A half-bird costs just $9.95 (including two sides) and arrived with crisp skin and cooked-through flesh that was still juicy. The juiciness surely had to do in part with the marinade, whose undisclosed ingredients had to include lemon and garlic, along with (I’m guessing now) cumin and paprika. Nothing about the bird seemed complex or exotic yet the result was sublime. Roast chicken is underrated; if done right, it’s simple, elegant, and memorable.

If the sides don’t make quite the same splash, they do offer variety, including fries in several forms (potato, yucca, sweet potato), tacu-tacu (wonderful rice-and-beans croquettes), and vegetales salteados (basically a quick sauté of green and yellow-wax beans).

Outside of the rotisserie, there is a wealth of ceviches, including a version with red snapper (pescado, $9.75), another with whitefish, calamari, and tiger shrimp (mixto, $9.75), and a soupy cocktail of seafood dice ($4.75) served in a heavy highball glass. All the ceviches are made with what the menu calls leche de tigre, a citrus-based marinade; yet despite this implication of acid, I found them all too salty. And if I find it too salty, it must really be salty. A little sugar (maybe from orange juice) might have helped pull the marinade into better trim and more complexity.

The restaurant’s menu scheme stresses shareability, so the kitchen turns out a wealth of small plates. Notable was the seco de costillas ($8.95), boneless flaps of braised (beef) short rib in a sauce dotted with carrots and peas, like beef Burgundy, but with huacatay (a pungent Peruvian herb) and cilantro. Then there was jalea ($9.75), a kind of relative of fritto misto, with batter-fried calamari rings and shrimp with salsa criolla and huacatay tartar sauce.

Despite a certain perfunctory quality, the dessert menu does offer a stellar possibility: the chocolate bandido ($7.25), a warm chocolate cake with brandy sauce and crème anglaise. The simplicity is deceptive and wise, because the chocolate is an engulfing experience, texturally somewhere between cake and fudge and of a singular intensity, like dark sexual heat. When you have chocolate like this, you really don’t care if the pastry chef has scattered some berries on the plate or made artful doodles with mint cream. No: you’re a fastball pitcher, you bring the heat. Let the batter worry about getting some wood on it.

LIMON ROTISSERIE

Daily: noon–10:30 p.m.

1001 S. Van Ness, SF

(415) 821-2134

www.limonrotisserie.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Absinthe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Absinthe

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When Absinthe opened in Hayes Valley in 1998, it was meant to evoke an aura of Provence. Meanwhile, the restaurant’s name carried a whiff of naughty Parisian excitement. Absinthe was the grog Oscar Wilde drank himself to death with in the French capital after his release from Reading Gaol, and not too many years later it was banned in France (and here) on suspicion that, like masturbation, it caused blindness and insanity.

These days, absinthe is enjoying a small revival, having largely been exonerated of its devil’s-brew reputation. And the restaurant — which, along with Jardinière, represented revival in a part of town unsettled for years by contentious freeway demolitions and the symphony strike that began in December 1996 — has not only thrived but settled into an identity it might have been meant to have all along. If you’re a latecomer and you want some sense of what Stars was like back in its heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you’ll find a taste of it at Absinthe. The restaurant offers a bit of the old feel: hints of low-key elegance and even glamour, a look both established and fresh that combines the sunny Mediterranean and the fog-bound, gleaming city, and exemplary food (emerging from a kitchen now run by Adam Keough) that brings together a world of influences into a distinctively Californian balance.

New high-profile restaurants in the city tend not to be like Absinthe. They are often hard-edged, spare, and cold, concocted from glass, steel, and plastic. And they are noisy. Fair enough. But Absinthe, to my mind, is the height of what San Francisco restaurants were, and were like, before the city became a suburb of Silicon Valley. It is a credit to the owner, Billy Russell-Shapiro (who ran the wonderful Rosmarino near Laurel Village before launching Absinthe) that he has let his restaurant evolve into Stars’ successor, or dauphin, without renaming it or otherwise clumsily tinkering with it. Evolution is undervalued, I would say, in our revolution-worshipping culture — tear it down, throw them out, get a new one — but evolution is how most real change is achieved.

Keough’s menu does retain some definite Provençal trappings, although — since these sorts of trappings are typical of a lot of the rustic-Mediterranean cooking that’s the foundation of California cuisine — they tend to enhance one’s sense that the style is distinctively Absinthe’s and not a dutiful attempt to recreate old dishes from the other side of the world as if from Nonna’s recipe book. The berbere-spiced fried chickpeas ($4) were not only addictive but the kind of thing you might find in a restaurant near the old quay in Marseilles.

The fabulous garlic pretzels ($7), on the other hand, like a cord of thumb-sized fire logs ready for dipping in a mornay sauce of Vermont cheddar, could have been a witty take on Oktoberfest. And the marvelous potato tart (a bit pricey at $14) had a distinctive northern, even wintry, flair, with its leeks, egg, long length of crispy smoked bacon, and large effusion of frisée on the side.

If any dish is supremely characteristic of Provence, it would have to be the seafood stew called bouillabaisse, and Keough does serve up a lovely version ($15). It’s listed with the share plates, but it’s plenty big enough to be a main course unless you’re ravenous or a carnivore. The stew was chockablock with manila clams and PEI mussels, along with a huge sea scallop, a beguiling broth of puréed red-bell peppers scented with garlic and bacon, and, on the side, levain toasts spread with an ebullient herb rouille. The stew did not seem to have been finished with pastis, the French version of the anise-flavored liquor that’s ubiquitous around the Mediterranean, but the bacon’s tang was a worthy alternative.

Speaking of worthy: a skirt steak ($24) that was actually tender as well as tasty. The meat was served with black-garlic mashed potatoes (black garlic being fermented and slightly sweet), which were not in fact black, more of a caramel color, but still dramatic. Less dramatic but important in supporting roles were a green-peppercorn jus and braised artichokes.

No sweet confection has ever disappointed me more than German chocolate cake. Despite Germany’s formidable reputation in chocolate, German chocolate has long seemed unpersuasive, and it isn’t even the right color. Absinthe’s version ($9) did have the fearsome hepatic pallor, but it was layered with crushed almonds, capped with dollops of coconut-like foam (like little meringues), festooned with candied walnuts, and altogether had a complex, not-too-sweet chocolatiness even a skeptic could love.

ABSINTHE

Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.-midnight;

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

398 Hayes, SF

(415) 551-1590

www.absinthe.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Well-managed noise, but not quiet

Wheelchair accessible

 

Shangri-La

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Shangri-La

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE For many of us, the word “kosher” immediately suggests something about meat. As one of the crazy women on Seinfeld once put it, “it’s how they kill the pig.” Well, not exactly, but maybe we can give partial credit, because while there is no such thing as kosher pork — pigs are strictly off-limits, kosher-wise — the method of slaughter is an important aspect of kosher dietary restrictions.

But kosher isn’t only about meat. It’s also about vegetables and fruits, all of which qualify, provided you don’t eat any tag-along bugs. At Shangri-La, a 33-year-old Chinese vegetarian restaurant in the mid-Sunset, the cuisine is cooked “under kosher supervision,” according to the menu card. I pictured a proper authority figure back there in the kitchen, inspecting the produce like an Army medic examining freshly shorn inductees for signs of head lice.

You can’t see into the kitchen, of course. This is an old-style Chinese joint, complete with worn red carpeting, fake-wood paneling, Chinese calendars, and — an element of beautiful discord — elegiac violin music on the sound system. The music reminded me, a little, of the early scene in Schindler’s List in which the Shabbat candles are lighted. It was like being in a café in some city in central Europe in 1937, with the shadows of war gathering in dark corners. The sounds of the violin are among the most haunting and moody in music. I tend to object to almost all music played in restaurants, but that’s at least in part because you rarely hear this kind of music in restaurants any more.

Despite and because of the violin’s tones, we found Shangri-La to be atmospheric rather than moody. The service staff was cheerful and remarkably knowledgeable; we ordered by number, and our server quietly named the dish while writing it down. She knew them by heart. We even threw in a couple of extra numbers, as if giving a quick quiz. She knew them all.

This kind of intimate knowledge suggests confidence in the menu, and although Shangri-La emphasizes meat substitutes, from shark-fin soup to duck and kidney — a style I find suspect, as if most people would not even consider eating vegetarian food unless they were faked out into thinking it was made with real meat — the cooking is outstanding and reasonably priced. Not for nothing are the tables laid with placemats proclaiming the various kosher-vegetarian awards the restaurant has won in recent years.

Some of the most convincing dishes are the ones that don’t bother to pretend — a plateful of spicy cucumbers ($3.50), say, skinned, seeded, cut into lengths, then dressed with a thick, glistening sauce that began in sweetness and ended in chili heat, like spring into summer. The cucumber has to be among the most modest members of the vegetable kingdom, and hardly any serious attempt is made with it beyond slicing it into salads or raita or puréeing it into gazpacho. Here it offered a wonderful texture and a moist mildness that gently supported the sauce.

Green onion cake ($4.25) is another dish that’s vegetarian by birth, and Shangri-La’s version was big, puffy, and crisp, like a flatbread. Veggie goose ($4.50), on the other hand, did seem to try for some carnivore appeal by stuffing smoked tofu into a buckwheat pancake, rolling it into a fat cigar, slathering it with hoisin sauce, and slicing it into bite-sized pieces. It was tasty, but it wasn’t goose.

“Mu shu,” in my life, has almost always meant mu shu pork, but Shangri-La’s fleshless version ($6.95) gave proof of how unimportant the shreds of meat actually are. With some lingerie-sheer pancakes, a small dish of hoisin sauce, and a big platter heaped with a stir-fry of shredded cabbage, carrots, water chestnuts, and (optional) egg, the uninvited guest really wasn’t missed much. We found the Szechuan-style spicy noodles ($6), heavily dabbed with garlic-red chili sauce, to be equally satisfying, even though they were cold — and there is a psychological resistance that has to be overcome to eat cold dishes in cold weather, when one really wants to be bathed in fragrant steam rising from friendly bowls. Cold is dour and can be a flavor damper, but not here.

Still, we did feel a slight want of steam. The pot of green tea gave off a little. A little more would have been heaven, though not pig heaven.

SHANGRI-LA

Daily, 11 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

2026 Irving, SF

(415) 731-2548

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Grub

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
4
Grub

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE When cultural historians of the future gather to argue the question of when and where Valencia Street finally jumped the shark, they might find themselves concentrating on the changes that came to a single block, between 18th and 19th streets, early in the presidency of Barack Obama. They might, in particular, find themselves considering a place called Grub, which sounds like a greasy joint of some kind where people eat with their fingers but is in reality a gorgeously designed restaurant that flows from a plate-glass façade through a nouveau-mod dining room to a glowing blue bar that looks like something from Star Wars, or Las Vegas.

It’s the sort of place you wouldn’t have found on Valencia as recently as five years ago, and it suggests, to me — along with the nearby The Summit, with its matching plate-glass façade — that a basic shift in sensibility is occurring. Like the Ferry Plaza farmers market, Valencia Street and its establishments now get mentioned in the travel section of The New York Times, and this kind of publicity means tourists, coming as if to some exotic game preserve. Tourists fundamentally change the nature of whatever it is they’re coming to experience, almost as in a chemical reaction.

None of this is to imply that Grub itself is an unworthy restaurant. It is highly worthy, with a value-intensive menu that includes authentic grub like burgers and mac ‘n’cheese, as well as such highfalutin treats like osso buco. (Is it just me, or has osso buco suddenly become trendy?)

Both the burgers and mac ‘n’ cheese are offered in “bar” (ie, design your own) mode. Your burger choices include beef, buffalo, vegetarian, ahi tuna, and portobello mushroom. The ahi burger ($12) consists of five ounces of seared filet. You can add cheeses and condiments to your heart’s content, but given the priciness and quasi-delicacy status of ahi, we thought it decadent to slather it with pickled red onions and bacon. Our suave server (a godlet who might have just stepped from the set of one of those Twilight movies) recommended the wasabi aioli, which did indeed bring a moistening intensity, though the sandwich remained a little frail, pale, and delicate, like a child who needs to get outside more.

Plunging into the mac ‘n’ cheese bar, by contrast, is like going to a gym where everyone is insanely worked out. All the variations (base price $9) include white and sharp cheddar cheeses and a gratin of grana padano breadcrumbs — more than enough flavor thrust to reach escape velocity. But you can tart up your crock with everything from truffle oil to grilled steak ($1 per extra ingredient) and some savories in between. Truffle oil is, for me, one of the world’s most overrated (and overpriced) food items — with lobster (a favorite of the godlet) not far behind — and I thought it more or less got lost amid the meatiness of the mushrooms and bite of the cheese. The steak stood up better, adding a hint of smokiness and enough weight to make the dish a meal unto itself.

But the menu offers other meals unto themselves, too, with a bit more polish. Grilled tiger prawns ($15) were arranged atop a butternut squash risotto heavily leavened with Parmesan cheese, whose tang balanced what otherwise might have become a cloying sweetness. A filet of Pacific snapper ($16) was “crusted” — “smeared” would have been more accurate — with what seemed like crab-cake batter and seated on a pad of celery-root puree with a pool of carrot-butter-white wine sauce and watercress salad. And the osso buco ($17) arrived in autumnal, rather grave guise atop mashed potatoes with a burgundy-charged sauce and fried shoestring carrots. The meat was fork-tender, and as someone who’s been making osso buco for years (from the same Patty Wells recipe), I can tell you this isn’t a given, even with long simmering. As for mashed potatoes instead of the more traditional risotto: eh. The potatoes did have a dense, mousseline-like velvetiness, which led me to suspect the involvement of tons of butter. But then, at higher-end sort of greasy spoon, you would expect a higher grade of grease, and butter is the grease of the gods, or at least godlets.

GRUB

Dinner: nightly, 6 p.m.–12:30 a.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

758 Valencia, SF

(415) 431-GRUB (4782)

www.grubsf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Pizza Nostra

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Pizza Nostra

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PIZZA NOSTRA

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., noon–3 p.m.

300 De Haro, SF

(415) 558-9493

www.pizzanostrasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Not too noisy

Wheelchair acccesible

 

Viva Goa

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
4
Viva Goa

DINE In a nondescript space on Lombard Street — itself one of the more nondescript of the city’s thoroughfares, a faded remnant of 1950s automotive delirium — a succession of south Asian restaurants has come and gone over the past decade or so. The latest arrival is Viva Goa, which opened late last summer and, as the name reveals, features the cooking of Goa, a region on India’s west coast south of Mumbai where once there was a colony of Portuguese.

The best-known contribution of Goa to the world’s experience of Indian food is almost certainly vindaloo, a spicy sauce of garlic, chilis, and vinegar — vinegar being derived from wine and wine pointing in the direction of the Portuguese. The Portuguese also, according to actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, “introduced chiles to India” — having brought them from their New World colonies — “in the late 15th century. Indians, already familiar with their own black pepper, took to them with a passion.” Jaffrey’s recent book, At Home with Madhur Jaffrey (Knopf, $35, 320 pages) is a trove of straightforward recipes, many of them Goan, that rely on a few readily available ingredients to produce stunning results. If you have space on your shelves for only one Indian cookbook, let it be this one.

Viva Goa offers vindaloo in a number of guises, along with dishes that tend to turn up in Indian restaurants of every stripe, including saag paneer ($8.99), ground spinach mixed with spices and cooked with cubes of fresh white cheese. Due to a circumstance beyond my control, this old standby seems to get ordered every time I find myself in an Indian restaurant, and, despite the utter predictability of the pattern, it never disappoints — and didn’t here.

Viva Goa’s vindaloos are made with ginger, garlic, potatoes, cardamom, fenugreek, cinnamon, black peppercorns, chilies, and vinegar, along with some form of flesh — beef, pork, lamb, chicken, shrimp — or no flesh. Lamb ($10.99) was fine, though the distinctive gaminess of the meat vanished in the fragrant blaze of the sauce. The sauce had a reddish thickness I would have guessed was the result of stewed or reduced tomatoes, but the menu made no mention of tomatoes. So perhaps this effect was achieved through some combination of the vinegar, chilies, and potato.

Although most of the Goan recipes in Madhur Jaffrey’s book are rich in chili peppers, black peppercorns, cayenne, turmeric, and ginger, the evidence flowing from Viva Goa’s kitchen suggests that Goan cuisine has a mild-mannered side too. A nice example would be the vegetable caldin ($8.99), with bits of broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, and zucchini stewed in coconut milk with coriander, turmeric, garlic, and cumin seeds. The coconut milk brought an element of buffering creaminess, and although the seasonings were formidable, it was as if someone had discreetly dimmed some harsh overhead lighting.

And at least one item from the menu is neither spicy nor mild: the chicken cafreal ($11.99), a half-bird slathered with a pesto-looking sauce of fresh cilantro and green chilies then simmered in a pot. No complaints about the meat, which was juicy and tender, but the coating did not quite convince. Because the bird wasn’t cooked in the tandoor, the enveloping sauce neither reduced itself to a glaze nor firmed up into a crust or shell. Instead, it remained gloppy, like slowly melting spring snow. It wasn’t quite as satisfying as tandoori chicken ($10.99), but, with its African heritage, it was different enough to justify a place on the menu.

Did I say Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes rely on easily-got ingredients? They do, with one exception: fresh curry leaves. These are not easy to find (she recommends basil or kaffir lime leaves as substitutes), but they somehow turned up in Viva Goa’s malabar jinga ($7.99), an arrangement of shelled, sautéed prawns napped with a spicy red sauce that looked like caponata but with a much stronger kick, aromatic and exotic.

To round out the proceedings, starch-wise, are many of the usual suspects, from basmati rice to naan ($1.99, made with whole-wheat flour) and paratha ($2.50, basically buttered naan). There are also (for $1.50) fine pappadum. These would be excellent for cleaning up any leftover sauce, except they lose so much of their magic when cool. Luckily, they’re almost sure to be gone long before then.

VIVA GOA

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; Sun., noon–3 p.m.

2420 Lombard, SF

(415) 440-2600

www.vivagoaindiancuisine.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Mission Chinese Food at Lung Shan

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
3
Mission Chinese Food at Lung Shan

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MISSION CHINESE FOOD AT LUNG SHAN

Thurs.–Tues., 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

2234 Mission, SF

(415) 863-2800

www.missionchinesefood.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Loud

Wheelchair accessible

Beast and the Hare

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
2
Beast and the Hare

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEAST AND THE HARE

Dinner: Wed.–Mon., 6–10 p.m.

1001 Guerrero, SF

(415) 821-1001

www.beastandthehare.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Michael Mina

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
24
Michael Mina

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

MICHAEL MINA

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

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

252 California, SF

(415) 397-9222

www.michaelmina.net

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

 

Parada 22

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Parada 22

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARADA 22

Tues.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

1805 Haight, SF

(415) 750-1111

www.parada22.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Tolerable noise

 

Campannina

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Campannina

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE It does fall to me occasionally to check up on our town’s tonier heterosexuals, who can be found cavorting in their infamous and restaurant-dotted playland beyond the magic mountains of Pacific Heights. (As for the homos: I have a pretty clear picture of that splendid circus.) Now that the rich, aided by their loyal apparatchiks in Congress, have secured another round of tax relief for themselves the question naturally arises regarding how they will spend their fresh loot, which we the taxpayers are so wisely borrowing from our BFFs, the Chinese.

Judging by the evidence on display at Capannina, a wonderful Italian restaurant on Union Street, they’re spending it prudently — even wisely! — although the sample size is small. It’s small because the restaurant itself is on the small side: a mid-block storefront beautifully done up with pistachio-colored walls, banquettes upholstered in a timelessly elegant fabric of gold and claret stripes, a tall bar of burnished wood at the rear of the dining room, and, hanging over that bar, a contrivance of wrought iron that resembles a bit of belle epoque signage from a Paris Métro station, or the undercarriage of a bistro table that somehow found itself hanging upside down from the ceiling, like a bat.

Capannina’s look reminds us that restaurant design, like clothing fashion, is a little like calculating a reëntry angle for a space capsule: too steep an angle and the craft burns up, too shallow and it bounces off into space for eternity. The window, the sweet spot, is actually rather tight and involves some clever blend of old and new, unexpected and familiar, soothing and stimulating. Capannina has worked these tensions into a nice balance; the design does enough to attract your attention briefly without making intrusive demands. It is handsome without becoming narcissistic — no small feat in a culture like ours — and in this important respect it looks and feels just as a restaurant should. When it fills up, though, it does get loud to the point of making conversation difficult.

Several of Capannina’s blood relations, including Café Tiramisu and Brindisi are to be found on Belden Lane, whose European atmospherics and restaurant population density keep the standards pretty sharp. Capannina is an outlier or outpost, but it seems to enjoy an indirect benefit from its siblings’ competitions; the kitchen’s Italian cooking is, like the design of the restaurant itself, a tight weave of tradition and controlled innovation.

One little flourish I particularly like in Italian cooking is a nuzzle of chili heat. The gamberi picante con polenta ($14), or spicy prawns, did indeed leave a naughty tingle on our lips, soothed by the balm of basil aioli. Even better was the polenta, which appeared as a small, crisp, well-formed cake, hardly larger than the shrimp themselves, instead of the more usual engulfing blob.

Nothing says early winter around here quite like crab, and Capannina’s kitchen turns out estimable crab cakes, or polpettina di granchio ($14). These were served in threes, with tomato-basil aioli, and were quite small (“mini,” in menu-speak). The downsizing might have contributed to their sublime, almost fritter-like crispness. I love big, fat crab cakes, at least when I start eating them, but crab is rich, and what is wonderful for the first few bites isn’t necessarily as wonderful by the last one.

We found the carpaccio di manzo ($13) to be a corrective, with its purifying, slightly astringent presences of fresh arugula leaves and mustard dill sauce, along with a generous sprinkling of cracked black peppercorns on the tissue of beef. Parmesan cheese, well-represented here in leaf-like shavings, can go either way, like the fabled independent voter, or many a man in this zero-gravity city. In this dish it flexed both of its biceps, one rich, the other pungent.

To my mind there is no better chicken preparation in the world than al mattone, or under a brick, and Capannina’s version ($19 for a half-bird) couldn’t be improved on: crisp, golden skin all over, juicy flesh cooked through to the bone, and not much bone. The leaking juice helped animate the chard and crisp potato dice arranged along the side of the plate.

And about the cannoli ($8): exceptional, in a word. These were finger-sized pastry flutes, boldly fried, oozing mascarpone laced with candied fruit — a kind of creamed panettone — and served with an espresso sauce for dipping. Caution, though; they were rich beyond any tax-cutter’s wildest fantasies.

CAPANNINA

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

1809 Union, SF

(415) 409-8001

www.capanninasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Passion Cafe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Passion Cafe

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSION CAFÉ

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

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

28 Sixth St., SF

(415) 437-9730

www.passioncafe.net

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Pleasant noise

Wheelchair access to ground floor

Miss SaiGon

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Miss SaiGon

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MISS SAIGON

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

100 Sixth St., SF

(415) 522-0332

www.misssaigonsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Pica Pica Maize Kitchen

Andrew Lam
-
0
Pica Pica Maize Kitchen

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PICA PICA MAIZE KITCHEN

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

401 Valencia, SF

(415) 400-5453

www.picapicakitchen.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not too noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Ragazza

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Ragazza

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

RAGAZZA

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 255-1133

www.ragazzasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accesssible

Skool

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
Skool

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SKOOL

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., noon–4 p.m.

1725 Alameda, SF

(415) 255-8800

www.skoolsf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

On the noisy side

Wheelchair accessible

Paradise Pizza & Pasta

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Paradise Pizza & Pasta

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARADISE PIZZA & PASTA

Daily from 4:30 p.m.

393 West Portal, SF

(415) 759-1155

www.paradisepizzaandpasta.com

Beer and wine

DC/DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Another Monkey

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
6
Another Monkey

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANOTHER MONKEY

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.

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

280 Valencia, SF

(415) 241-0288

www.anothermonkeythai.com

Full bar

MC/V

Some noise, but not bad

Wheelchair accessible

Citizen’s Band

Andrew Lam
-
0
Citizen’s Band

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CITIZEN’S BAND

Dinner: Tues.–-Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Brunch: Sat., 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

1198 Folsom, SF

(415) 556-4901

www.citizensbandsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Uptown Joe’s

Andrew Lam
-
0
Uptown Joe’s

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPTOWN JOE’S

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10:30 p.m.

Brunch: 9 a.m.–2 p.m.

1500 Sutter, SF

(415) 441-1280

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Bar Agricole

Andrew Lam
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1
Bar Agricole

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BAR AGRICOLE

Dinner: nightly, 6 p.m.–1 a.m.

355 11th St., SF

(415) 355-9400

www.baragricole.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Tolerable noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

Capp’s Corner

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Capp’s Corner

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAPP’S CORNER

Dinner: Mon.-Fri., 4:30–10:30 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun., 4-11 p.m.

Lunch: daily, 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1600 Powell, SF

(415) 989-2589

www.cappscorner.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

 

Papito

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Papito

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Step into Papito, a new cantina that opened this summer on Potrero Hill, and you probably won’t notice many signs of a French connection. The paint scheme, of lime and rust shades, is cantina-ish. The plate of frosted, backlit glass that divides the tiny dining room from the entrance to the rest room, isn’t — but it’s more urban-rich than French. The menu is immaculately, if grandly, Mexican. What we are left with, then, is the bar, of lusciously burnished wood topped with a plateau of copper — rather bistro-like, I thought, though a zinc top would be more authentic.

The French angle is relevant because Papito is the sibling of nearby Chez Papa and Chez Maman, along with, until a recent change of hands, Pizza Nostra (which began life as Couleur Café) in the nearby flatlands. The impresario-in-chief of these concerns is Jocelyn Bulow, who put himself on the map in 1996 with the wonderful Plouf, a French-style seafood house, and has since made himself a force to be reckoned with on Potrero Hill and in the gallery district. Notable at the moment about the Bulow career arc is its curve away from the French kitchen, toward Italy (not that great a reach) and now toward Mexico, a somewhat bolder maneuver.

Papito wasn’t completely unforeshadowed. Some of its roots are traceable to Couleur Café, which served a duck confit quesadilla that recurs here in more convincingly New World guise, with the former’s Gruyère and caramelized onions subbed out in favor of habanero peppers, mint, cilantro, house-made pickles, chilpotle, and tamarind sauce. The other quesadillas (all $10) are equally impressive — and Mexican, not French or quasi-French — including an edition with homemade chorizo (I looked in vain for any leakage of that telltale bright orange grease, like Halloween face paint), potatoes, jack cheese, salsa verde, and pico de gallo. This is a serious, heavyweight, mealworthy quesadilla, not a finger snack for the middle of a busy Saturday afternoon.

Pico de gallo is possibly my least favorite of the Mexican condiments, since it so easily can be too oniony. But Papito gives the old warhorse new life by making it with pineapple instead of tomato and serving it with a pair of tacos ($8) filled with slow-cooked Berkshire pork carnitas and guajillo-tomatillo salsa roja and piped with plenty of crema.

The menu features a sizable range of shareable plates, including a lovely salad ($8) of heirloom tomatoes and nopal cactus, dusted with cotija cheese and swabbed with a sauce the menu card calls “cilantro pistou” (but seemed more like an avocado purée to us). Also of note was the variety of tomato shapes, sizes, and colors: orange, green, red, yellow, pear, cherry, large round. One feels slightly let down when “heirloom” — the word promises so much — tomatoes turn out to be just red, no matter how juicy they are.

Frijoles negros ($4) were underwhelming, despite the bolstering presence of chives, queso fresco, crème fraîche, and matchstick tortilla chips over the top. Fortunately, we had a trio of salsas (mango, tomatillo, and chilpotle) at hand to enliven things. Papito, incidentally, does not serve shovelsful of complimentary chips, and, much as I love chips and salsa, I think this is a good thing. It helps you retain an edge of hunger until the real food starts arriving. But it does mean the trifecta of salsas are orphans.

If the black beans were a kind of lull or pause, then the grilled cobs of white corn ($5 for two) were a revelation. The cobs were showered with grated cotija cheese and presented with lime quarters and chili salt, each potent but slightly superfluous, since grilled corn seldom needs much help and the cheese provided most of that here. A nice touch: the metal handle, cool and solid, protruding from each cob. These handles made the corn much easier and less messy to eat.

For dessert you can have flan or, also in the Mexican vein, churros ($5), about the size of baby zucchini and stacked in a rough square, like a drafty log cabin. You dip them in a thin chocolate sauce. But the most surprising possibility is a chocolate mousse ($5) with a core of raspberry coulis made slightly molten by pasilla pepper — New World ingredients, Old World style, subtly transcendent result.

PAPITO

Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun. brunch 10:30 a.m.–4 p.m., dinner to 10 p.m.

317 Connecticut, SF

(15) 695-0147

www.papitosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

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