Paul Reidinger

Urban Tavern

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Urban Tavern

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE A cardinal rule of urban living is that hotel restaurants are to be approached with caution, especially if the hotel is a tentacle of one of the national chain monsters. Some of San Francisco’s best restaurants are in hotels, but those hotels tend to be chic and boutique-y. In the bigger, blander establishments, you’re likely to find yourself eating cioppino from a hollowed-out round of sourdough bread while the whole restaurant spins slowly, like a sideways Ferris wheel in some sad circus.

Urban Tavern is in the Hilton near Union Square — an ominous portent — but once you’re inside, you’d never know you were on the ground floor of a gigantic corporate box. The space doesn’t look like any tavern I’ve ever been in, but it certainly is urban in the best sense: designed but not over-designed, with a few big touches — such as the multicolored horse, sculpted of metal — and plenty of small ones, such as the lampposts made to look like the trunks of slender trees. The restaurant is also bigger than it looks from the street; it runs deep into the building, and maybe this is one reason that noise, which from the signs (many hard surfaces and a general modernist edge) should be a horrific problem, is hardly an issue at all.

Urban Tavern styles itself a “gastropub,” but it could as well be a wine bar since the wine list is extensive and interesting — and, as an added fillip, all bottles are half-price on Sundays. (The mark-down includes half-bottles, which are as well-represented here as any place I’m aware of.) But whether your fancy is beer, wine, or a soigné cocktail, chef Colin Duggan’s cooking holds up its end of the deal, and then some. Duggan was present at the restaurant’s creation in August 2008, and his current menu reflects a tasty dynamism with, as seems to be de rigueur at the moment, a German touch or two, such as a wonderful fresh pretzel ($11), served with slices of grilled caggiano beer sausage (garlicky, like kielbasa), and a broad smear of country mustard.

If your heart lies on the other side of the Rhine, you’ll certainly respond to the cheese puffs (a.k.a. gougères, $5 for three), which are indeed puffy — like little domed stadiums with big pockets of warm, fragrant air inside — and also impressively glazed, I would guess from a proper egg wash. In a similar vein we find a pair of turnovers ($10), pastry triangles the size of sandwich halves filled with crab and king trumpet mushrooms for a sea-sweet, if slightly muted, effect.

The main courses do tend toward tavernishness. There is a burger, along with steak frites and a couple versions of ribs, baby-back and spare, the last being served with a red-wine-based jus we found meaty and slightly sweet. But there is plenty of sophistication too, as in a sturgeon filet ($22) plated atop a jumble of green lentils, sun-dried tomatoes, and braised winter greens. Sturgeon are best-known for their roe, which we call caviar, but their white flesh is dense, meaty, and possibly the most delicious of the freshwater fish. In this country, sturgeon are also farm-raised to an environmental standard that makes them a “good alternative,” according to the Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Of course, no gastropub menu would be complete without a vegetarian option, which at Urban Tavern is called a stew ($15) and consists of an iron skillet filled with a variety of roasted vegetables, including broccoli and cauliflower florets, butter beans, carrots, butternut squash, split brussels sprouts, and zucchini, all liberally seasoned with Parmesan cheese and moistened, at your discretion, from the pitcher of vegetable reduction on the side. It takes a certain nerve to do so little to vegetables and a certain faith that from the babble of different voices, a melody will emerge. But it does.

Desserts seem a little pricey at $9 a pop. We very much liked the peanut butter cup, a big disk of peanut butter mousse lacquered with dark chocolate in perhaps the ultimate marriage of New World delectables. The cup was presented with a wafer of peanut brittle and pat of peanut butter ice cream, which we found creamy and peanut buttery but slack somehow, as if a contrasting ingredient had gone missing. The banana trifle, served in a milk jar, was like a slice of banana-cream pie transformed into a parfait with good banana flavor but a bit too much sweetness. Even sweeter than German wine, and that’s pretty sweet.

URBAN TAVERN

Breakfast: 8:30–11 a.m.;

Lunch: 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; Dinner: 5:30–10 p.m.

333 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 923-4400

www.urbantavernsf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Well-controlled noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

5A5

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
5A5

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE How odd that the world’s best beef should come from Japan, a small island nation where pastureland is scarce and whose gastronomic renown largely has to do with the sea. Beef’s natural home is a big, flat place: the pampas of Argentina, say, or our own Great Plains. Throw in a few zillion acres of wheat — for the refined white flour whence come soft buns — and you have the culture of mass-produced, drive-through hamburgers that defines us. Given the powerful connection between the burger and the car, it’s a wonder that someone hasn’t yet closed the circle by putting tread marks on a burger: the Treadburger.

At 5A5, a next-generation steak house in the Barbary Coast, beef is treated as the delicacy it can be, and not surprisingly the restaurant’s tones and accents are Japanese and east Asian. Beef is a — pricey — delicacy in Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun but not the 32-ounce steak. The name refers to the wagyu beef the restaurant actually imports from Japan and sells for prices beginning at about $16 an ounce. On that scale, your 32-ounce steak would cost you … well, let’s say bailout money

But the 32-ounce steak represents life out of balance in a particularly American way — “koyaanisqatsi” is the Indian term and title of the 1982 movie — and 5A5 is all about a Zen-like equilibrium. The restaurant reposes in an unassuming brick building on a narrow, quiet street. Inside, the look is thoughtfully understated, with cream-colored, 1960s-looking chairs, nests of horseshoe banquettes, lots of open space (a witty hint at prairies?), and a ceiling of perforated concavity that looks like a giant, upside-down, backlit colander.

For a steak house, 5A5 lays a surprisingly light hand on the meat. Chef Allen Chen’s menu contains a full page-and-a-half of smaller courses, including shooters, bites, starters, soups, and salads — many of them as clever, elegant, and meatless as you would find in any temple of California cuisine — before you reach flesh country. Even the list of main dishes transcends beef to include buffalo, fish, poultry, and a vegetarian option. And vegetables here aren’t an afterthought. Behold a platter of glisteningly green-white bok choy ($8), tossed with chunks of meaty bacon and crumblings of macadamia nuts, or a berm of baby spinach ($8), sautéed with onion and garlic and topped with a fine thatch of shredded, fried naan.

Flavor patterns are polycultural but vigorous. A shooter of hamachi ($4), for instance, includes not only a small chunk of yellowtail (a fish familiar to sushi lovers) but a creamy, tangy blend of avocado, ginger, yuzu juice, and tobiko. It’s like a piece of sushi roll liquified into a health drink and presented in a wide-mouth, heavy-bottom shot glass. A plate of ribs and chips ($12) gives you several exquisitely tender spare ribs in a spicy hoisin glaze, accompanied by a stack of lacy fried-potato disks. And truffle fries ($8) introduce a distinctly occidental note, though modified by the ramekin of sriracha aioli. Sriracha is a Thai hot sauce, but in aioli it produces an outcome quite similar to cayenne or other hot red pepper.

As for the meat: even the plebeian cuts of Angus are sensuous and delicate. Like cheesecake, their texture is soft, with just enough firmness to hold their shape. And, perhaps in a nod to a pair of unsettled Zeitgeists, financial and cardiovascular, you can have either a smaller or larger portion of several of the main courses. I thought the smaller, six-ounce portion of filet mignon ($23) was just right: enough to register as a proper serving of meat but not so much as to induce that sickening feeling of overload. Better yet, the meat was juicy and flavorful, which, if you’ve ever cooked filet mignon yourself, is far from a given. Tender bonelessness does carry its price. For a bit of extra insurance (and a bit more money, $29), you can get your filet on the bone.

After all that, dessert should be light-hearted, and maybe just plain light. A nice example is the plate of green-tea doughnuts ($8), presented with a globe of macha ice cream and a pot of intense, coarse, barely sweet raspberry jam. Hints of bitter, sour, sweet, creamy, crunchy, gooey — and we have at least one small slice of life in balance.

5A5

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

Sun., 5:30–9 p.m.

244 Jackson, SF

(415) 989-2539

www.5A5stk.com

Full bar

AE/MC/v

Gentle noise

Wheelchair accessible (elevator to restrooms)

 

Specchio

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Specchio

paulr@sfbg.com

Success brings penalties as well as rewards, and if you are a successful cuisine in America, one of the penalties involves banality. Banality is the essence of mass culture. You are Italian food and everybody loves you, but Chef Boyardee puts you in a can and sells you from Wal-Mart shelves, and (just a bit higher up the shame scale) you can find yourself being dished out in hackneyed versions in hackneyed settings, squishy cannelloni in bland Bolognese sauce at quaint spots with tabletop candles set in empty bottles of cheap Chianti.

Yet there’s much to be said for the tried-and-true. Europe might be the Old World, but it also has its ultramodern dimensions. In my observations, the resolution of old and new has generally meant that the latter is fitted gracefully into the former, another piece of a puzzle being forever assembled. The American way is to raze whole blockfuls of hideous, shoddy buildings so a new generation of hideous, shoddy buildings can replace them. The past in America is as disposable as everything else, from razor blades to auto workers.

Specchio is a newish Italian restaurant in America (in our very own San Francisco, in fact), but it has the Euro-modern feel of a glam place in Milan or Barcelona. The embrace of the new is fervent and obvious; the name means “mirror,” with an implication of a dusty article you might find atop Granny’s chest of drawers, but Specchio’s interior design doesn’t emphasize mirrors and certainly not dust. There are, instead, textured concrete walls, concrete floors, a gleaming stainless-steel exhibition kitchen at the rear of the soaring main dining area, and spare furniture of a post-Bauhaus flavor. It is the sort of setting you would expect to be deafening even without people in it, but the noise, while not inconsiderable, is surprisingly well-managed. In this respect Specchio resembles Delfina.

The au courant setting does not quite prepare one for chef Gino Assaf’s poised, traditional menu. (Assaf grew up in Venice and was the chef at Gondola in North Beach for several years.) It’s the photographic-negative, or mirror, effect: a reversal, with the old as an inlay on the new. It has been many years, for instance, since I last tasted vitello al tonno — veal topped with tuna sauce, as classic an Italian dish in its way as spaghetti with meat balls — and that version had been made (with scaloppini-style cutlets) by a home-schooled Italian friend. Specchio’s version (part of a $48 prix-fixe) featured slow-roasted veal in thin slices, almost like carpaccio or bresaolo; these were laid like mats on a wide plate and topped with the creamy, caper-sharpened tuna sauce, pipings of crème fraiche, plenty of lemon, and a small garden of arugula leaves.

More thin-sliced flesh: salmon carpaccio (also a prix-fixe item), scattered with shreds of fennel root and green peppercorns and dressed with a lemon vinaigrette. This version was visually more arresting than the traditional beef interpretation — translucent orange salmon flesh trumping opaque red meat — but the overall flavor effect was less rich and tangy.

Lobster is overrated and problematic, and (for me) the less that’s done to and with it, the better. The flesh is best when plucked right from the shell, swabbed with a bit of butter, and eaten. So lobster ravioli in a lobster bisque sauce (again, prix-fixe) sounded as if it might be overwrought. It wasn’t. The meat inside the pasta pockets remained sweet and firm, with its distinctive tactility, while the creamy sauce was intense with crustacean essence. For a bit of color, the kitchen added asparagus coins.

Swordfish, as the meatiest of fish, needs no introduction and very little help — just some tabs of braised leek and grapefruit sections, say, atop a grilled steak (prix-fixe), itself seated atop a bed of roasted potato, zucchini, and red bell pepper. The leek and grapefruit made an unexpected and appealing combination: a fruity sharpness with an undertone of earth.

Complaining about tiramisù is almost as cliché as tiramisù itself, so I am pleased to report that Specchio’s tiramisù was as good as could be: moist but not soggy, with a nice balance between the competing charges of espresso and liquor. (The great weakness of tiramisù is too much booze, which leads to sogginess and drunk-breath.) Equally impressive, in the Italian tradition of classic simplicity, was a pat of lightly sweetened ricotta cheese topped with a syrupy strawberry reduction that was more fruit than sweet. It was like a small piece of cheesecake, with no crust. Is there a Chef Boyardee take on this? I hope not.

SPECCHIO

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

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

2331 Mission, SF

(415) 958-5528

www.ristorantespecchio.com

Wine and beer,

AE/DS/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

Bin 38

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Bin 38

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If we agree that the Marina District is a sort of Castro District for heterosexuals — the het ghetto, or hetto — it should follow that food in the neighborhood’s restaurants is something of an afterthought. Restaurant food in the Castro has long been a swamp of mediocrity (though there are signs of improvement), and restaurants in the Marina have likewise tended to be more about convenience, speed, and affordability — like refueling race cars — than an experience in their own right.

At a glance, Bin 38 would seem to conform to this pattern. The restaurant and wine-beer bar occupies a narrow storefront space on a run of Scott Street between Lombard and Chestnut streets already chockablock with eating places pitched to the young. From outside it looks like a typical box, but once you’re inside the door, you find a dodge-and-weave of rectangles: an entryway with host or hostess, a bar with a nest of intimate tables opposite, a passageway, another dining room rich in alcoves, yet another passageway, and a garden. There is a snug, cave-like quality to the layout — it reminded me of a lost beloved, Rendezvous du Monde, which back in the 1990s occupied a similarly burrow-like abode on Bush Street in which splendid food was served.

I could say that Bin 38’s food is as good as Rendezvous du Monde’s. That’s saying something, and it is as good, but what is most immediately notable about the dishes emerging from head chef Matt Brimer’s kitchen is how gorgeously everything is composed and plated. The designs aren’t so fussy that you feel like a Visigoth trashing the treasures of Rome when you start eating them, but they are striking in their combinations of shape, color, and texture. I hesitate to describe food as art, but I hesitate a little less here.

Color is perhaps the most arresting aspect of food that has yet to be eaten, and winter, the bleakest season, offers surprising possibilities to the color-minded chef. Beets, for instance, of gold, ruby, and rose. Bin 38’s roasted-beet salad (part of a $29, three-course prix-fixe) looked like the contents of a jewel box: an array of richly gleaming disks, arranged on mache with dabs of mild, creamy French feta, and scatterings of equally jewel-like pomegranate seeds. The whole thing is dressed with a citronette, basically a vinaigrette made with lemon juice instead of vinegar. The finishing touch was the platter itself, a long narrow rectangle such as might be used for presenting a sushi roll.

Just as colorful was a wide, shallow bowl of hand-cut tagiolini (also a prix-fixe item), ribbons of pasta a little wider than fettucine, tossed with a colorful mélange of spinach, tomato, baby carrot, turnip, and chunks of braised pork, with flavor amendment provided by olio nuovo and square flaps of Parmesan cheese. What was most remarkable about the sauce was the way in which the various ingredients kept their individual identities while managing, at the same time, to become part of a greater whole.

If I mark down the winter salad — again, prix-fixe — a bit, it’s mainly because the color scheme wasn’t quite as intense: Belgian endive (white with hints of green), fennel shreds (white with even fewer hints of green), sprigs of watercress (green but small), sections of blood and mandarin orange (gorgeous), and pink peppercorns (too small to add much visually). The arrangement was appealing, though, with the leaves of endive neatly lined up along the platter like canoes tied up in the marina of a summer camp. Dressing: cherry vinaigrette.

Bin 38 enters the burger derby with the BIN burger ($13), a well-seasoned disk of ground beef enhanced with smoked gouda and mayonnaise, served on an English muffin and presented with a heap of sliced cornichons. You have to order fries separately, which isn’t the worst thing. You might want a small bowl of spiced nuts ($3) instead — better for you — though they’re at least as sweet as spicy. Or you might want neither, if you opened with wild Gulf prawns ($12), served sizzling on a fajitas-like cast-iron platter with chile arbol oil, very spicy, and garlic, and levain slices for mopping up.

Desserts are also arty. A toasted almond panna cotta arrives as little hemispheres that resemble white-chocolate truffles, topped with chunks of strudel, interspersed with blood-orange segments, and bathed with a reduced hibiscus tea that looks as if it leaked out of a joint of beef. Chocolate pudding cake is distinguished mainly by the pat of brown-butter gelato on the side, tasting rather caramely. Hetto heaven!

BIN 38

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.; Sun., 5:30–9 p.m.

3232 Scott, SF

(415) 567-3838

www.bin38.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Tuba

Andrew Lam
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Tuba

A score or so years ago, the corner of 22nd and Guerrero streets was one of the gastronomic hotspots of the city. (A score, as we will all recall from our civics class parsings of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, is 20 years.) On one corner stood, from 1989, Arnold Tordjman’s eclectic and imaginative Flying Saucer, replete with neon flying saucers in the windows, while across the street was Robert Reynolds’ Le Trou, which from the early 1980s offered a monthly rotation of regional French cooking. By the early 1990s, a glam trattoria called Mangiafuoco completed the triad.

But these sorts of convergences, like all magic, tend not to last too long. A city’s tectonic plates shift. Both Flying Saucer and Mangiafuoco vanished shortly after the turn of the millennium, becoming (respectively) Tao Café, a handsome Vietnamese restaurant, and (after some throat-clearing) La Provence, a handsome Provençal restaurant. These successors are good restaurants, but they are not as compelling as the restaurants they replaced.

Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the Le Trou space. The first successor was the Moa Room, which served New Zealander food. Then came the dot-com edition of NeO, with its white walls, white tables, white everything — it was like being inside the sperm scene from Woody Allen’s movie Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. All-white was evidently a bit much, for NeO was soon reinvented along Day Glo-Cubist lines before vanishing altogether. It was briefly succeeded by a good Indian restaurant whose owner ended up moving to Dallas, but not before painting the walls red, and those red walls constitute part of the inheritance of what is now a Turkish enterprise called Tuba.

Tuba opened early in the new year and is already packing them in. In a flaccid economy, it’s good to see any small business thriving, but Tuba, like its many predecessors, isn’t laid out to accommodate a crush of patrons. There is no host’s station or waiting area at the front; instead the door opens to rows of tables on either side and a clear if narrow path to the bar at the rear, where the staff congregates. On a crowded night, you might make it all the way back there before bumping into the host.

Why the big crowds? Part of the reason must be that the neighborhood, once edgy, is now well-to-do, and the array of restaurants (there’s also a nice sushi spot just a few doors down) draws strollers who scan posted menus. If this place doesn’t appeal, walk a few steps to that one or — in the extreme — cross the street. Tuba’s prices are also gentle; even the menu’s highest peaks scarcely rise to the mid-teens.

Then there’s the draw of the Turkish food itself. It’s Mediterranean, and eastern Mediterranean, with obvious affinities for the neighboring cuisines of Greece, Lebanon, and the Arab Middle East. It suggests simplicity, honesty, healthfulness; there is plenty of yogurt, lamb, and eggplant. At the same time, it has its own character and distinctive dishes.

The signature Turkish specialty in America might be sigara boregi ($7), cigar-like phyllo flutes filled with feta cheese and some spinach and deep-fried to a delicate, flaky crispness. When fresh, as at Tuba, their texture is wonderful; the cylinders are like edible (and still slightly molten) gold. But I found the feta’s assertiveness and saltiness to be near the border of acceptability, even as softened by the spinach. They’re also incredibly rich, which is a factor you have to weigh in relation to the fabulous round loaves of warm, focaccia-like bread you’re brought at the outset and might have trouble resisting. (The bread, unlike focaccia, contains no oil, our server told me. But it’s just as pillowy.)

White bean salads are common throughout the Mediterranean. Tuba’s is called piyaz ($6), and is heartily spiked with garlic, lemon, and parsley. Then there is the baked eggplant casserole musakka ($13) — layers of eggplant and potato dressed with cheese, a spicy tomato sauce, and béchamel sauce. Many of us probably think of this as a Greek dish while tending to forget that Greece was the subject of a hostile takeover by Turkey for several centuries.

Among the most appealing of the larger courses is beyti ($14), a flatbread rolled into a cylinder around a filling of spiced ground beef and lamb, sliced into disks and plated with yogurt and spicy tomato sauce. It’s very shareable, so don’t be shocked if others at your table score their fair share.

TUBA

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

1007 Guerrero, SF

(415) 826-8822

Alcohol pending

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Baker and Banker

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Baker and Banker

“Banker” might not be the most auspicious word to attach to yourself in these parlous times — people used to rob banks; now it seems to be the other way around — but what if it’s your surname? In a series of small ironies and convolutions, you’re a chef not a banker — a chef named Banker, Jeffrey Banker — and you’re married to a baker named Baker (Lori Baker), and you open a restaurant. The restaurant is called Baker & Banker, which sounds formidably institutional. Your patronage might expect a building with fluted marble columns and an ATM-like machine that dispenses pastry to holders of valid cards.

But no. Baker & Banker (which opened in early December) actually occupies the space, once an apothecary shop, that used to house the Meetinghouse (where Banker worked as a cook), and later Quince, before its move to the Financial District. The building, at the corner of Bush and Octavia streets, is authentically Victorian, right down (or up) to its flat roof; it looks like the sort of structure that would carry a small brass plaque saying Mark Twain once slept there. But of the old apothecary shop there is no longer, alas, any sign. The wallsful of small drawers that gave the Meetinghouse such a distinctive cast have been removed. The dining room is sleeker than it used to be, and also slightly roomier, although it’s still on the snug side. Wall banquettes upholstered in dark brown leather, plenty of dark wood, and a caramel paint scheme lend the room an urban warmth, maybe a little like that of an exclusive steakhouse on the Upper East Side.

One new design wrinkle involves placing chalkboards on the windowless walls. The chalkboards announce various specials, from cheese plates to beers and wines by the glass. The wine list, and indeed the menu as a whole, has a more Teutonic flavor than one is accustomed to finding on what is basically a California-cuisine menu. How about, for instance, a glass of German red wine, a spätburgunder from Georg Breuer ($13) — a pinot noir, in other words, as pale and delicately balanced as a young ballerina on her tiptoes, with a pronounced presence of cherry?

Actual cherry turned up, as a reduced juice, to sauce a plate of bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin ($24.50). The meat, which appeared as a pair of upright cylinders with beveled tops, was roasted medium-rare to a lovely rose color and accompanied by shreds of savoy cabbage dotted with spätzle, to continue our Teutonic theme. But I am getting ahead of myself.

As we might expect at a place where one of the principals is a baker named Baker, the baked goods are superlative, beginning with the basket of still-warm items — slices from a honey-wheat loaf, a pair of honey-rosemary buns — that reach your table not long after you do. Desserts are comparably fine … but again, I leap ahead.

The core of Banker’s menu is seasonal and eclectic — more like that of the Meetinghouse than Quince. You might start with a rather Italianish white-bean soup ($8.75) deepened by bits of pancetta, shreds of kale, and a creamy green-garlic sofrito. From there you could move on to a filet of seared black bass ($25.50), a pad of flaky white flesh plated atop a Thai-style shellfish risotto ringed with crispy shallots. Banker’s is a world without borders.

Or — since one of the less-advertised pleasures of winter is salad — a beautifully composed winter salad ($13) of Monterey calamari à la plancha, arugula, frisee, fried chickpeas, and sections of mild, juicy Oro Blanco grapefruit. Citrus, for all its sunniness, is largely a winter crop.

Dessert can get short shrift these days, since few of us need the extra expense or calories, and a certain repetitiveness haunts local dessert menus — crèmes brûlées flavored with lavender or Meyer lemon, flourless chocolate cake, profiteroles — but not Baker & Banker’s. The possibilities offered by Lori Baker are original and exquisite, from a holiday-worthy, coffee-black sticky toffee pudding ($8) — thickened with kumquat and prune, topped by a cap of candied-kumquat-peel ice cream, and napped by a blood-orange sauce — to a trio of brown-butter doughnuts ($8) filled with huckleberries (a petite cousin of the blueberry) and presented with a dish of lemon curd. Let the bankers have their bonuses! This stuff is better.

BAKER AND BANKER

Dinner: Tues.-Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.

1701 Octavia, SF

(415) 351-2500

www.bakerandbanker.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Cafe Prague

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Cafe Prague

DINE When in Prague, one would naturally try to eat as Praguers do, and in my experience, this means lots of pizza. The city, as a physical artifact, is a gothic dream, a fantasy of spires, castellations, and cobblestones worthy of Walt Disney. And being sealed up in the aspic of communism for 40 years actually enhanced these charms. When Milos Forman was looking for a place to film Amadeus, his 1984 movie about Mozart in Vienna, he settled on Prague as the setting because it had changed so little since the 18th century.

Except for the people, that is, who emerged from behind the ruins of the Iron Curtain in 1989 with a hunger for all things western, from Bulgari to holidays in Thailand to pizza. I ate as much pizza in Prague as I did in Rome a few years later, and that is saying something. And the wonderful Czech beer, Budvar, was so cheap in the late 1990s it might as well have been pouring from the taps. What was trickier to find was a spot that served traditional Bohemian cooking in a bohemian atmosphere — a place, in other words, like our very own Café Prague.

We never found a place like Café Prague in Prague, but here you don’t have to do much searching, and you can even take BART, since the restaurant expanded last year from its home in the Financial District (once on Pacific Avenue, now on Merchant Sreet) to new digs in the Mission District — on Mission Street itself, in fact, just two blocks from the 16th Street BART Station. The set-up offers, in addition to convenience, a more authentically bohemian setting, or at least one farther removed from soaring glass towers full of bankers counting their taxpayer-funded bonuses. Inside it’s homey; the only bohemian touch that seems to be lacking is a pall of blue smoke from cigarettes being nervously puffed by sallow, Kafkaesque young men.

Today’s Kafka aspirants, from the look of it, are strapping lads (and lasses) who make quick work of huge mugs of Czechvar (Budvar’s North American label) before tucking into immense and satisfying platters of central European food. I have never seen so much food on plates. Even the appetizers are colossal. A bratwurst platter ($7), for instance, consisted of a stack of wonderful sweet and smears of mustard and ketchup to swipe them through, along with a tangle of sauerkraut, a heap of pepperoncini, coins of dill pickle, and a wealth of other pickled vegetables. There was easily enough here for a table of four, especially since we’d earlier loaded up with abandon on the seductive, warm bread in its bottomless basket.

A bowl of split-pea soup ($5) was likewise almost a meal in itself, especially with the addition of bacon and dumplings. When bacon is mentioned as an accoutrement on a menu, you might expect a few bits or crumblings, for a hint of flavor and crunch and some decorative effect. Here the bacon appeared in the guise of nicely crisped slats — enough of them to amount to some real heft. And the bacon was the meaty English kind, not the fatty American stuff. Just to make sure no one would go away hungry, the kitchen tossed in some dumplings as well.

A word on the dumplings, which are ubiquitous. They are dotted with caraway seeds and resemble large slices of the crustless white bread the English use to make their tea-time cucumber sandwiches and are not (as I was expecting) spheres of boiled potato dough. The dumplings were impressively stacked beside several flaps of sauerbraten ($15), a vinegar-marinated pot roast that seemed slightly tough but was smoothed and softened by a broad lake of velvety brown gravy, and beside the roast duck ($15), rich as a winter night. Another small pile of sauerkraut helped balance some of the duck’s fattiness.

After such an avalanche of food (plenty of protein and fat and, thanks to the dumplings, nearly limitless starch), the very thought of dessert might leave you queasy. I can’t say that Café Prague’s version of apple strudel ($5) is a pastry version of Alka-Seltzer, but it is good, with more apples than pastry for a somewhat lower center of gravity. It almost looks like (dare I say?) a slice of deep-dish pizza, except for a chocolate-speckled egg of whipped cream on each side, for a little flourish of bohemian decadence.

CAFÉ PRAGUE

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

2140 Mission, SF

(415) 986-0269

Beer and wine

Cash only

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Richmond

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The Richmond

On the list of life’s most perplexing questions, Where can I find a quiet restaurant? is rising fast. Increasingly I find myself presented with — even beseeched by — this inquiry, and increasingly I fumble. It’s not that there aren’t any, but their numbers seem to be dwindling, like those of book-readers or subscribers to newspapers. So when I find one, I am elated — quietly, of course.

The Richmond isn’t exactly new — it opened about five years ago, in an inner Richmond District space long occupied by Jakarta — but it opened with such media fireworks that I put off going there. Then tempus fugit, as tempus has a way of doing, and suddenly it is years later. Noise has increased throughout the restaurant kingdom. And, glory be, the Richmond turns out to be one of those wonderful neighborhood restaurants where it is actually possible to have a conversation with the other people at your table without having to shout and wave your arms or (in the extremely rare opposite case) fear that you are disrupting a funereal hush.

The restaurant’s singular layout certainly conduces to this balance. As in Jakarta days, the lateral storefront space divides into a warren of nooks, many of which are now cloaked by wine-colored curtains. It’s like being inside a voting-booth factory, with interesting peeps and murmurs leaking from tables behind half-drawn curtains. The tone is relaxed but not sloppy; the walls are painted a neutral beige, and few of the tables are far from a window. Not surprisingly, the clientele is a little older than that of, say, Namu down the street. I had the sense of being in the faculty club of some small but august urban institution.

Chef John Owyang’s food, it must be said, is better by a country mile than that of any faculty club I’ve ever been to. Owyang’s pedigree includes a stint at Elisabeth Daniel, the Daniel Patterson venture in the Financial District that was, in its short life, one of the toniest and most innovative (and expensive) restaurants in the city. Owyang appears to have taken a sense of culinary style away from that experience while paring away the Upper East Side preciousness. You can get a five-course tasting menu (matched with wine, if you like) at the Richmond, but you can also get a cheeseburger.

For me, the difference between good and great so often turns on grace notes and little touches, like fine, almost invisible brush strokes on a painting. Even the best neighborhood restaurants don’t typically offer amuses-bouches, but the Richmond does. It might be something as simple as mulled apple cider topped with a bit of whipped cream and served in demitasses — a clever hint that the little, clove-steeped sip isn’t just a play on a traditional winter favorite but also on the Italian drink macchiato, a shot of espresso finished with a dollop of foamed milk.

Owyang’s kitchen is clever but doesn’t wallow in cleverness. The basic style is elegant Californian, with a rich variety of flavors, colors, and textures and tasteful presentations that don’t become precious. In an age of feature creep, in food as in software, restaurants aren’t immune, and the temptation to embellish and embroider dishes is great. But Owyang understands the value of restraint, or counter-creep; his wonderfully earthy pumpkin-celery root soup ($7) was subtly enhanced by the crunch of candied pumpkin seeds and a few pipings of crème fraïche over the surface, and that was all. And enough.

A scallion flatbread “sloppy joe” ($7.95) turned out to be basically a small pizza, made sloppy by crumblings of Italian sausage and augmented by a bit of whipped goat cheese and some watercress. A plate of seared Pacific cod ($18.95) mounted the flesh — as dense, moist, and white as wet snow — on a bed of sautéed squid, slivers of red cabbage, and steamed broccoli florets. Not too much, not too little. Markedly richer was the so-called chicken and ravioli ($17.95), flaps of chicken scaloppine waltzing with chicken-mousseline-filled ravioli in a broad bowl of glossy black truffle sauce, with some leaves of baby spinach added for color and penance.

If you’d like a pause before your dessert arrives, you’ll appreciate the chocolate-peanut butter torte ($7.50), which takes a soufflé-like 15 minutes to prepare and turns out to be our old friend, the molten chocolate cake, except the lava is peanut butter. A conversation piece.

THE RICHMOND

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

615 Balboa, SF

(415) 379-8988

www.therichmondsf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Schmidt’s

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Schmidt’s

Schmidt’s, which opened last summer in the heart of the Mission District’s latest trendy-food zone, would appear to be an offspring of Hayes Valley stalwart Suppenküche, but its parentage is actually traceable to Walzwerk. Suppenküche has a blond-wood look that seems to be part ski chalet and part beer hall, while Walzwerk conjures the spirit of contemporary Prenzlauerberg, the Berlin (once East Berlin) neighborhood where urban chic has bloomed amid war-ruined buildings. Walzwerk didn’t face quite so steep a climb, of course, but it did manage to be a success in a troubled space on a fairly sketchy run of South Van Ness Avenue.

With expansive wood floors worthy of a gymnasium and plenty of wood furniture (too dark to be blond), Schmidt’s resembles Suppenküche more than Walzwerk, but it’s roomier and more open than either. Its ceiling floats high above cream-colored walls that could not be barer. As if to compensate for this desolation, the design seems to invite noise. Once the place starts to fill up — and fill up it does, mostly with younger people who might find the moderate prices attractive — conversation becomes difficult.

Other notable peculiarities: Schmidt’s doesn’t accept reservations, takes only cash (there is a cash machine stashed in a far corner, near the toilet), and, under its deli cap, sells German groceries from a wall of shelves just inside the door. In this sense the place reminds me a bit of Speckmann’s in Noe Valley, which gave way some years ago to Incanto.

Schmidt’s mixed bag of eccentricities wouldn’t mean much either way if the food wasn’t good, but it is good. The heart of the menu is the grilled sausage platter ($10), which gives you a choice from among a dozen or so interesting varieties of sausage (including several types of bratwurst), along with a heroic pile of potato salad and a heap of the house-made sauerkraut. We found the kraut to be a bit salty, despite a festive leavening of fried capers.

The other main dishes tend toward meatiness, although the emphasis is on lighter meats (if there is such a thing), such as pork and veal. A Holstein-style schnitzel ($12) features a breaded veal cutlet pan-fried to a bronze crispness; it’s seated on a bed of braised cauliflower florets and leeks and topped with an anchovy and a fried egg. The organizing principle of this dish escaped me, but there was no denying its complex substance.

A German meal could hardly be complete without spätzle, the little noodle pellets that are the German answer to orzo or pearl couscous. If you’re a vegetarian, you can get the spätzle as a full main course, but even as a side ($4), it’s pretty substantial. It’s even more substantial with cheese ($1 extra), which results in something like macaroni and cheese.

The most interesting cooking can be found among the appetizers and salads. Here you’ll find such treats as pea cakes ($7.50 for a trio) topped with house-cured gravlax and crème fraïche. The cakes themselves strongly resemble latkes, except that they’re bright green and retain their distinctive pea flavor. Radishes, a winter staple, become the basis of a salad ($7.50) energized with sections of blood orange and given a thick, creamy dressing based on quark (k’vahrk), a fresh, white cheese that resembles a cross between mascarpone and ricotta. Most salads are ensembles, but this one turned out to be completely dependent on the blood oranges. A forkful without some orange was pretty undistinguished, but with the citrus, it was like flipping on a light in a dark room.

Desserts, in the tradition of Mitteleuropa, are impressive. Linzertorte ($6) turned out to be basically a slice of strawberry pie, intense with berry flavor in a swaddling of flaky, buttery pastry. And speaking of pastry: the apple strudel ($6) was a rectangular fortress of crispy phyllo sheltering apple slices under a sky filled with thunderheads of whipped cream. The strudel had a wonderfully light, airy look, but when you are working your way through an arrangement of butter and cream the size of a brick, you are scarfing up some calories, even if it doesn’t quite feel that way.

Service is friendly and knowledgeable if occasionally balky. My impression was that the floor staff is stretched a bit thin — maybe, like the value pricing, a sign of the times.

SCHMIDT’S

Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–11 p.m.

2400 Folsom, SF

(415)401-0200

Beer and wine

Cash only

Deafening

Wheelchair accessible

Guns ‘n’ rosés

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Guns ‘n’ rosés

If you like Beretta – and Beretta is very likable – you’ll likely like its younger sibling, Starbelly. I wonder who is thinking up the names in the Beretta folks’ briskly expanding universe of restaurants. “Beretta” makes me think of guns, while “Starbelly” sounds like a spoof of Spaceballs, Mel Brooks’ epic spoof of the Star Wars franchise.

The restaurant opened in the fall in a space (at 16th and Market streets) that once was Josie’s Juice Joint. Subsequent occupants include ZAO Noodle Bar and Asqew Grill, a pair of local chains that pitched affordable, high-quality, quick-turnaround food to younger people. Starbelly certainly attracts younger people and their traveling circus of noise but, as befits its status as a version of the California café, it has all kinds of people, including older ones and heterosexuals. The crowd is, to my eye, less hipstery and tech-moneyed than Beretta’s, although the glow of human energy is similar. Starbelly is too stimulating to be relaxing, but once you’re seated, your blood pressure does return to something like normal. Because the restaurant doesn’t take reservations for small parties, there can be a scrum near the host’s podium at the front. If you want a less hubbuby table, angle for one in the rear, past the bar, where the dining area opens out some.

In matters of food, Starbelly and Beretta are like fraternal twins: similar in certain respects but sharply different in others. The most conspicuous similarity is the prominence of pizza on both menus, along with the little wire stands to serve them on. But pizza is less dominant at Starbelly, where chef Adam Timney’s cooking rolls away in a number of sophisticated directions. Starbelly is probably the highest gastronomic peak in the Castro District at the moment, much as 2223 was 15 years ago. Of course, we should remember that the Castro has long been the Death Valley of restauranting and temper our enthusiasm accordingly. Still, Starbelly is good.

The dinner menu tilts toward smaller, shareable plates and divides among the categories “snacks” ($5 each), “small,” “salads,” and “vegetables.” Then come the pizzas and bigger plates. “Snacks” often means a dish of warm, spicy nuts, but here you can indulge in such witty treats as mini corn dogs, each riding its little toothpick and ready for dipping in spicy mustard (coarse, country-style) or house-made ketchup (fruity in a way the commercial product can never be and worth the price of the dish just for the experience).

The kitchen handles seafood skillfully. Grilled baby octopus ($9), recommended by our server, turned out to be nicely tender with a faint hint of smoke; the octopus was arranged on an arugula salad. Pan-roasted diver scallops ($14) also had been expertly cooked, but I thought the accompanying gingered yam purée, scattered with pepitas, was a little too sweet. Scallops, like pork, are naturally sweet and seem to invite sweet harmonies, but I (and here I state a personal preference) would rather have counterpoint, something sour, spicy, or salty.

Pizzas do not disappoint. The crusts are on the thin side, with a bit of puff on top and a hint of blister underneath but — hooray — no charring. Toppings range from the classic (tomato sauce, mozzarella, and basil on a margherita) to New World (Mexican chorizo with eggs and cilantro) but on the whole are fairly simple. A good example is a pie topped with Starbelly bacon ($13) along with market peppers and tomatoes. All that red lends a certain Murder in the Cathedral look, but the tangy, aromatic combination of toppings catches the sense of summer shading into autumn.

Speaking of fall: brussels sprouts have been on just about every menu I’ve seen since Labor Day, and they’re on Starbelly’s, too ($6). Here they’re halved and pan-roasted with chunks of bacon until nicely caramelized at the edges. Bacon seems to be the consensus remedy for the palatability issue that haunts brussels sprouts, and a good roasting, whether in an oven or pan, has set right many a troublesome vegetable. A shot of lemon juice wouldn’t have hurt here, for a final bit of zing.

The big plates are reasonably priced, mostly in the low to mid-teens; only lamb chops breaking the $20 barrier. The kitchen does offer what might be sly homage to Zuni Café: a half-chicken ($15), roasted on a rotisserie until sensuously tender and juicy, then plated with a spinach panzanella — basically swirls of braised greens in a warm, savory bread pudding under a roasted-onion vinaigrette. It’s not formally offered for two like the Zuni version, but it’s ample enough to be quite shareable, especially if you’ve previously stocked up on some of the smaller plates.

Which undoubtedly you will have done, since at Starbelly, the path to a full belly is a winding one, with many delightful turn-outs and outlooks along the way. *

STARBELLY

Mon.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–midnight.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–4 p.m.

Dinner: Sat., 4 p.m.–midnight; Sun., 4–11 p.m.

3583 16th St., SF

(415) 252-7500

www.starbellysf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Le Colonial

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Le Colonial

DINE Could there be a more enchanted address for a restaurant in San Francisco than 20 Cosmo Place? No. “Cosmo” gives us an urban, even cosmopolitan, glamour, while “place” suggests, at least, a degree of refuge from the maelstrom of city traffic. Cosmo Place does not disappoint; it has something of the air of Shepherd Market, the warren of quaint lanes stashed well off the main thoroughfares in London’s posh Mayfair district, and also of the small plazas ringed with outdoor cafes you might find near the waterfront in Barcelona.

For more than 40 years, until the early 1990s, 20 Cosmo Place was the home of Trader Vic’s, which was probably the most famous restaurant in the city and one of the best-known in the country. Although there were — and remain — other Trader Vic’s restaurants around the country and the globe, none could match Cosmo Place for sheer atmospherics. But the founder and namesake, Vic Bergeron, had died in 1984, and with his passing came a reordering of the empire that included closing the Cosmo Place restaurant. Trader Vic’s reopened some years later in the city, in the old Stars location on Golden Gate Avenue, but that experiment was short-lived.

On Cosmo Place, meanwhile, a new presence arrived in 1998. This was Le Colonial, a high-end Vietnamese spot with (like Trader Vic’s) outposts in several other major U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. There was, for me, a certain sorrow in the passing of Trader Vic’s, which was certainly a San Francisco institution of the first order. But the transition was smooth enough, the newcomer thrived, and now, more than a decade on, Le Colonial seems as permanent as Trader Vic’s once did. Yet one cannot forget the predecessor.

When I crossed the threshold at 20 Cosmo Place recently, it was for the first time in nearly 30 years. One evening early in that long-ago June, a group of us came to the city and to Trader Vic’s as graduating college seniors, got massively blitzed on tropical drinks that came in gigantic tureens, and left … well, I don’t remember leaving. I know only that I must have. Three decades on, the basic layout came as a delightful surprise to me despite (by all accounts) being pretty much the same as before.

The entryway is still a long breezeway set with tables, wicker chairs, and potted plants covered by a roof of ironwork and glass such as you might find in a belle époque rail station. It is reached from the street, or lane, by an impressive set of stairs. At the far end of the breezeway sits a set of heavy wood doors that open to the host’s podium. Beyond, and upstairs, lay three dining areas, one of which was, once upon a time, the coveted Captain’s Cabin.

The mood these days seems a little more relaxed, although the crowd is still stylish and the Captain’s Cabin still exists. The interior design speaks in tones of elegance and, oddly, heat: starched linen table cloths and ceiling fans, plush carpeting and wicker chairs even in the main dining room. These cues might lead you to imagine that you’re sweltering at the edge of a steamy jungle instead of wondering why you forgot to wear a scarf.

As the restaurant’s name reminds us, Vietnam was a French colony for about a century, and executive chef Joseph Villanueva’s fine menu captures glints of the resulting cross-cultural pollination. Among the most compelling examples of his ambidexterity are the pan-fried brussels sprouts ($10), or rau xao­ — all the dishes bear Vietnamese names — in which the halved sprouts are cooked with portobello mushrooms and plenty of ginger before being liberally slathered with sweet chili sauce. Using such intensely flavorful ingredients to subdue a notoriously uncooperative vegetable is the culinary equivalent of an enhanced interrogation technique, but when a confirmed brussels sprouts-hater takes a tentative taste or two (after much cajoling), then serves himself a big heap, we know all the bother was worth it.

Luckily, most of the menu doesn’t need this kind of strong-arming. Wok-tossed Blue Lake beans ($8) are wonderfully crisp-tender and simply dressed with a garlic-soy sauce. Niman Ranch pork ribs ($14) are rubbed with five-spice powder, given a honey-ginger glaze, and roasted to an aching tenderness. The same glaze ends up on fried quail ($14), which is only marginally less tender. Among the lemongrass-inflected dishes, it would be hard to beat chicken two ways ($25), roasted and sautéed, and served with a warm salad of shiitakes, baby spinach, and micro-cilantro.

There are disappointments. The fresh rolls wrapped in rice paper are a little tough and, tastewise, on the delicate side. On the indelicate side, we have black tiger prawns ($29) in a coconut curry broth that sounds promising but is made with powdered curry, rather than the Thai-style paste, with a certain metallic harshness as a consequence.

But knocking a few points off a dish here and there does nothing to diminish the overall experience in a place as atmospheric as Le Colonial. As with a view restaurant, the temptation must be strong to lean on the enchanted setting and its storied past while letting the food and service discreetly slip. It’s a credit to Le Colonial that if the restaurant served its menu in a setting a tenth as compelling, we would still judge it worthy.

LE COLONIAL

Dinner: Sun.–Wed., 5:30–10 p.m.;

Thurs.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

20 Cosmo Place, SF

(415) 931-3600

www.lecolonialsf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Bacco

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Bacco

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Two autumns ago, I popped in on Bacco, in Noe Valley, and found a house in good order. The restaurant, opened by Vincenzo Cucco and Paolo Dominici in 1993, turned 14 that fall, and little had changed through the years except that the color scheme of the two dining rooms had gone from pumpkin to butter and sage, and a "Zagat-rated" sticker had appeared in the window at the door. I left with a sense of calm reassurance, like a parent who’s just peeked through a bedroom door to see a child safely tucked in.

But safety is one of the world’s illusions. Last spring, Dominici disappeared while spearfishing in Hawaii. In 2006, he and Cucco had opened another restaurant, Divino, on the Peninsula, with Cucco running the newer place and Dominici remaining at Bacco. The unexpected death left the older restaurant without a captain. Uncaptained restaurants have a way of foundering — they can too easily lose their way, fade, fold, or end up in other hands.

Luckily for Bacco, those other hands are Cucco’s, and so the restaurant remains within the family, as it were. He has once again taken up the toque in the kitchen, while longtime manager Luca Zanet continues to run the front of the house; ownership proper has passed into the hands of Dominici’s widow, Shari. This is about as favorable an outcome as we could hope for from an unforeseen disaster, and, after a period of turbulence and uncertainty, the ship appears to have righted itself and regained its course.

Bacco, for me, has long been one of the best-looking Italian restaurants in the city. The original paint scheme, of pumpkin or cinnamon, was most appealing when viewed from outside; in the evenings its light would fill the street like the glow of a merry fire, but inside, the reddishness could become distracting. The present scheme, of gentle sage and butter tones, bounded by ribbons of white moulding, is easier to take and does not so forcefully compete with other elements of the design, among them the high ceilings, terra-cotta-tiled floors, and the soaring, old-world arch that is, in effect, the gate of the main dining room. That room also offers a long line of windows that gaze onto Diamond Street. The second, smaller dining room (to the left of the podium as you enter) is less open but cozier.
Under Cucco’s steadying guidance, the food remains excellent. Bacco has long found a way between rigid insistence on Italian tradition and a tumble into sloppiness from the many temptations of California’s abundance and freedom. The cooking is more Ital than Cal, but it is supple and has been smoothly adjusted to reflect local conditions. Pasta, desserts, and baked goods are made in-house, and the kitchen quietly swears its fealty to supporting local growers and using organic products whenever available.

Polenta with gorgonzola and wild mushrooms, for instance, has been on the menu for years, but now the polenta is made with buckwheat, an underappreciated grain. A similar underappreciated grain, spelt (a type of wheatberry, similar but not identical to the Italian grain farro), turned up in a nicely molded salad along with corn kernels, scallions, and diced peppers under a jaunty cap of burrata ($12). Burrata is a mild, creamy cow’s milk cheese, a close relative of mozzarella, and we found it a bit reticent for such a starring role, especially since the underlying salad, while tasty, seemed to be "missing something," according to the oracle across the table. No human oracle (or even Oracle) is infallible, but this one is more reliable than most.

Baby octopus ($10), braised in red wine with herbs and finished with a shower of celery-root shreds, was missing nothing, even though the dish was classically Italian in its simplicity. We mopped up the extra sauce with chunks of focaccia. (The basket of bread arrives early and is replenished frequently, by the way, as is the accompanying tray of olive oil infused with parsley and anchovies.)

The pasta dishes strike many of the most traditional notes — a softball-sized tangle of vermicelli ($16), say, dotted with a handful of petite Tuscan meatballs in a rich, garlicky tomato sauce. Yes, it’s spaghetti and meatballs, with a few sophisticated twists.

For local color, how about petrale sole ($26), rubbed with herbs, sautéed, and seated on a mirepoix-like mat of roasted root vegetables? Petrale sole is (despite the Italian name) a local glory, and since it’s often breaded, an unbreaded version was a nice treat.

We were slightly disappointed with the brussels sprouts ($9), or cavoletti ("little cabbages"), which, despite being cooked with cubes of pancetta and plenty of olive oil, retained some of their quiet belligerence. Perhaps this was because they’d only been cut in halves, rather than chopped up or shredded. They weren’t quite tender enough to be described as tender.

As if in compensation, the chocolate shortbread cookies, or baci Isabella ($8) were divine: a pair of halved globes pasted together with chocolate ganache and served with a glass of milk. The oracle described them, with satisfaction, as being like "cookies that think they’re truffles," and a satisfied oracle is a happy oracle.

BACCO

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

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

737 Diamond, SF

(415) 282-4969

www.baccosf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Coda

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Coda

paulr@sfbg.com

Coda is just the sort of stylish urban vault where you’d expect to find votive candles flickering on every table, but you don’t. It’s the visual equivalent of a promising dish that’s lacking a final dash of some seasoning. The space has the look of a sound stage — exposed-brick walls, concrete floors, a large dining area uncluttered by pillars — and while there is something exciting about the vastness, vast spaces also fill up easily with darkness. And while darkness can be exciting and even beautiful, it’s more beautiful when punctuated and shaped by light.

The Coda space was home most recently to Levende Lounge — which looked pretty much the same — and before that, Butterfly, whose layout was different and whose tables were each finished with a candle, so that, on entering, you gazed upon a flickering sea of candlelight. Candlelight is wonderfully softening, like a dab of foamed milk atop a demitasse of strong, dark espresso. Shafts of red halogen light, such as shine on one of Coda’s brick walls, are arresting but don’t cast the same limbic spell.

Onward. The space is comfortable enough without candles. The tables, in particular, are nicely spaced, with plenty of breathing room between them. This gives an appealing sense of insulation from other tables and the conversations going on at them (nota bene, eavesdroppers). The overall noise level is also surprisingly moderate, at least when live music isn’t being played. But Coda, in addition to being a good restaurant, is also a live-music venue, with performances every night of the week, beginning at 9 p.m. weekday evenings, 10 p.m. Saturdays, and 8 p.m. Sundays. If it’s just food you seek, plan accordingly.

Simple seekers after food won’t be disappointed. Coda’s menu has been put together by Chris Pastena, who is one of the local masters of Cal-Ital cooking and had a hand in the revival of Bruno’s a few years back. Pastena’s Coda menu divides its offerings according to their nature rather than along the formal lines of a dinner service, so instead of first, main, and side courses, you have soups and salads, starches and grains, vegetables, and flesh. This sort of arrangement is conducive to nibbling; it also helps gently remind us that we should mind our starch intake.

Having said that, I must say that one of the best items on the menu, pastena in brodo ($6.25), smuggles starch to the table under cover of soup. Pastena, in addition to being the chef’s surname, is a small, star-shaped pasta, and it is usually spelled "pastina" — but that would wreck the joke. The pasta is a bit player, anyway, since the real star is the golden brodo, chicken broth stoutly fortified with truffle oil and grated parmesan cheese. The broth could have stood alone, like a brilliant (or consummate) consommé.

As a loather of brussels sprouts in childhood, I am perhaps perversely drawn to them now. They are a real test of vegetable cookery: can the bitterness be drawn away and the texture softened without losing the essential character of the vegetable? Coda’s kitchen makes a lovely salad out of the little cabbages; they are coarsely shredded, dressed with a vinaigrette of sherry and toasted garlic, tossed with bacon and goat cheese, and topped with a poached egg. I didn’t like the egg, which introduced a gooiness I found unsettling, but the rest was fabulous. You could easily re-spin these flavors into a fine pizza.

Another potentially difficult member of the cruciferous family, cavolo nero, or black kale ($4) is simply braised here (in what? we couldn’t tell, but maybe just olive oil) to a tender crispness that reminded me of the flash-fried arugula leaves I had years ago at Abiquiu near Union Square. The bane of kale cookery is toughness, so if your kale turns out tender — as here — you have succeeded.The lone small dish we found underpowered was a bowl of Israeli couscous ($4.25) tossed with what appeared to be mainly a dice of carrots and zucchini. It lacked a unifying flavor or theme and would probably work best as a side dish — to one of the formidable plates of flesh, say.

Among the most interesting of these was the coffee-crusted pork loin ($16): four slices of medium-rare meat bathing in a shallow pool of (Jameson) whiskey-cream sauce. The coffee rub and cream sauce combined to produce a latte effect — beguiling in its own right and also a welcome change from the usual cliched accompaniments of apples, cherries, and so forth. Less impressive, though still quite good, was a grilled ribeye steak ($24.50), nestled on a mat of watercress. The meat had a good smoky flavor and was nicely rare, but it was a little fattier than ideal.

Of an ideal fattiness was the honey-lavender panna cotta, like a tasty, creamy cloud that had been captured in a martini glass. At $5.50, it has to be the best buy on the dessert menu. And a deal is always music to some ears.

CODA

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–-10 p.m.

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 551-CODA (2632)

www.codalive.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Loud

Wheelchair accessible

Tony’s Pizza Napoletana

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Tony’s Pizza Napoletana

paulr@sfbg.com

Carrying coals to Newcastle is hard work, so when we’ve finished up, how about some pizza to refresh ourselves? And where would we begin the search — North Beach, the Newcastle of pizza? No, too obvious. Chic pizza these days is found practically everywhere in the city except North Beach — in Dogpatch, in Glen Park, in the Mistro, and the Marina. Why would anyone go to North Beach?
Well, one good reason would be Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, which has an air of Neapolitan or Roman authenticity that goes far beyond the pies themselves and is really unmatched in this respect by any of the newer places, despite their commendable pizzas. While I am not a huge fan of trying to recreate the foods and styles of other places — restaurants are not zoo exhibits, and the best way to have authentic food experiences is to travel to the places where those experiences are indigenous — Tony’s is relaxed enough in look and atmosphere, and intense enough about the food, to become an authentic experience in its own right. It feels unforced and right, like a place that’s been there forever yet is as fresh as if it opened yesterday. (It actually opened early in the summer in the longtime home of La Felce.)
One of the underrated joys of North Beach is the display of fabulous, oversized culinary apparatus — the kind of implements you could never have in your own home, unless you’re Pat Kuleto. One example is the coffee roaster in the window of Caffe Roma, and another is the pizza oven — I should say, one of the pizza ovens, since there are three — at Tony’s, which isn’t in a window, but you can get a booth quite nearby and watch the action.
The oven of which I speak is gas-fired (no, not coal-fired, this isn’t Newcastle) and has an attractive dome covered in a mosaic of red tiles. The oven’s heat is steady and fierce, and as the clad-in-white pizzaioli — led by owner Tony Gemignani — wield their long-handled peels, you have a brief sense of men working in a foundry, except that what emerges from the heat isn’t a sequence of gold ingots but of pizzas, and pizzas in a surprising variety of shapes and forms.
At most of the newfangled places, pizza takes its familiar form, as a yeast-leavened wheat dough rolled into a thin disk and topped with various combinations of sauces, cheese, vegetables, and meat before being baked. You might luck out and spot a calzone, in which the disk is folded over on itself to form a mezzaluna-shaped pocket. But nowhere else are you likely to find stromboli, a sort of pizza roulard in which the pie is rolled up into a log, baked, then sliced into rounds like a büche de Noel. Tony’s Romanos Original 1950 version ($11) is stuffed with ham, pepperoni, sliced Italian sausage, sweet peppers, and mozzarella and American cheeses — and if that isn’t rich enough, the crust acquires a pastry-like flakiness, perhaps from the rolling.
Also plenty rich-looking are the Sicilian-style pies, which are baked in square pans, like focaccia, and heavily laden with toppings. They look like party platters as they emerge from the oven and are rushed to large, clamorous tables of partiers. Smaller parties, though, can probably make do with the more svelte, conventional pies, among them the margherita ($18), which is probably the signature Italian pizza, and also Tony’s, and is baked in a 900-degree wood-fired oven.
The margherita also is so simple that there isn’t much maneuvering room. You have your crust, your tomato sauce, a few blobs of mozzarella, and some basil leaves. Not much to go wrong; not much to stand out, either. Tony’s tomato sauce is tangy, the basil leaves lightly blistered but still basically fresh and fragrant, the coins of melted mozzarella like reflections of a full moon on the still surface of a pond. One’s attention, then, is drawn to the crust, and it is gorgeous: a thin but not too thin mat, soft but not droopy and blistered just enough on the bottom to lend character. I would hesitate to say Tony’s is the best margherita pizza I’ve ever eaten only because I’ve eaten so many good ones, and in part this must say something about the soundness of the recipe. I’ve never had a better one than Tony’s, can I put it that way?
Since humans do not live by pizza alone — or bread (and the bread is excellent, with pesto, EVOO, and chopped garlic for dipping) — there is also a host of unleavened items on the menu, including pastas, small plates, and salads. An antipasto-style plate of white Italian anchovies ($10) couldn’t be plumper, nestled on their bed of fresh arugula leaves like middle-aged, bleached-out snowbirds surrounded by palm fronds on a Florida beach in February while, nearby, lurks a clutch of Calabrese peppers — sort of like blood-red pepperoncini, sweet with a bit of bite. They could be snowbirds who’ve been in the sun way too long.
For a salad, how about spinach ($10) with pine nuts, goat cheese, slivers of red onion, a balsamic reduction, and EVOO? All immaculately fresh and nicely balanced, though the sweet-tooth found the balsamic a bit too sweet, and I thought the price was a little dear for what was, in the end, ordinary.
The sweet-tooth did like the chocolate truffle cake ($7 for a massive, ship’s-prow slice), which was refreshingly not all that sweet. Sometimes it’s best to carry fewer coals to Newcastle, particularly if the coals are sugary.

TONY’S PIZZA NAPOLETANA
Wed.-Sun., noon–11 p.m.
1570 Stockton, SF
(415) 835-9888
www.tonyspizzanapoletana.com
AE/DS/MC/V
Beer and wine
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible

Noodle Theory

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Noodle Theory

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOODLE THEORY

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

Sat.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–5 p.m.

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

3242 Scott, SF

(415) 359-1238

www.noodletheory.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Noeteca

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Noeteca

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOETECA

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

1551 Dolores, SF

(415) 824-5524

www.noetecacafe.com

Beer and wine

DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Greens

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Greens

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GREENS

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

Brunch: Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Bldg. A, Fort Mason Center

(415) 771-6222

www.greensrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Buns and the city

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Buns and the city

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

URBUN BURGER

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

581 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-2483

www.urbunburger.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

MISSION BURGER

Lunch: Fri.–Wed., noon–3 p.m.

2200 Mission, SF

(415) 551-1772

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Magnolia

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Magnolia

paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAGNOLIA GASTROPUB & BREWERY

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

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

1398 Haight, SF

(415) 864-7468

www.magnoliapub.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Deafening

Wheelchair accessible

Sunflower

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Sunflower

paulr@sfbg.com

An as-yet unnamed phenomenon involves the transformation of stylish or distinctive restaurant spaces into homier Asian spots. The most conspicuous example I can think of is the restaurant adjoining the Hotel Milano, at Fifth and Mission. At one point, about 15 years ago, it held a Michel Richard venture, Bistro M, and now it’s a Thai joint, with purple neon signage.

A more recent exhibit is the migration, or extension, of the Vietnamese restaurant Sunflower from its longtime haunt at Valencia and 16th streets to the old Baraka space on Potrero Hill. For years, Sunflower has been a perfectly decent, modestly priced, rather ordinary-looking restaurant in a stratified and hypercompetitive venue, while Baraka was a small jewel, slightly above the fray on its hillside perch. I would not have foreseen the melding of the two. But now, when you step into what was Baraka, you’ll smell lemongrass — and much as I liked Baraka in its several guises over the past six years, I like lemongrass as much. (Outside, incidentally, you’re likely to smell the garlic breath of Goat Hill Pizza across the street.)

The restaurant’s décor looks to have been (so far) little touched by the regime change and the new, golden name. The walls of the h-shaped dining room are still a throbbing red, and there is no host’s station, which means that a line of tables begins within a few feet of the front door. This is awkward for all parties concerned, and it would be worse if the staff was less attentive. But they are very attentive, and blockages are cleared quickly. Still, the tables just inside the door are not exactly choice, and if you can find your way to a table on either side of the dining room, or deeper in, you’ll probably be happier.

The menu reflects the degree to which Vietnamese cooking has come to be accepted as another variety of American comfort food. You can certainly get similar stuff for quite a bit less in the Tenderloin, where it is served in much more modest settings that remind us of how ragged things were for many Vietnamese immigrants a generation ago, at the close of the Vietnam War. And you can get far fancier — and pricier — food at the Slanted Door. Sunflower sits somewhere between these two poles; it is upscale, in a mild, neighborhood way, while remaining more or less traditional and comparatively inexpensive in its cooking.

You can get imperial rolls, you can get pho (although it’s not called that), you can get garlic noodles ($7.95), and they are excellent. You can also get spring rolls, either with shrimp or in vegetarian guise ($6.95 either way); we found the vegetarian version to be a little heavy on the tofu — big, spongy blocks of tastelessness right in the middle of things.

Better were the vegetarian pot stickers ($6.95), which had been steamed (instead of wok-seared in the Chinese style) and therefore lacked that nicely caramelized base. They were also damper overall than their Chinese counterparts, and contained tofu. But they also held a wealth of shredded cabbage and mushroom chunks and were served with a velvet-smooth peanut sauce that helped make up any flavor deficiency.

If you like imperial rolls but are hesitant about ordering deep-fried items outright, you can find them slipped into your vermicelli ($7.95), a big bowl of fine rice noodles overlaid with bean sprouts, mint, ground peanuts, nuoc nam (the ubiquitous, salty-sweet sauce), and some kind of flesh, or no flesh. The barbecued beef in a lemongrass marinade was ethereally tender and fragrant, while the imperial rolls were flawless: nicely crisped skins (with a bit of stubble) enclosing an earthy blend of minced pork and taro.

Grilled lemongrass chicken ($13.95) is generally a bulletproof favorite. Here the kitchen uses strips of boneless breast meat, and as any Thanksgiving cook knows, it’s the white breast meat that’s most in peril of drying out. Our strips were pretty dry and slightly tough, though chicken never gets really tough. Fortunately, lemongrass has powerful therapeutic, or at least distractive, effects, and nuoc nam (a saucer of which seems to be a perpetual presence on most of the tables) is a useful moisturizer.

A dish that helped put Slanted Door on the map, way back when, was shaken (or shaking) beef. Sunflower offers its own, quite worthy version, and if, at $11.95, it isn’t quite a steal, it’s pretty close. The meat (filet mignon or a similar cut, I would guess from the lean tenderness) is cubed, then wokked with garlic and chilies. It isn’t as aromatic as the lemongrass items (and can initially be overwhelmed by them if they’re served simultaneously), but once you start to taste the garlic and feel the chili heat, it becomes addictive.

And may I offer a brief huzzah in the matter of Sunflower’s rice continence: You’re asked if you want it at all, and if you do, the serving for one is about the size and shape of an inverted teacup. Brown rice ($1.75) has an appealing mottled inkiness and a nice toasty taste that reminded me, a little, of sunflower seeds.

SUNFLOWER

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

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

288 Connecticut, SF

(415) 861-2336

www.sunflowersf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Balompie Cafe

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paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BALOMPIÉ CAFÉ

Daily, 8 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

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

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

Beer and wine

DS/MC/V

Loud but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

 

Jannah

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paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JANNAH

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

Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–2 p.m.

1775 Fulton, SF

(415) 567-4400

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Echoey noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Metro Cafe

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paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

METRO CAFÉ

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

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

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 552-0903

www.metrocafe311.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Red Crawfish

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paulr@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RED CRAWFISH

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

611 Larkin, SF

(415) 771-1388

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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