Paul Reidinger

Liberty Cafe

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paulr@sfbg.com

Not all restaurants have authors — central figures that breathe their essence into a place — but the ones that do tend to be special. They are also uniquely vulnerable, for if that central figure disappears, a restaurant can be left adrift without its animating force, like a fully-rigged sailing ship on a breezeless sea.

In January, Cathie Guntli, the founder and guiding light of the Liberty Café, died. She opened the place in Bernal Heights in 1994, in a woody Victorian storefront space along then-backwatery Cortland Avenue, and the restaurant quickly established itself as one of the city’s new neighborhood jewels. It was the Firefly of Bernal.

Since Guntli’s death, Liberty Café has passed into new hands associated with Hard Knox Café and Sally’s. So far the change in ownership is not visible; the restaurant looks the same and the general new-American tenor of the food is familiar. The menu still features the famous chicken pot pie. The real changes can be found outside the restaurant; Bernal Heights was a sleepy little hill town 15 years ago, but it isn’t anymore. The commercial district along Cortland has bloomed with shiny new restaurants in recent years, and Liberty Cafe, which began as an outpost or beacon of sorts, no longer holds that distinction. These days, in fact, its homey Victorian look seems almost quaint.

The restaurant has long adhered to a no-reservations policy. This can complicate patrons’ planning, but it does help keep tables full, particularly if there is a steady stream of passersby on foot and a loyal clientele. Liberty enjoys both advantages, and it isn’t hard to see why: it’s kid-friendly and modestly priced, and it’s in the middle of a walk-friendly zone.

Still, there are signs of stress. The dining room strikes me as slightly understaffed; although Liberty Café is barely bigger than tiny, with 32 seats divided between two rooms, you can almost see the front-of-house staff — a single server, maybe two, aided by a couple of bussers — panting to keep up. People must be met and greeted, summoned from the wait list, and then seated. The no-reservation system is an efficient way of filling tables, but it adds an extra step or two to the service, and that is enough to stretch the staff.

The food is a quirky mix of modesty and elegance, although the balance now tips more toward the former. As if in compensation, portions are quite generous. If you like caesar salad, for instance, you’d have trouble finding a better deal than Liberty’s ($7): a looming plateful of immaculately crisp romaine spears tossed with croutons and tabs of Parmesan cheese under a light fall of grated Parmesan — like the first snow of winter. No anchovies, though, alas.

The house-baked breads and dinner rolls flow out to the tables in a steady stream. While they are tasty and satisfying on their own if smeared with a bit of softened butter, they’re also useful if you happen to have ordered soup. The soup ($7 for a broad bowl) changes daily; it could be of portobello mushroom, a thick pottage tasting intensely of the earth and decorated only with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. I had mixed feelings about this soup; there was no doubting the purity of its flavor, but it looked like mud. A bit of colorful festooning wouldn’t have hurt.

There was plenty of color on a plate of seared ahi ($18): purplish fish in thin slabs, pale-green chunks of ripe avocado, brilliant red pear tomatoes, halved and very ripe. The tuna had been well-coated with cracked pepper for some extra jolt, and the dish as a whole fluently spoke the language of summer. But the tomatoes and avocado didn’t seem quite coherent; they were meant to be a salad, but they behaved like junior-high boys and girls reluctant to mix at a dance.

Impressive coherence was achieved with the vegetarian pot pie ($13), a meatless version of the chicken pot pie. Under a disk of golden pastry (a treat in itself) lurked a potpourri of cauliflower florets, carrots, and lentils in a thick mushroom slurry. The effect was surprisingly autumnal (on a warm night, no less), and at first I hoped for and missed the flavor of curry, but the milder flavor accreted bite by bite in a swelling crescendo. Even so, I couldn’t finish it. Two fairly hungry people could share one and come away happy, and I call that value. They could also probably share — but might end up fighting over — the exceptionally tasty country-fried pork chop ($17), slathered with white gravy and served with cheesy grits and bacon-braised kale.

Given Liberty Café’s bakery chops, the pies — I speak now of the dessert kind — are generally estimable. Cherry ($7), for instance, featured an avalanche of wondrous sour cherries the color of a good red Bordeaux and with just enough sweetness to qualify as a dessert. If not a slice of pie, then perhaps some butterscotch pudding ($7), served in a goblet and deeply tasty despite some feathery remnants of scalded milk. It was good but could have been, should have been better. And for now, that’s the way it is at Liberty Café. *

THE LIBERTY CAFÉ

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

418 Cortland, SF

(415) 695-8777

www.thelibertycafe.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Baby Blues BBQ

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paulr@sfbg.com

Who needs the fleshpots of Sodom — or for that matter SoMa — when we can find all the flesh we can handle at barbecue restaurants? All right, it’s not quite the same thing, but close. The real issue pertains to the restaurants. San Francisco isn’t much of a barbecue town; we are a village of pastels, and barbecue is a primary color.

We are also a realm of hipsters, and where there are hipsters, it follows that there might also be hipster barbecue. If you were to start sniffing around for something in this line, you would do well by beginning along those blocks of Mission just south of Cesar Chavez, where Bernal Heights and the Mission mix and mingle and hipsters are known to congregate. Your divinations of hipster habitat would soon lead you to a building with some old Rexall Drug signage still affixed, even as profound change arrived late last year.

You have found — eureka! — Baby Blues BBQ (outpost of a small SoCal chain), which doesn’t especially look like a barbecue joint either outside or inside but does sound like one. It’s filled with a well-mannered raucousness, not to mention touches of kitsch, among them an alabaster cow’s head mounted above the bar like a trophy from some strange safari. Also above the bar: a flat-screen TV showing rodeos in which young men are thrown from bucking, heaving bulls with serious-looking, Pamplona-worthy horns. It seemed to me that the people sitting at the bar were riveted by these dust-ups, but maybe this just proves the Warholian dictum that people would rather watch something than nothing.

Elsewhere on the floor — the layout is an archipelago of trapezoids — people seem more interested in the food than the rodeo. If you don’t find high-def rodeo footage to be particularly appetite-kindling, you might well be relieved, as I was, to find yourself among people who are tucking with real application into impressive platters of ribs, chicken, brisket, and so forth. (There are two communal tables, for the communal-minded.)

Some of the best flavors to be found at Baby Blues involve the side dishes, or, in menu-speak, "fixins." They’re $3.50 each, a la carte; they also come two (of your choice) to a dinner platter and, as a quartet (also of your choosing), make up their own dinner platter. Among the best of these are the "blues on a cob" — an ear of shucked corn, roasted and then slathered with poblano-chile butter and crumblings of mild white cheese — and the macaroni and cheese, which features fat tubes of pasta (perhaps ziti) in an intense cheese sauce under a lid of broiled bread crumbs.

We were somewhat less impressed by the coleslaw, which suffered from wateriness. Not enough mayo? The cabbage was fresh and crisp, though. And the baked beans were more looks than flavor. The roll call included black, pinto, and kidney beans — as in a three-bean salad — but the overall affect was a mild, tang-less sweetness. The wonderful, smoky-dark cornbread, presented as a brownie-like square with nicely crusted edges, did provide some balance and extra texture here.

As for the flesh: it’s served in ample portions that nonetheless don’t overwhelm. It is one of life’s dismaying facts that too much good food, or any food, can turn the delight of eating into the curse of bloat, and this danger is especially high, in my experience, at places that traffic in heartiness. Barbecue certainly qualifies. But Baby Blues has its portion sizes expertly calibrated.

A half-rack of Memphis-style long bone pork ribs ($17.95) featured meaty slats, cooked with a strong hint of smoke and left with plenty of juiciness. The sauce slightly failed to amaze, I must say. It lacked presence and (probably a related issue) seemed to have been thinly applied. In fairness, it must be said that too much sauce can be as bad as too little and can leave one with the impression that a cover-up has been attempted. Baby Blues has nothing to hide, ribs-wise.

Beef brisket ($13.95) is one of the classic cuts of tough but tasty meat. Here it’s braised in beer, which lends a pleasant sourness, and served in shreds, like a disintegrating garment. Its nearest relation might be ropa vieja, a Cuban dish of shredded flank steak. Shredding tough cuts before serving them is wise; it not only makes the customer’s job easier but adds a final layer of insurance that any remaining toughness demons have been exorcised.

Desserts are of the down-home school. We reached a split decision on a peach pie ($5) littered with blueberries; Dr. No thought it wasn’t sweet enough, but I liked the homemade-ness of it, including the fine, flaky pastry. But we both loved the banana mousse ($5), which was like a gelato that managed to stay solid at room temperature and was enhanced by pulverized vanilla cookies. There was also plenty of it, so, like spackle, it helped fill any last gaps left by the savory dishes. We did get up feeling a pound or two heavier.

BABY BLUES BBQ

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sun., noon–10 p.m.

3149 Mission, SF

(415) 896-4250

www.babybluessf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Quite noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Corner

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paulr@sfbg.com

For the evolution-minded, the past is a living presence, and such all-American phrases as "start from scratch" or "clean-sheet design" cause anxiety. In our culture of disposability and revolution, the past is about as attractive as a worn-out razor blade — and we know what happens to them. So to find a new restaurant that simultaneously manages to be contemporary yet respectful of the past gives quiet delight. The restaurant is the Corner; it opened last spring and is indeed right at the corner of 18th and Mission streets, adjoining its older sibling, Weird Fish.

The Corner is better-looking than Weird Fish, which is by no means homely. Both are boxy and tall, but the Corner has a cozy mezzanine that not only looks upon the bustling bar below (part of the place’s identity is as a wine bar) but at the long south wall, a piecework of glass blocks, transom windows, and tall drapes through which the deepening twilight filters. There is even sidewalk seating for the al fresco-minded — brushed-aluminum tables nestled against an Art Deco exterior of black glazed-ceramic tiles that look original to the building (once a Chinese grocery) — or for those who find the noisiness of close quarters indoors to be intrusive. Like me. The mezzanine has the feel of a private room, but it can get nearly as loud up there as on the main floor. You’re not quite on the balcony of the Saint, circa 1980, but close.

The food is the sort you could eat every day, an assortment of Cal-Ital dishes prepared with a light touch. Restaurant food can be debilitating — too many calories, too much attention-seeking — so to find a restaurant whose cooking navigates the tricky passage between humble or indifferent on the one hand and grandiose on the other is a gift. The Corner’s style has an obvious root in the accomplished home kitchen, but the techniques are sharper, the effects intensified. These are among the major reasons for going out to eat in the first place.

And prices, it must be said, are astonishingly moderate for what you get. I’ve had plenty of cauliflower soups in recent years, but at most places even a cup would cost you more than $3.95. Here it buys you a broad bowl, and the cauliflower is purple, and the base of the soup is deep and rich — beef stock? Vegetarians would scream, of course, but using beef stock is the sort of simple touch that can subtly enhance certain dishes.

No one would mistake the Corner for a vegetarian restaurant. The menu includes a gratifying plate of charcuterie ($10), with sizzling coins of andouille sausage, slices of salami, and tissue-like sheets of coppa and prosciutto. This is a meaty array, and there is surprisingly little in the way of filler beyond a dab of mustard, a few bread rounds, and a small heap of pickled-onion shreds.

There’s also a wonderful leg (and thigh) of Muscovy duck ($10.95), given a bewitching, vaguely oriental treatment of star anise and Turkish dates, and a similar section of chicken ($9.95), herb-roasted, with goat cheese worked under the skin in place of butter. I wouldn’t have expected this substitution to succeed, mainly because goat cheese can be sharp and bossy, but under the spell of the heat, all the parts seemed to melt into a harmony.

Also ruled by the spirit of harmony (and even veganism!) was a plate of bruschetta ($5.95): toasts adorned with almost indecently ripe red tomatoes, basil, garlic, and olive oil. This venerable combination is about as Italian as Italian gets; it needs no improvement and can’t be improved upon. The mac and cheese ($3.95), on the other hand, could have used a tweak or two. It was served in what looked like a small paella pan, so we award a point there for presentation, but it was seriously undersalted and, even when brought up to salt snuff, didn’t distinguish itself. Given the renaissance in restaurant mac ‘n’ cheese in recent years, often involving the use of such premium cheeses as Gruyère, the Corner’s version was curiously disappointing.

The comfort-food redeemer turned out to be a cherry crumble ($5), made with seasonal sour cherries that had been judiciously handled: sweetened just enough to qualify them as a dessert, and baked just enough so they didn’t lose their shape or texture. The bits of pastry added crunch interest, with a softening pillow of whipped cream on top. The crumble was served in a vessel that resembled a coffee cup with no handle, and this turned out to be just the right size for sharing by two people: several ample bites each, and done. Beautiful.

Servers have a lot of ground to cover — up and down stairs, in and out doors — and they do it ably. Water glasses are reliably refilled, and plates come and go in a smooth rhythm. And how about a not-small glass of good tempranillo for $5? Even plonk costs more than that now at most places, while glasses of better wine often run near or over $10. I have been patiently awaiting a revolution on this matter; could the Corner’s $5 tempranillo be the shot heard ’round the city?

THE CORNER

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 4 p.m. midnight;

Fri.–Sat., 4 p.m.–1 a.m.

2199 Mission, SF

(415) 875-9258

www.thecornersf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

New Tsing Tao

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paulr@sfbg.com

The shock of the new can involve dazzlement, yes, but that’s not inevitable. Sometimes the new doesn’t seem all that different from the old, and the shock mainly has to do with how little things have actually changed. In our hyperaccelerated culture of progress, new means better, so the word gets deployed a lot, like bait on a fisherman’s hook, without necessarily signifying much. I never saw an old Tsing Tao restaurant and don’t even know if there was one, but the four-year-old New Tsing Tao in West Portal has the lived-in look of one’s favorite pair of weekend shoes — old Wallabies, maybe, or maybe duck boots, since West Portal can be damp, drizzly, and drippy, and certainly has been this summer.

New Tsing Tao does have its newish qualities, mostly the line of bulbous, science-fiction-red halogen lamps that dangle on long cords from the ceiling. Their racy glow suggests a bordello, starship, or hipster club. Pretty much everything else suggests a friendly neighborhood Chinese restaurant, including the rather worn-looking burgundy-colored carpeting on the floor and a long mural depicting (presumably Chinese) mountains in winter along one of the walls. Carpeting isn’t much favored these days by edgy restaurant designers, who seem to have given their love to various hard and glossy surfaces, but it remains useful as a damper of noise. You can hear yourself think inside New Tsing Tao, and you can hear what the person across the table is saying, too. Maybe ordering another Tsing Tao.

The food is rather classic San Francisco neighborhood Chinese food, the kind we tend to take for granted unless something goes wrong: a delivery gets messed up or the place goes out of business. Servings are large, prices are modest, and service is well-practiced and cheery in its way. The location — on a bendy stretch of Ulloa Street off the main drag — also offers a subtle charm; it’s a village within a village, without the drama of streetcars pacing back and forth like caged animals.

If drama you nonetheless must have, you might like the sizzling rice soup ($5.95 for the smallest size), which features a brick of toasted rice that resembles a Rice Krispie bar and hisses and sizzles fabulously when tossed into the broth. The rice is a diva, simultaneously giving value for money (including entertainment value) while overwhelming the rest of the soup’s players, a troupe of worthy character actors including chicken, prawns, peas, water chestnuts, and straw mushrooms.

The menu includes many standards, including potstickers ($5.95 for a clutch) — they are chubby — and mu-shi pork ($8.50), bits of meat and shredded napa cabbage ready to be spooned into rice pancakes with some hoisin sauce. If I’ve ever had bad versions of either of these dishes, I can’t remember them, and New Tsing Tao’s are just what one expects. In restaurants, we tend to like what we expect. The menu is vegetarian-friendly; the potstickers can be had in meatless guise, as can hot and sour soup ($5.50), which is rich in tofu splinters to make up the flesh deficit. (The meat version costs a little more, $5.95.)

Twice-cooked pork ($6.75 at lunch), although alluringly described as "hot," did leave me slightly disappointed. The meat was a little tough, the sauce tasted mostly of soy, and the promised heat was little in evidence. Some of the better stir-fry dishes are to be found under the aegis of "chef’s specialties." These include a preparation called Phoenix Dragon ($10.50), an everything-under-the-sun cornucopia of shrimp and shredded chicken breast tossed with snow peas, baby corn, straw mushrooms, and water chestnuts. If you could only have one dish from the menu, you would probably be pleased with this one.

I also admired the orange beef ($8.95), in part because it was spicy enough to satisfy the menu card’s "hot" claim, and — more important — because the meat was not crisp-fried or deep-fried, just quickly turned in a hot wok so that it remained supple and juicy. Deep-frying has its charms, crispiness being one of them, but it can seem perversely out of place in Chinese cooking, which places so much emphasis on gently handled vegetables. Fresh vegetables are crisp the way nature intended.

The main dishes are generally served with a sizable ration of white rice. You are asked if you want it, which means it’s possible in theory to opt out, but it has a tendency to turn up anyway, and accumulates like piles of snow left by plows, massive and indistinct. The casual wastefulness of this bothers me — not at New Tsing Tao in particular but as a wider phenomenon in Chinese restaurants. In a straitened era when even the flow of junk mail has diminished, this might be a moment to revisit the white rice glut in Chinese restaurants — a time (as Lincoln put it in quite a different context) to think anew. *

NEW TSING TAO

Sun.–Mon, Wed.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

811 Ulloa, SF

(415) 566-9559

www.newtsingtaorestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Moss Room

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paulr@sfbg.com

The basement restaurant is an odd duck — odder still if the basement is in a museum in a relatively remote park. Yes, my 16-ton hints do pertain to the Moss Room, the venture orchestrated by Loretta Keller and Charles Phan that opened last fall in a subterranean sector of the new Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park.

A word, if I may, about that building, which faces its nemesis, the DeYoung Museum, across the concourse the way Minas Tirith faced Minas Morgul in The Lord of the Rings: one fair, the other sordid. The Academy of Sciences building is, for me, the far superior design because it subtly but unmistakably refers to its predecessor and because, with its expanses of glass and filaments of steel, it sits in its sylvan setting far more lightly. It does not imperially impose itself on its surroundings. Also, it has the Moss Room.

Strange to say, but the restaurants the Moss Room most resembles are both downtown, where the Academy should have been moved. One is Shanghai 1930, a similarly elegant basement, like a lavish bunker. The other is Bix, above ground but with underwaterish light and a bold staircase. At Bix, the staircase rises to a mezzanine; at the Moss Room, it descends from a cafeteria to the subterranean sanctum and adjoins a channel-like aquarium and a wall garden.

These design details suggest the restaurant’s commitment to sustainability, and as weary as sometimes one grows in using that word, it’s probably worth repeating with respect to a place that is inside a science museum in the middle of a large urban park. If any restaurant should be attentive to food’s ecological dimension, it should be the Moss Room. And it is, with the passion extending all the way to the wine list, which is organized under the rubrics "organic," "biodynamic," and "sustainable."

The Moss Room’s look doesn’t suggest its kinship to Keller’s other restaurants, Bizou and Coco500. The former was like the best restaurant in a quaint Provençal town, while the latter offers a slightly deracinated spareness meant to appeal to urban youth. The food, though, is another matter. Keller has long been a leading exponent of a cooking style I associate closely with Zuni Café: the cuisine of Italy and the south of France, fluffed and freshened. We could call this style "rustic" or "lusty," to use two clichés much favored in a certain cliché-choked competing venue — but let’s not. How about "lustic"? Or perhaps "lustique"?

Because the Moss Room, despite being below the water line, is a more elegant venue than either Bizou or Coco500 — a carpeted hush, dim lighting, high ceilings, the zen spectacle of drifting aquarium fish and herbs growing from the wall above them — there is a certain tension about the food. Should it be elegant or lustic? Can it be both? When you try to be both, you risk being neither.

The small plates reflect a certain restlessness. They range from a humble plate of hummus and pita bread ($10) — glistening like naan — embellished with roasted red-pepper and manouri cheese, to the more elaborate batter-fried squash blossoms ($9) zipped up with goat cheese, mint, and roasted-garlic aioli.

A bowl of corn chowder ($8) did strike me as quite Kelleresque. The corn came from Brentwood, and the chowder was made with chicken and shrimp stocks, along with bits of bacon for deeper flavor. Summer corn is famously sweet, of course, and shrimp stock can intensify this effect. So can under-salting. Luckily, fate provided us a small bowl of sea salt.

Equally Kelleresque was a bowl of squid-ink spaghetti ($12) tossed with a meaty mix of squid and sun-dried tomatoes sharpened with chili flakes and what the menu called "herbs." This dish was visually striking, with the zinfandel-colored strings of pasta looking like a clump of kelp, and its flavors glowed with a steady dark heat.

I caught a milder wave of the same effect with the local albacore ($26), a pair of seared chunks looking like roulades embedded on a textured carpet of roasted eggplant shreds and tomato quarters, with a pale green purée of summer squash piped around the perimeter. Albacore is wildly underrated and is worth searching out.

As for salmon: I like it but don’t love it, and when our server explained that the wild Alaskan version ($23) consisted not of a filet but of flaked flesh tossed with English-pea cavatelli and a north African blend of radish, mint, and preserved lemon, I silently cheered. Salmon can be overbearing and rich, but here the kitchen induced it to cooperate with its platemates.

Speaking of platemates: Greg’s cookie plate ($9) offers a petit-fours-like array of tiny treats. It’s ideal for sharing, and you get lots of bites with not much heft. For the heft-minded: a roasted-peach tart ($9), accompanied by a lump of crème fraîche custard and grainy peach sorbet. Close your eyes and think of the Stairmaster.

•<\!s>Le boo-boo: In a recent piece about Bistro St. Germain (July 22) I described Paris’ Faubourg St. Germain as being on the Right Bank of the Seine. Well, no, it’s actually on the Left Bank. *

THE MOSS ROOM

Mon.–Tues., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.;

Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

55 Music Concourse (in the California Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park), SF

(415) 876-6121

www.themossroom.com

Wine and beer

Not noisy

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Bistro St. Germain

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paulr@sfbg.com

Few neighborhoods in Paris are more full of cultural flavor than the Faubourg St.-Germain, the Right Bank district whose main thoroughfare, the Boulevard St. Germain, is the home of the Café Flore (the original!) and the Deux Magots. Picture Sartre thoughtfully smoking a clove cigarette, with a demitasse emptied of espresso sitting on the table in front of him.

Although the Faubourg St.-Germain is very near the Sorbonne, its bohemian life is mostly a relic. These days the area is expensively residential, and its shops and restaurants reflect this affluence. So when our own bistro impresario, Laurent Legendre, recently opened his latest venture on lower Haight Street under the name Bistro St. Germain, was he looking backward or forward, toward nostalgia or aspiration?

If the lower Haight can’t quite claim anyone of Sartre’s stature as part of its boho past, it can claim that it has kept something of a boho present. The neighborhood retains elements of true grit and is full of young people, and its restaurants still tend toward the cheap. But the area’s socioeconomic furniture has been rearranged in recent years, and since the opening of nearby RNM in 2002, the upmarket trend has been palpable. Last year saw the arrival, in the next block, of Uva, a sleek enoteca, and now there is a proper bistro.

Legendre isn’t the only propagator of neighborhood bistros in San Francisco — nearby L’Ardoise, for instance, was launched by Thierry Clement — but he is a force majeure. His previous undertaking, Le P’tit Laurent in Glen Park, is unusually authentic. Before that, he was a longtime principal in Clémentine (in the old Alain Rondelli space) and Bistro Clémentine, both in the inner Richmond.

I do find myself wondering how many traditional French bistros we need in this city, which, as it happens, is not Paris, home of the traditional French bistro. Are others wondering the same thing? The evidence, at least at Bistro St. Germain, suggests not. The place has the boxy spaciousness of a swimming pool or a pool hall, yet it fills up quickly with people and noise. (Sartre: "Hell is other people.") Are the crowds drawn by the tasty location, the huge wall mural (a silhouette of the Paris skyline, including such familiar spectacles as the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, and Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre), or the crisply executed, fairly priced food? The answer to this sort of trick question, or trick rhetorical question, is almost always, all of the above.

The food does not disappoint, certainly. From the arrival of the first basket of bread at the table, it’s clear that care is being taken in the kitchen. The bread is a simple sweet baguette, still warm from the oven, sliced and presented with a pat of softened butter. The addictive properties of warm bread have, I believe, been under-investigated. Your bread basket will be endlessly, cheerfully replenished, but try to save some slices for mop-up duty in the event you have mussels — and you should have mussels. At $9 for a sizable platter, they aren’t expensive and can be had in a number of sauces, among them a basquaise of white wine, tomato, and peppers. Hugely soppable. And don’t forget some frites ($3.50) — sublimely crisp — for some additional counterpoint.

The menu ranges gracefully across the French classics. There are snails ($6.25 for six), served on a dimpled earthenware plate and redolent of raw garlic. There is a roast poussin ($14), beautifully bronzed yet with moist white meat — a quiet miracle — and served with a large stack of frites. Duck confit ($16) is nicely done, with a crisp crust still faintly sizzling; it is set on a broad bed of lentils that are the proper gray-green color but are too big to be the traditional Puy variety. As lentil-cookers will likely agree, a large virtue of Puy lentils is their determined resistance to overcooking. They don’t easily turn to mush. The bigger sorts have to be handled more carefully, but Bistro St. Germain’s kitchen passes this test.

I found a bourride ($17) — a seafood stew, complete with aioli-smeared rounds of toasted bread — to be defined by the presence of what I took to be some form of cheeks, perhaps halibut cheeks. The rest of the players, including shrimp, mussels, and chunks of salmon, I could easily identify by shape, texture, and flavor. The suspected cheeks, however — rectangular tabs of flesh, thumb-sized — offered a strong, almost cheese-like flavor. Can fish be gamey? I offered tastes around the table as a cross-check, and the reactions returned were mild. Nonetheless, I hesitated for a bit before finishing the last piece.

Vegetarians can find French cooking a tough go, but Bistro St. Germain is accommodating. The meatless choices are explicitly identified and aren’t shabby — a shallow bowl of ravioli ($15), say, stuffed with squash purée and bathed in a mushroom cream sauce. Not quite legendary, perhaps, but pretty good.

BISTRO ST. GERMAIN

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sun., 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

518 Haight, SF

(415) 626-6262

Beer and wine

MC/V

Very noisy if busy

Wheelchair accessible

Flour + Water

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paulr@sfbg.com

In an era when the naming of restaurants resembles the naming of Japanese cars — the ideal being a single, elegant, mysterious word like "Incanto" or "Lexus" — it seems rather daring to give a new place such a defiantly plain, yet weirdly complex, name as Flour + Water. One suspects that the idea is to suggest simplicity and forthrightness, but a certain austerity is also implied — not to mention the ubiquitous ness of flour in this country. We eat way too much flour, too much of it white and refined. It silts up our insides. I do like the "+" for its distinctiveness.

As it happens, pizza crust consists largely of flour and water, and one of the bigger deals at Flour + Water (which opened by a pair of Davids, White and Steele, late in the spring on the ground floor of a big Victorian building in the innermost heart of the Mission District) is pizza. The pies are made in the Neapolitan style, which means a thin crust and a very hot oven. This style of pizza has become very, very popular in San Francisco in the past few years — a winsome development for those of us who suffered through a long Dark Age of foam-rubber crusts. Are Flour + Water’s crusts up to the high standard set by Pizzeria Delfina, Gialina, Pizzetta 211, and Piccino? That, Horatio, is the question.

The duet of flour and water also figures in pasta, but the routine here can be more complex, since if you replace the water with egg, you end up with noodles. Flour + Water’s — excellent — pastas are hand-rolled, just from semolina flour (the slightly yellowish stuff produced from durum wheat) and water, I would guess. The name we give to this combination, macaroni, faintly suggests that it came from a box on a supermarket shelf, but in fact Flour + Water’s pastas are not only brilliantly sauced but produced in unusual shapes with evocative names — "maltagliati," for instance, or "rags," a type of pasta made from leftover scraps. One evening I saw a plate of this arriving at the festive table next to ours, and it did look like a tiny pile of old clothes waiting to be stuffed into a Goodwill bag.

My own plate of pasta, already dispatched, had consisted of agnolotti ($16), a swarm of little ravioli-like pockets filled with seasoned minced pork and bathed in a sauce of butter, Parmesan cheese, and parsley. (Our well-schooled server said that the name meant "clouds," but I might have misunderstood her; "agnolotti" is also said to refer to the shape of priests’ hats.) The pasta itself had the slight, not-unpleasant toughness I associate with fresh macaroni; fresh noodle pasta is a bit more pliant and luxurious. It’s like the difference between wool and cashmere.

Given the apparent pedigree of the pizza operation (chef Thomas McNaughton’s kitchen has its own pizzaiolo, Jon Darsky), I was struck by the condition of the crust under a margherita pie ($12 for a decent-sized one). I am all for blistering, and the restaurant’s Web site boasts of an ultra-hot oven, but there is a difference between blistering and charring. Blistering good, charring bad. Charring makes an un-pretty spectacle and leaves an off taste — we are talking about burnt flour, after all — while research suggests that it’s bad for you. By the time we were done with the pie, the serving tray was littered with twisted little lumps of charcoal, like burned-out tanks on a miniature battlefield. The toppings were fine and included fior di latte (a mozzarella cheese made from cow’s rather than water-buffalo milk). The half-wilted basil leaves clearly had spent some time in the oven.

In a small irony, some of the restaurant’s best dishes have nothing to do with pizza, pasta, or flour. A trio of plump marinated sardines ($9) wore bikinis of roasted-pepper slivers — they looked like a chorus line in some musical about a beach — while a simple side dish of chickpeas ($5) turned out to feature fresh chickpeas. These have a wonderful spring-green color and a bit more juiciness than the reconstituted, beige kind. F+W’s lot was also enlivened by a fine dice of pancetta, carrot, and onion (a meaty twist on mirepoix) and broth, which we daintily sipped after the chickpeas were gone.

Best of all, Flour + Water’s brief dessert list includes an authentic star: a block of olive-oil-scented cornmeal cake ($8) topped with a globe of olive-oil ice cream — a dense, smooth reminder that olives are fruit — and flanked by split strawberries tossed with shreds of candied fennel. Fennel is a root, not a fruit, and candied or not, its looks are unprepossessing (like a frosted-glass lightbulb that’s shattered), but its licorice flavor takes well to sweetening and to a union with sweet-tart, ripe strawberries. Enchanting!

FLOUR + WATER

Dinner: 5:30 p.m.–midnight

2401 Harrison, SF

(415) 826-7000

www.flourandwater.com

Beer and wine

Pleasant noise

AE/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Aicha

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paulr@sfbg.com

The tagine is something of a unicorn in the kingdom of food. Many people will recognize the word as referring to a stew of Moroccan or other north African provenance, but it also refers to the pot in which the stew is cooked. And, though you may be an inveterate Moroccan-restaurant-goer, chances are you’ve never seen the tagine pot in its full glory. What typically reaches the table is just the lower half of the tagine — a kind of serving platter, probably of glazed ceramic, possibly hand-painted.

But the spectacular part of the tagine is the conical top, which looks like a space capsule or a hat from Beach Blanket Babylon. The top is aesthetically striking, but it also is a mechanism for moisture retention; like a still, it captures condensation and routes it back to the dish whence it came. The top has a knob at its peak that resists heat and so enables the cook to lift it up and see what’s going on in there.

I wish the removal of tagine tops would become a standard tableside flourish at Moroccan restaurants, the way lighting saganaki on fire is at Greek places. Tagine de-topping isn’t standard practice at Aicha, at least not yet, but I did thrill to the spectacle, deep in the open kitchen, of a bare-handed chef pulling off the top of a hand-painted ceramic tagine to inspect its contents. The tagine top looked very much like the one I have at home, and perhaps the tagine dish itself was the one that would soon be brought to me. More on this important matter anon.

Aicha opened late in the spring in a storefront space on Polk Street, in that transitional zone between the Civic Center and Russian Hill. The restaurant will definitely be seen as an upgrade to this emulsification-resistant neighborhood. Although it’s small, it’s handsomely appointed — a crisp, clean spareness with striking copper accents, and, of course, beautifully authentic tagines.

Authenticity is a central theme at Aicha. The restaurant will do its best "to preserve the authenticity of the cuisine," according to a statement on the Web site. This is never an easy undertaking in California, land of bravura salad-tossing, but so far the place is off to an impressive start. The food is modestly priced and not elaborate or precious, but it does offer an intensity of flavor many kitchens charging two or three times as much might envy.

There is great delight to be found not only among the appetizers, which cost between $3 and $6, but even in the more modest side dishes ($3 each) like the simple-sounding white beans. These are of the smaller, navy-bean size; are expertly cooked al dente (i.e. neither hard nor mushy); and are presented in a creamy, well-seasoned sauce whose glints of redness hint at the presence of paprika or some other extroverted but not bitingly hot red pepper. We do not eat enough beans and legumes in this country, perhaps because we associate them with poverty and the old country (whatever that country that might be), but maybe we would eat more if they were this good.

For just a dollar or three more, you can find yourself feasting on comparably gratifying appetizers. Blanched carrots ($4), are peeled, quartered, and tossed with chermoula, the distinctive north African spice paste that usually includes garlic, preserved lemon, and cumin, along with other herbs and spices. Like beans, carrots (one of the notably health-protecting orange foods) are neglected in our culinary culture and are often relegated to lowly duty in mirepoix or soup stock. But if you served these at a party, you would run out in five minutes.

Possibly even tastier, though not quite as finger-friendly, is taktouka ($4), a plateful of grilled red bell pepper squiggles tossed with some tomato, olive oil, and what the menu cryptically calls "spices." Cumin was in there, certainly, but grilled peppers have such a distinctive and alluring flavor that they don’t really need much else.

Somewhat less impressive — yet at the top of the appetizer price scale — was an artichoke salad ($6) consisting of pickled artichoke hearts, peppery green olives, crumblings of feta, and lots of immaculate romaine leaves. Lots. The romaine was too much with us and diluted the potency of other players.

It was thought that the b’stilla ($6), a pizzetta-sized round of phyllo stuffed with pistachio chicken and dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon, was a little too cinnamony. (Frasier‘s Dr. Niles Crane, complaining about a Café Nervosa cappuccino: "Can you believe the incompetence of that man? I very clearly asked for a whisper of cinnamon, and he’s given me a full-throated shout!") But a lamb tagine ($9) — tender shanks on the bone, surrounded by little green hills of peas and artichoke hearts — was all a heart could desire, even if the plate arrived topless.

AICHA

Daily, 11:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m.

1303 Polk, SF

(415) 345-9947

www.aichasf.com

Credit cards pending; call ahead and bring cash

Hard surfaces mean noise

Wheelchair accessible

Farallon

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paulr@sfbg.com

Since restaurants tend to age in dog years, a restaurant that reaches its 12th birthday — like Farallon — might be called venerable. It has survived its perilous youth to achieve, perhaps, the stability of middle age, and the good news is that while not all that many restaurants see their 12th birthday, the ones that do stand a reasonable chance of seeing quite a few more.

Mark Franz, who cooked at Stars while that glittering spot was still in the hands of founder Jeremiah Tower, has been the man at Farallon from the beginning — the man, at least, in the kitchen. The designer was Pat Kuleto, and the restaurant’s interior décor shows a definite kinship with other Kuleto projects from the mid-1990s; like Boulevard (1993), it is rich in fanciful lamps and light fixtures, and like Jardiniere (1997), it includes a conspicuous sweeping staircase.

But mostly there is the Captain Nemo effect, the sense of being in some magical grotto at the bottom of the sea. Many of the visual effects are not subtle: the huge faux scallop shell that forms part of the ceiling and the row of lamps like line-caught fish hanging in front of the exhibition kitchen are two that spring to mind. But Kuleto did not neglect the finer touches, even if it takes a bit longer to notice them. The tiled mosaics on the wall arches, for instance, are quietly spectacular in their byzantine colors and details. The mosaics have worn well. They lend an air of permanence and impressiveness, and they’re what you find yourself staring at long after you’ve stopped noticing the more outlandish stuff.

The menu describes the cooking as "coastal cuisine," an au courant designation for imaginative or contemporary seafood. The restaurant’s obvious peers are Aqua and Waterbar; it’s less monumental than the former and cozier than the latter, and because it’s just a few steps from Union Square, I wondered if we would find some pandering to tourists — some version of cioppino, say. I didn’t notice any such over-obviousness. The theme instead is one of discreet sophistication, cleverness that does not call attention to itself.

Sashimi of ahi tuna ($18), for example, is the kind of thing you could get at dozens of restaurants around town. But Farallon’s kitchen gave the glistening ruby tabs of flesh a sly Spanish twist, with an overlay of a boquerón (a white anchovy), a scattering of slivered almonds, and a nearby berm of ñora-chili purée, like an honor guard.

A buckwheat blini (part of a four-course, $65 prix fixe) was soaked — and I do mean soaked — in melted butter, then topped with alternating lengths of gravlax and sturgeon, themselves capped with crème fraîche and a brief hailstorm of salmon roe, like little pebbles of orange glass. The lesson here was butter, its delicate, singular richness. Accept no substitute, because there is none.

The combination of cantaloupe and prosciutto is friendly to the point of cliché, so a little inventiveness is welcome. Farallon’s summer melon salad (also part of the prix fixe) featured a core of cantaloupe dice wrapped in swaths of prosciutto and topped with what looked like simple shaved ice but turned out to be verbena granita. Since we intuitively associate color with flavor, it was startling to find so much punch packed into something that looked as if it had been reclaimed from a hotel ice bucket.

The menu does not beat you over the head with screeds about sustainability, and perhaps this restraint is wise, since seafood choices are so often fraught ones. I love arctic char — a milder, eco-friendly relation of salmon — and I very much liked the way it was handled here ($35): gently roasted, then finished in a cast-iron pot with some white wine and a succotash-like medley of corn kernels, summer squash dice, and cubes of Spanish chorizo. But: the fish had been taken in Icelandic waters, which are quite a few carbon footprints away.

Also carbon-footprinty, though delicious, was soft-shell crab, available as a starter ($18) on a bed of corn kernels, and as the third of the prix-fixe’s four courses, with Puy lentils (a bit overcooked, I thought) and basil-roasted tomatoes. In both cases the crab was fried "naked," which meant without being dipped in batter. Fried batter has its golden, crunchy charms, but it can be overbearing. When you are trying to enjoy crab — especially soft-shell crab, the essence of crab — the best crust is no crust.

Also, crustlessness shaves a few points from the calorie count, which leaves wiggle room for dessert: a warm (prix-fixe) brownie, say, with a pat of malted-milk-ball ice cream bisected by a chewy chocolate tuile, or, for the more restrained, an array of chocolate bites ($6), including a liqueur-filled truffle and two bites of a sublime milk chocolate-peanut butter pavé. Just the sort of thing the 12-year-old in each of us loves.

FARALLON

Dinner: Mon.-Thurs., 5:30-9:30 p.m.;

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

450 Post, SF

(415) 956-6969

www.farallonrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Bar Bambino

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paulr@sfbg.com

Heresy is the true spice of life, and it was with this thought in mind that I sat one evening in Bar Bambino, a two-year-old wine bar in a most unlikely location — a heretical location? — and had a beer. The beer was a Moretti but also dark, a La Rossa. I’d never before seen Italian dark beer, either here or in Italy, and, truth be told, I didn’t know the Italians even brewed dark beer. The party of the second part, a beer skeptic, reached across the table to take a sip from the large, shapely goblet.

"Mmmm! That’s good!" was the verdict. "Chocolately."

The verdict, really, was unanimous and extended to Bar Bambino in its entirety. The restaurant sits on one of the bleaker stretches of 16th Street as it passes through the Mission District, and its narrow poker face is easy to miss. Once inside, though, you will feel as if you’ve stepped into an enchanted cave that includes a communal table (in the front window), a bar, a second communal table deeper in that can also be set aside for large parties, and, in the rear, a heated garden for a semi-al fresco experience.

Years ago, in the mid-1990s, we spent the better part of a Florentine afternoon lounging in a place called Cibrèo. Princess Di was said to be a habituée, and we could see why. Like Bar Bambino, it was off the beaten track and discreetly handsome, a place to sit and have a glass or two of wine and order a succession of plates of various sizes. It was my first in-country experience of polpette, the wonderful baby Italian meatballs that are typically served in a spicy tomato sauce.

Although Bar Bambino doesn’t look anything like Cibrèo (which sprawled like somebody drunk on a sofa), it does have a similar aura of relaxed but sustained festivity. It also has baby meatballs ($15); they come in a nice stack, with a potent tomato sauce and some shreds of chard, and they are very satisfying. Among other things, the polpette tell us that the kitchen takes its Italian cooking very seriously; the food is a lot like Delfina’s in this respect, though perhaps a bit more playful. You can get Italian-style "tater tots" ($5), nicely crisp on the outside and creamy on the inside, just like the ones you used to eat on a stick at the state fair.

The white-bean-and-tuna salad is an Italian classic. Here ($9.50) it’s made with slow-cooked spagna beans, which looked a lot like cannellini to me and tasted as if they’d been simmered in broth. The only other players were chunks of tuna, slivers of red onion, and a healthy splash of extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO, to the acronym-involved). The dish was very tasty but drab-looking at best, like uncooked brains. In Bar Bambino’s defense, I will say that I’ve had similarly dreary-looking versions in Italy — which is odd, since Italian culture manages to bring small flourishes of visual style to practically everything.

A plate of bruschetta ($11.50) topped Sicilian-style with stewed lamb leg, crumbled egg, parsley, and poor-man’s cheese, gets my vote as best bruschetta in the world. I’ve never had bad bruschetta, and I’ve had plenty of good ones, but this one, with its shards of profoundly tender meat, was unforgettable.

Among the pastas, the trofie ($13.50), sauced with cream and crumblings of mild sausage, attracted our attention. The pasta itself turned out to resemble hand-rolled cigarettes, vaguely tubular and tapered at the ends. It’s a Ligurian pasta and is notable for consisting only of flour and water — no egg. Its little rills and ridges caught the sauce nicely. This is the kind of simple Italian dish that leaves you wondering, How do they manage to do so much with so little? A dash of this, a touch of that, and a miracle.

Italian culinary miracle-working does not always extend to the dessert cart, but at Bar Bambino the charm lasts all the way to the end of the menu card (although there is no dessert cart). On the traditional side, we have the old Sicilian favorite, cannoli ($7), a trio of delicate pistachio pastry flutes filled with goat-milk cheese, ricotta, honey — the pistachio flavor dominates — and on the more playful end we find zepote di banana ($8), beignet-like banana fritters topped with melted Nutella sauce, which you pour out yourself from a little pitcher.

Will those around you be watching to see if you spill? Possibly. Bar Bambino’s snugness invites a certain degree of social espionage. On the other hand, the sophisticated look, including a long wall consisting of narrow wood planks and the wonderful chandelier made of wine bottles hanging over the front communal table, might help insulate you from over-overt scrutiny, which can help you enjoy your heresy, whatever it might be. *


BAR BAMBINO

Tues.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–midnight; Sun., 5–10 p.m.

2931 16th St., SF

(415) 701-8466

www.barbambino.com

Wine and beer

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Terzo

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paulr@sfbg.com

Fish might not need bicycles, but does a restaurant with an Italian name need pasta? Terzo does offer fish on its menu — and pasta too, though rather glancingly, considering that many of us would put pasta right at the center of Italian cuisine. But despite the name — "terzo" means "third" in Italian and is meant to suggest the public spaces where people gather when they’re not at home or work — Terzo isn’t quite an Italian restaurant. It’s both less (a minimum of pasta and pizza-like items) and more, in its use of flavors and influences from around the Mediterranean. A friend found that the restaurant, with its emphasis on small, shareable dishes, reminded him of SPQR, the Roman-style small-plates spot on Fillmore, but for me the deeper resonance was with SPQR’s predecessor, Chez Nous, whose tapas-style cooking drew on all sorts of Mediterranean roots.

It must be said that, similarities in food notwithstanding, Terzo doesn’t remotely look like either of those places. Behind a demure street face, the surprisingly spacious interior is a kind of warm metropolitan glam: caramel-colored wood, flickering candles, mirrors, and touches of glass; the look is like that of a monastery designed by Mies van der Rohe. The patrons, while casually dressed, have an air of importance about them — but then, we are in Cow Hollow, an enchanted land of importance. Sort of our Green Zone.

That Middle Eastern staple hummus ($8), then, to set the mood. Our server told us that chef Mark Gordon’s kitchen is particularly proud of its version, and so it should be. The chickpea puree was rich and smooth, with no hint of tahini bitterness, but it was the house-made pita triangles, warm and swabbed with olive oil and za’atar, that provided the burst of extraordinariness. Pita bread like this tells you that you’ve probably never had fresh pita bread before.

Subtle touches similarly raise many of the other small dishes to the heights. A marriage of crispy polenta and morel mushrooms ($14) was discreetly though powerfully enhanced by a splash of crème fraïche scented with thyme and braised green garlic. Baby artichokes ($9), halved and achingly tender, had been braised — evidently in or with lemon juice — before being heaped atop piquillo peppers, then covered with tumbled sheets of prosciutto. A panzarotto ($9), a kind of calzone, was filled with mozzarella, chard, and chili (whose bite was palpable), then napped with a radiant marinara sauce, but it was the bread pouch that caught my attention, with its serrated lips and faintly shiny crispness, like that of pastry. And a salad of shredded fennel and porcini ($12), although laid flat on the plate like a kind of unsettled carpaccio, jumped up impressively under the coaxing of lemon, olive oil, and truffle pecorino.

Spiedini ($12.50) were simple skewers of free-range chicken chunks, bread, and onion, brushed with a cilantro-chili marinade and then grilled until everything was soft and lightly caramelized. Campfire food, for rather boutique-y campers. The only small plate that didn’t quite come off for me was roasted asparagus ($9). The spears seemed very much al dente (how much roasting did they get?) and were scattered with toasted hazelnuts — a clever idea that did not work, since these hard hemispherical pellets made an already difficult-to-eat dish that much harder to eat: knife and fork for the asparagus, plus a spoon to scoop up the nuts. At some early point, we dropped the pretense and used our fingers.

We also used our fingers, greedily, on a huge bowl of fried-onion rings ($6). No ballpark I’ve ever been to offers anything better. The red-onion rings were dunked in buttermilk batter, then fried to a delicate, crisp gold; the shreds seemed almost to want to float.

"Don’t let me eat any more, I’m going to be sick," moaned an addicted party from across the table, who nonetheless kept right on eating.

As is so often the case at small plate-ish restaurants that also offer some big plates, the latter at Terzo do not shine quite as brightly. I wonder if this doesn’t have something to do with plentitude — delight diluted by too many bites. I did like the roasted halibut ($27), topped with a surprisingly gentle radish-lemon salsa verde and presented in a shallow bowl on a rubbly bed of chickpeas. The fish had the sublime moistness I associate with poaching, while the chickpeas were plump and perfectly cooked. I liked this dish fine, but I suspect I would have thought it was a knockout if it had been half the size.

The flourless chocolate cake ($8), with fleur de sel and whipped cream, would have been a knock-out at twice the size. It had the primal intensity of some ingredient lifted from a pastry chef’s secret cache. Entre nous: amazing.

TERZO

Dinner: Sun.-Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.;

Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11 p.m.

3011 Steiner, SF

(415) 441-3200

www.terzosf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Moderate noise

Wheelchair accessible

Fly on Sutter

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paulr@sfbg.com

Although Brick shuffled off this mortal coil toward the end of April, it did leave part of that coil behind, in the form of an impressive brick wall. That wall now belongs to the city’s second iteration of Fly and remains the dominant physical feature of the space, along with stretches of purple paint and hangings of wall art fashioned from bottle caps that glint in the changing light.

In good times and bad, the death of restaurants isn’t unusual. But what is noticeable in the current go-round is the spread of trusted brand names — Pizzeria Delfina, for instance (which opened a second outpost in the onetime ZAO noodle bar on California near Fillmore), Dosa, and now Fly, which for years has been a stalwart on Divisadero in the Western Addition.

The new Fly has a pool-hall feel and offers more natural light than its older sibling, while the Tendernob setting is more about real grit than the hipster faux kind. Even San Francisco, one of the most yuppified cities in America, still has its patches of dingy storefronts, ratty-looking apartment blocks, and populations of people with missing teeth. Stepping into Fly can feel a bit like stepping into an oasis, but one steps in with a distinct sense of ambivalence nonetheless. Prices aren’t particularly high and the setting isn’t at all posh, but it’s all still a world apart from the one on the other side of the large windows.

Apart from the name-giving brick wall, the chief legacy of Brick is the Brick burger ($9), a hefty lump of well-seasoned Angus beef, capped with melted white cheese and threads of pickled white onion, nestled in a soft, shapely bun, and served with either salad or fries. The fries are excellent, as is the burger. In fact I’ve never had a better one in these parts, and while the price isn’t low (Carl’s Jr. has made an entire ad campaign out of the exorbitance of the $6 burger), it’s not unreasonable either.

Otherwise, much of the menu resembles that of the original Fly. The food is friendly and non-narcissistic, the sort of stuff that supports and propels conversation rather than preening for attention and itself becoming a subject of conversation. We recognized a plate of hummus and tapenade ($6.75), served with warm pita triangles and some spare change of cucumber and tomato coins — just as satisfying as six years ago, and only 50¢ more. The kitchen also turns out a broad array of pizzas, some the regular kind, others covered Fly-style with salad.

This sort of all-in-one idea seems very American, but if you prefer your pizzas and salads to coexist rather than cohabit, your wish can be easily accommodated. We found the La Tortilla salad ($8) to be a jumble of mixed baby greens with corn kernels, black beans, tomato dice, shards of crisped tortillas, and a cilantro vinaigrette — it was as if a bowl of ordinary mésclun had collided with one of those Mexican salads served in a giant taco bowl. The vinaigrette didn’t quite appeal; it did taste like cilantro (whose flavor can dissipate rapidly once the leaves are cut), but it could have used a bit of counterpoint — some sweet or sour, or both — for fullness.

Considering that the pizzettas are showered with salad, the distribution of basil leaves atop a pizza margherita ($9) was notably continent. The other toppings (mozzarella, chopped tomato) were applied with equal restraint, which meant, for once, that the crust wasn’t merely a beast of burden but a worthy dimension of the whole in its own right. Fly’s crusts rise to the occasion by managing to be both thin and puffy at the same time.

The barbecue pork sandwich ($9) was just absolutely stuffed with dense, juicy meat and plenty of provolone. It reminded me of those meat-and-cheese Jack in the Box ads from a few years ago: no frills, just the good stuff, on a nice fresh baguette. And fish tacos ($8 for three) were very tasty and crunchy. Their only flaw had to do with their swaddling clothes, which consisted of flour rather than corn tortillas. Flour tortillas do have a silken softness their corn brethren can’t match, but they also raise an authenticity issue and aren’t as good for you. (Corn tortillas are made from masa, a whole-grain flour.) Most of us eat far too much wheat flour anyway, and too much of that is refined white flour.

The mood of the place is leisurely and undramatic, and it encourages drifters-in. Drifting is better than flying. Of course, what isn’t?

FLY ON SUTTER

Continuous service: Tues.-Sun., noon–2 a.m.;

Mon., 5 p.m.–2 a.m.

1085 Sutter, SF

(415) 441-4232

www.flybarandrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Potentially noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Let there be lunch

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0

paulr@sfbg.com

In the restaurant pageant, places that don’t serve dinner are at risk of being seen as a ragtag contingent. Dinner is glory, while breakfast and lunch, if not preceded by the adjective "power" — relic of a pre-bust past — are routine. There are time constraints and concerns about drink, not to mention daylight, which, while delightful, can be inhibiting. People are free to dance the night away, but not the noon hour.

One response to this predicament is to be very good-looking — like, say, Stable Café, which opened about a year ago in a building that, in the 1870s, actually housed the mayoral stables, back in the days when mayors had stables of horses instead of (or in addition to) floozies. The structure has a Wild West, stagecoach-stop look and has been painted black — shades of that sex club on Castro Street in the early 1990s. Inside, though, all is spare, sunlit grace, with ice water pourable from a pewter ewer and a lovely gated courtyard, set with tables and patio umbrellas, on the north side of the building. The quiet style and attention to detail aren’t surprising, considering that there’s an architecture firm, Malcom Davis Architecture, on the building’s second floor, and that Davis and his partner, Brian Lackey, own the property and are its redesigners.

Lackey runs the food operation, which serves both the café and a catering concern called Mission Creek Kitchen. The former’s menu naturally emphasizes soups, salads, sandwiches, and panini — the last being Italian-style sandwiches pressed in a waffle-iron-like device and served hot. This method is especially effective when cheese is involved, since cheese melts and melted cheese holds things together while adding a gooey voluptuousness that is its own reward. Turkey sandwiches, for instance, can be dry, but Stable’s turkey and cheddar panino ($6.75) was enlivened by plenty of melted white cheddar. A vegetarian edition ($6.75) of tomato, pesto, and mozzarella cheese, was like a reimagined slice of pizza margherita. The bread used for the panini is plain french bread, not fancy but pillow-fresh within a tender-crisp crust.

Panini come with a sizable heap of mésclun, tossed with some carrot ribbons and a cherry tomato or two and glossed with a simple vinaigrette. If that doesn’t offer enough counterpoint, then perhaps a small bowl ($3.50) of the day’s soup, which might be a coarse purée of tomato and roasted red bell pepper — a strange combination for late spring, but let’s let it go because, even in the presence of out-of-season soup, Stable is as attractive a place to look at and sit in, or next to, in this part of the Mission since the days of the original Citizen Cake a decade ago. If you’ve missed a haven of sunny serenity since that operation packed up and moved to the Civic Center, then Stable Café might well strike you as paradise regained.


Just off Union Square, in the Chancellor Hotel, we find another handsome, daytime-only spot called Luques. We find it after some searching, since the dining room is well-concealed behind the hotel lobby. Furtiveness does offer its joys, but a restaurant that people have trouble finding is in danger of becoming a restaurant that people stop looking for. Yet those who manage to suss out Luques will find themselves in a comfortably appointed, skylit dining room that, in its remove from the street bustle just a few steps away, can seem almost like a private or VIP facility.

Chef Darren Lacy offers a mainstream California menu with gentle Southern flourishes. You can get po’boy sliders, for instance, or a Creole-style croque monsieur ($10) — the classic ham-and-cheese sandwich, made here with tasso instead of ham. (Tasso is an cold-smoked relative of prosciutto, with pork shoulder used in place of leg.) For a bit of added luxury, the bread is brioche, although that cake-like quality is somewhat obscured by a downpour of béchamel sauce. On the side: a mixed green salad for the ascetic or, for the rest of us, delicately golden, crisp fries.

I particularly liked Lacy’s cream of mushroom soup ($3.50 for a cup), which was thick with strips of shiitake mushrooms and creamy, although not too creamy, thanks to an expert blending of cream and stock. No Creole influence here (unless the cream counts), or on the California chicken sandwich ($9.25), a friendly get-together of boneless grilled chicken breast, avocado, tomato slices, jack cheese, bacon, and aioli on sourdough. Still, it did what a good lunch is supposed to do: satisfy without encumbering, so that when you leave the secret chamber you’re still as fleet of foot and clear of mind as you rejoin the daily pageant.

STABLE CAFÉ

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–3 p.m.; Sat., 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

2128 Folsom, SF

(415) 552-1199

www.stablecafe.com

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

LUQUES RESTAURANT & BAR

Daily, 7 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

433 Powell, SF

(415) 248-2475

www.luquesrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Contigo

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paulr@sfbg.com

For a small restaurant, Contigo is physically complex. As you enter, you glide along a six-seat food bar at the edge of a display kitchen, while beyond the host’s checkpoint opens a two-level dining room enclosed by white oak banquettes, like the remains of a Viking ship. (The wood was actually recovered from a Connecticut barn.) One sidewall consists of a bank of stainless-steel refrigerators, standing at attention like troops awaiting review; opposite is another bar — smaller, emphasizing wine, and partly recessed in the manner of a church nave. Beyond a wall of glass doors at the rear of the space is an enclosed garden, set with tables and space heaters and covered with a big sheet of clear plastic, since sunny Noe Valley can be surprisingly cold and windy.

Some years ago the city’s Board of Supervisors imposed a kind of restaurant cap on Noe Valley: new establishments could open only in spaces being vacated by departing restaurants. As far as I know, Contigo (the name means "with you") is the first endeavor to breach this line. It occupies what had been a computer store. The restaurant’s build-out has emphatically erased that past while honoring a green ethic, from the reuse of old siding as interior paneling to the deployment of glassware made from recycled wine bottles. To drive the point home, the paint scheme consists of green in several shades. I like green, but I like other colors too.

Apart from that small irritant, Contigo is as good-looking a new restaurant as I’ve visited in a long time. It manages to be modern, slick, and warm without growing sweaty from the effort, and it would probably look quite at home on a little street near the Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona’s Eixample. Chef/owner Bret Emerson’s Spanish-Catalán food would probably be a hit there, too, since the cooking honors both its traditional Iberian roots and our local ecological imperative; Cataluña, birthplace of Miró, Picasso, and Casals, has long been Spain’s most sophisticated and forward-thinking region.

The menu tilts toward smaller plates ("pica-pica") but also offers larger dishes and includes separate sections for hams and cheeses. (Spain’s air-cured hams, the most famous of which are serrano and ibérico, are worthy rivals to their more famous Italian cousin, prosciutto.) The smaller plates ($8 each, or $7 each for three or more) are divided among jardi (garden), mar (sea), and granja (farm) — or, roughly, vegetables, seafood, and meat. They could also be divided among the familiar, familiar with a twist, and unexpected.

Patatas bravas, for instance, could be the classic tapa, and Contigo’s version, finished with a peppery salsa brava and a big puff of aioli, is classic. But the potato quarters are wonderfully crusty, making them competitive with french fries and allaying the unease of persons (some of them known to me) who dislike soft, mushy, or mealy potatoes.

We did find the tacopi butter beans — big white beans, like cannellini — to be overcooked and a little floury. But the shallow bath they swam in, of erbette chard and sofrito (tomato-less here), was full of assuaging flavor.

Among the familiar we would also put albóndigas, the little meatballs — I have rarely seen a tapas menu without some version — but here they’re served in a shallow pool of ajo blanco, a white gazpacho made slightly grainy by the presence of pulverized almonds. And while croquetas (basically fritters) are a common dish and a clever way of using up leftover mashed potatoes, it’s not every day you find them filled with oxtail meat or plated with razor-like leaves of mizuna.

Among the most California-influenced small plates are a pulpo salad — braised squid tossed with shredded fennel, chopped black olives, and citrus segments that were supposed to be grapefruit but looked and tasted more like mandarin orange — and a pair of crostini-like toasts, each bread spear topped with a smear of avocado and a plump, juicy grilled sardine.

These little dishes are so good and so varied that the larger courses (called platillos, an odd use of the diminutive) seem almost beside the point. The most interesting ones are the cocas, Catalán-style flatbreads that resemble white (i.e. tomato-less) pizzas. And you probably won’t miss that tomato sauce when firepower consisting of artichoke hearts, green garlic, and arbequinas olives is mustered atop your pie ($13). Flavorful? Yes, and then some, with a subtle crust hinting of pastry. But also slightly salty even for my taste. Maybe a little acid, from tomatoes or some other source, wouldn’t be superfluous, or overcomplex, after all.

CONTIGO

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10 p.m.

1320 Castro, SF

(415) 285-0250

www.contigosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Two

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paulr@sfbg.com

When Hawthorne Lane became Two late in 2007, I quietly mourned. The original restaurant had been, from its opening in 1995, one of my very favorite places in the city — none better — and when you are sitting on top of the world, where is there to go but down? The idea of attracting a younger clientele made a certain steely-eyed business sense; nearby Bizou had become Coco500 largely for this reason, so there was precedent. But young people also tend to be noisier than their elders, and Hawthorne Lane had been that rare thing: a nicely muted setting that managed to be lively at the same time. And beautifully upholsterd.

In hindsight, owner David Gingrass’s complex decision to simplify and shrink his glorious establishment was as prescient as that of a broker who got out of stocks and into cash as the febrile Bush "boom" entered its terminal phase. The restaurant’s second dining room is still there, darkened like a sound stage awaiting some new production, and maybe better days will bring that new production. For the moment it’s a quiet shrine to memory. All the action, meanwhile, is in the front room, which is still dominated by the gigantic, copper-topped bar. The crowd does appear to be younger — not too, though! — while the décor now includes a gorgeous communal table whose glossy wood top appears to have been salvaged from an old whaling ship.

And, glory be, the food is as sublime as ever. Gingrass himself recently returned to the kitchen after a long hiatus, and he means to emphasize his longstanding interest in charcuterie and bread. (Those with elephant memories might recall that he personally sold housemade sausages from a booth at the Ferry Plaza farmers market in the mid-1990s when the market set up every Saturday morning in the middle of the as-yet unrestored Embarcadero.)

But Two also emphasizes value. Nowhere is this more evident than in the "5 for $5" menu, which is presented as kind of five-course tasting menu but doesn’t require you to order the whole thing. You can pick and choose. The menu changes every Tuesday and might include a soup, salad, small pizza, meat course, and dessert. I did find a salad of crimini mushroom carpaccio to be underpowered, despite the bolstering presence of shaved celery hearts, grana padano cheese (a close relation of Parmigiano Reggiano), and a lemon-white truffle vinaigrette. Perhaps the disappointment flowed from the mushrooms, which are basically glorified button mushrooms; or perhaps the salad was overwhelmed by one of shaved brussels sprouts ($9), heavily showered with pecorino cheese (sharper than the grana padano), dotted with marcona almonds, and dressed with a garlic-chili vinaigrette. The salad looked like a sculpture made from lawn clippings and was fabulously tangy.

Other than that mismatch, the $5 items held up sturdily. Roasted tomato soup, topped with a dab of Parmesan cream, was silken and hearty. A four-slice pizzetta topped with a shmear-like combination of of smoked salmon, dill crème fraîche, and chives delivered a strong, smoky bite. And roasted Peking duck arrived in chunks aboard radicchio cups, buffered by totsoi and finished with a glistening sour-sweet Seville orange chutney that beautifully matched the richness of the meat. It was also a near-reincarnation of what had been one of Hawthorne Lane’s signature dishes.

Roasted marrow bones ($9) probably don’t count as charcuterie, but, like sausage, they do suggest an imaginative frugality, a bent for extracting wonder from unassuming sources. Bones often end up in stock pots, but here a pair was marinated in garlic and thyme, roasted, then served in a shallow platter with a caramelized onion broth (basically French onion soup without its cheese beret) and a baby loaf of crusty country bread. The marrow itself, dug from the bones with demitasse spoons, turned out to be flavorfully geutf8ous, like beef jam suitable for spreading. If all cooking were like this — simple in origin and execution, spectacular in result — it would be a happier world.

Lamb is always a little fancy, but what would spring be without at least a taste? Two’s kitchen grilled a boneless loin and fanned the slices over toasted fregola pasta (pebbly, like Israeli couscous) tossed with braised spring onions, almonds, unidentified greens, and jus. The crunch of the pasta gave particular satisfaction, as did the rosiness of the meat.

The humble cupcake need not be humble. It can be filled with chocolate cream, like a truffle, or topped with peanut-butter frosting, for a real American experience. Five bucks gets you … two!

TWO

Dinner: Mon.– Thurs., 5:30–9 p.m.

Fri.-Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

22 Hawthorne, SF

(415) 777-9779

www.two-sf.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/JCB/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Nopalito

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paulr@sfbg.com

Nopalito might or might not offer "far and away the best Mexican food in the Bay Area," as a hyperbolic toot harvested locally and posted on the restaurant’s Web site contends — I say not — but the food is very good. The menu card, moreover, gives a brisk tutorial in the persistence of Indian language and culture in Mexico and is worth scanning just as an intellectual artifact. In a world of burritos and quesadillas, often made with flour tortillas, it is revelatory to read about such possibilities as caldo tlalpeño (the traditional chicken soup), pollo al pibil (as part of a panucho), and huitlacoche (in a mushroom quesadilla). The Maya and Mexica who lived a half-millennia ago might well find aspects of these dishes, or at least their names, familiar.

Or would, if they could get in. Nopalito, although fairly sizable, doesn’t take reservations, but it does allow you to phone yourself onto a waiting list and be phoned back when your table is imminently available. You will likely be given an estimate on the wait when you join the list, but this information is not of high reliability, and, like flying stand-by, you should be prepared to move fast to claim your place. The advantage to the restaurant, meanwhile, is clear: tables are not held, but filled immediately.

As the punny name suggests, Nopalito is an offshoot of nearby Nopa. "Nopalitos" are also shreds of prickly-pear cactus that often end up in morning eggs. Since Nopalito doesn’t serve breakfast, this potentially signature ingredient is honored by being largely if not entirely invisible. But because "nopalito" is a diminutive form of "nopal" — the westernized spelling of the Nahuatl word for the parent plant — we can extract a useful clue, which is that words ending in a vowel and "l," such as "pibil" and "tamal," are often Nahuatl in origin and suggest that the food so described is more Indian than European.

Mexico is sufficiently huge and various to make generalization a perilous undertaking, but one way to think of Mexican cooking is as a modest overlay of European influence — much of it involving pork — on a broad and deep base of Indian ingredients and techniques. "Pibil," for instance, refers to a Maya method of wrapping marinated meat in banana peels and stewing it underground with hot stones. I didn’t see the Nopaliteños tending any barbecue pits, but chicken cooked in some pibil fashion did find its way onto the panucho ($4), a crisped corn tortilla also topped with black beans, pickled onions, and a feisty salsa of habañero chilis.

Corn tortillas are subtle but pervasive, a reminder that corn — "tamal" is the Nahuatl word — was, along with beans and squash, a principal pillar of the Mesoamerican diet. We found a quesadilla made with a blue-corn tortilla ($8) and filled with mushrooms, cheese, epazote, salsa molcajete, and huitlacoche (the fungus that grows on corn and is sometimes compared with truffles) to be quietly effective. A bit more loudly effective was a tamal enchilado ($4), a tube of masa, like very thick polenta, imbued with ancho chili and cooked with stewed pork, queso fresco, and crema (the Mexican answer to crème fraîche).

The ultimate in stewed pork has to be the carnitas ($14), which are excellent by any standard. The cubes of meat were marinated in beer, orange, cinnamon, and bay leaf, sealed in a pouch of parchment paper, then slow-cooked to exquisite tenderness and flavorfulness. The accompaniments were appropriately simple: a salad of shredded cabbage, a few halves of pickled jalapeño pepper, and a small tub of tomatillo salsa.

On the other hand, there was carne asada a la plancha ($15): grass-fed skirt steak in a nocturnal, slightly smoky pasilla salsa. The salsa was wonderful, but the meat was quite tough, almost unchewable, especially in comparison to the carnitas. Of course grass-fed beef isn’t as tender as corn-fed, but a few, or few more, whacks with a tenderizing mallet might have helped here. Somewhere in between lay a half chicken in mole poblano ($13), the meat nicely moist and pliant and the mole sauce (of chocolate, chiles, cinnamon, nuts, and toasted sesame seeds) richly fruity without a hint of bitterness.

Despite an improbable location adjoining the new Falletti Foods in what is basically a small mall, Nopalito has a Missiony glow, from the mod shades of green throughout the interior to the youthful staff. There is also a communal table — not quite a private table, but a shared table is better than no table, as the prickly pears among us know.

NOPALITO

Daily, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

306 Broderick, SF

(415) 437-0303

www.nopalitosf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Waterbar

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paul@sfbg.com

Waterbar is, obviously, a seafood house, but it doesn’t shout this fact in your face. The building is handsome in a generic way, and the interior décor is notable mostly for its artful blend of bustle and hush. There is water to be seen — the bay, to be precise, viewable through gigantic plate-glass windows, although your eye is likely to be drawn upward to the Bay Bridge, which looks particularly massive when observed from almost directly below and does set the mind to hoping that all these seismic retrofits will do the trick.

Inside, there’s more water, held in two tall glass columns that are, in effect, aquariums. A curious effect of these watery columns is that they, like the bridge, carry one’s glance upward, to colorful fish swimming near the ceiling. The fish are glancing right back; are they marveling at their on-high view or wondering when their luck will run out?

Waterbar, which opened early in 2008, is the fraternal twin of next-door Epic Roasthouse, and it’s the kinder, gentler sibling. The tone of the place is a little less assertive, prices are more modest, and the maritime menu probably raises fewer ethical and environmental hackles than Epic’s meat-driven one — although not no hackles, since the tale of the world’s collapsed and collapsing fisheries now includes a chapter about our very own king salmon. I was surprised to find skatewing ($30) offered, since skate is a flat-out "avoid," according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch service. Since it’s typically brought in from the East Coast, it also casts a larger-than-ideal carbon shadow. On the other hand, it is fabulous: a fan of ribbed white flesh, pan-seared to a crisp gold, splashed with a (too-salty) morel consommé, and plated with gnocchi, morels, English peas, and a pair of braised scallions.

Chef Parker Ulrich is a protégé of Farallon’s Mark Franz, and the pedigree shows. Seafood cookery benefits inordinately from a bit of flair, and Ulrich brings that flair. Exhibit A: the skatewing, which, after hesitating, I asked for and enjoyed. Another major example would be the grilled local sardines ($13), a set of plump, whole fish, nicely charred and plated with a celestial bread-crumb salad, golden and crunchy yet fragrant with mint.

Whole fish, including petrale sole, actually make up an entire subset of the menu. But petrale, a local favorite, might also recur as filets at the heart of a three-course prix fixe ($40), preceded by a sprightly green salad with pickled onions and crumblings of goat cheese and followed by a slice of lemon pound cake (slightly dry, intensely lemony), garnished with a strawberry dice and a puff of whipped cream. The fish itself was expertly cooked had been minimally fiddled with, although I was disappointed to notice that the accompanying ensemble (peas, gnocchi, braised scallions) was virtually identical to the skatewing’s.

Soups can be both fancy and less so. In the former category: a sumptuous lobster bisque ($9), poured tableside from a porcelain chalice over a lump of lemon chantilly cream and a clutch of tarragon leaves, which drift in the resulting thick sea like a school of exclamation marks searching for their dots. (The pouring, incidentally, is done by a member of a service team that practically swarms at key moments. When you first sit down, there is only one server, smiling and asking about drinks, but when the food starts to emerge from the kitchen, it’s brought and presented by a cast of … well, several, if not thousands.)

On the plainer side we find a clam chowder ($9), made with topneck clams, ample chunks of bacon and potato, and plenty of cream. There’s nothing subtle about this dish; it’s like running your pile-driver of a fullback straight up the middle on third and two and picking up eight yards. It’s good, in the full, unvarnished sense of that word.

I sound a gentle cautionary note as to items (other than alcoholic drinks) that are served at room temperature or lower. Coins of braised octopus ($16) — not quite room temperature, not quite chilled — were a little rubbery, although tasty. And the bread in the tirelessly replenished basket was both tough and under flavored; perhaps that was why the accompaniments included not only butter but a small dish of sea salt.

Still, Waterbar is lovely and worthy, a place that, despite its deluxe location and big ownership names (Pat Kuleto, Jan Birnbaum), offers something like value. Not many view restaurants can make that claim.

WATERBAR

Dinner: 5:30-10 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.-Sun., 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.

399 The Embarcadero, SF

(415) 284-9922

www.waterbarsf.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Zazang Korean Noodle

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paulr@sfbg.com

The words "Korean" and "barbecue" might never be woven into an eternal golden braid to compare with Gödel, Escher, and Bach, but they are definitely interwoven, perhaps even fused. When you say you want Korean food, you almost certainly will be understood to mean the kind served at the barbecue joints that line Geary Boulevard in the blocks just east of Park Presidio. These meals begin with a bounty of small dishes — pickled vegetables, bean sprouts, and so forth — before culminating in some kind of meat course in which you do your own grilling on the hibachi in the middle of your table.

There’s nothing wrong with this drill, but if you’re looking for something different yet still want Korean — and don’t want to go upmarket at Namu — what do you do? Why, you go to Za Zang Korean Noodle, of course, which, despite a name that sounds like one of the sounds written out on the old Batman television series when the bad guys were getting it (like biff! bam! boom! and pow!), is a nifty Korean noodle house on an almost invisible stretch of Geary between Divisadero and the Masonic underpass.

Yellow (almost gold!) is a theme here. The restaurant inside is largely done in tones of this cheerful color, and the pickled radishes on their complimentary plate are as pure an example of the hue as I’ve seen outside a box of Crayola crayons. They are like slices of the summer sun as depicted in a grade-school child’s drawing. They’re also mild — though tasty — and in this sense are something of a rarity on a menu otherwise laden with spice-charged possibilities. Perhaps their lone companion in mild-manneredness is the platter of boiled potstickers ($7.55 for a dozen); the cloud-shaped flour pouches have a softness I associate with shumai or other dim sum and are filled with gingery minced pork and chopped scallions. (You can also get them deep-fried, which brings a vegetarian option and a choice of headcounts, either four or eight.)

The noodle courses are, first, big. Just immense, easily enough for two people even if they’re hungry. The noodles themselves are housemade and resemble fresh spaghetti. They turn up in both the soupy dishes (zam pong, udon) and the un-soupy ones. In the second category, I found the spicy gan za zang ($8.95) to be unusually satisfying: a hemispherical bowl the size of a halved canteloupe, filled with noodles and slivered scallions, and a second bowl, smaller and shallower, filled with diced beef and vegetable (mostly eggplant, I guessed) in a thick black-bean, or za zang, sauce. (Hence the restaurant’s name.) Our server’s somewhat garbled advice, as I understood it, was to spoon the beef mixture gradually over the noodles. I did so and was happy, although I also took the occasional spoonful of the beef sauce neat and was just as happy with its dark, slightly fruity heat.

Black-bean paste figures in many of the non-soups, with the main variable being protein: seafood and pork are also offered, there is a flesh-free version, and the beef can be had in non-spicy guise. The wonderful noodles, meanwhile, figure in soups and non-soups alike. And vegetarians will note that all the soups are made with beef broth. This is bad for vegetarianism but good for flavor.

You are unlikely ever to find a more flavorful soup than zam pong ($7.95), which is like a bouillabaisse, only much, much livelier. The beef broth is charged with garlic and red chilis and is absolutely swimming with calamari tentacles, clams, shrimp (still dressed in their shells, making them tastier but a drag to eat), and slivers of onions and green bell peppers. Rice instead of noodles? That’s zam pong bap ($8.95). Udon, the other soup offering, is Japanese in origin and is neither spicy nor available with rice.

The cars hurtling along Geary are terrifying, like jets speeding down a runway en route to the great beyond, but in the slipstream of all that traffic, one can find surprisingly easy parking. The restaurant’s human traffic, meantime, is of the cheerful neighborhood sort: families, young couples, take-out loiterers, perhaps an oddball wearing a woolen beanie even on an eerily warm evening. At dinnertime I would skip the tall glass of complimentary warm tea the server brings. Too tall, too hot, too stimuutf8g — or, as John Madden used to say, boom!

ZAZANG KOREAN NOODLE

Sun.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m.

Fri.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.

2340 Geary, SF

(415) 447-0655

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy, but not too

Wheelchair accessible

Bruno’s Pizzeria Cucina

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paulr@sfbg.com

What do pizza and jazz have in common? Why, two z’s, of course — the pair of identical twins that also appears in such exciting words as nozzle, nizzle, pizzle, pazzo, and cazzo. Put these all together and shout them from the rooftops and you’ll have quite a riff, if not quite a jazz riff. For music, play ZZ Top. Then run from the obscenity police.

Other than that, pizza and jazz go together like … well, they don’t actually go together. There is no connection I know of. Nonetheless, our drastically refurbished jazz district, along Fillmore south of Geary, now has a creditable pizzeria to go along with the fancier places across the street, Yoshi’s and 1300 Fillmore. The pizzeria is called Bruno’s and, in a most un-Italian development, is unrelated to the Mission District old-timer of the same name. Old Bruno’s has had enough facelifts to rival Phyllis Diller. New Bruno’s, on the other hand, is new — with freshly painted reddish-brown walls, nicely upholstered booths, a gleaming bar against a far wall, a showy kitchen, and jazz memorabilia everywhere, the walls laden with portraits and plaques.

In Europe, jazz has long appealed to the French more than the Italians, but Bruno’s, despite these musical festoonings, is Italian to its core, right down to the patrone, Claudius Oliveira (owner of several other Italian restaurants in northern California, many in the East Bay) who circulates through the dining room, shaking hands and checking, and the service staff with their winsome accents. The cultural flavor is very much that of Little Italy, and part of its beguiling spell is to intensify the experience of the food.

Pizzerias aren’t generally known for their grace notes, but Bruno’s offers several. To begin, there’s the basket of marvelous garlic bread, which is not only flavorful but of a brioche-like tenderness and plumpness. Tasty bread so often exacts a steep price in crustiness and toughness, but not this stuff. Even if you couldn’t eat it, you’d be happy enough just feeling it with your fingers. But you will eat it, and then they bring you more, along with an amuse-bouche — a little ramekin of roasted red pepper soup, say, with a broad hint of cayenne kick. One is typically afforded this type of treatment only when ordering seven-course tasting menus at much starchier places.

Given the slight sports-bar aura, it isn’t surprising to find that the list of appetizers includes buffalo wings ("Texas style"), along with a parade of goodies from the deep fryer, among them calamari and zucchini sticks. But a better choice might be the drunken prawns ($10.95), spiked with tequila.

There is both an Aloha and a Hawaii 5.0 pizza, both with pineapple. Fruit (tomatoes excepted) does not belong on pizza, but pepperoni does, sausage does, salami too, and you’ll get all that and more with the signature Bruno’s special ($14.99 for a 14-incher), along with bell peppers, onions, mushroom slices, and a sprightly tomato sauce.

Most noticeable is the crust, which bucks the current trend toward thinness and crispiness: It’s big, puffy, and bready in true old-school California style. Although I prefer thinner crusts for a variety of reasons — a thin crust doesn’t distract from the toppings but does provide a discreet, pleasurable crackle — there is a case to be made for the more billowy kind. Such a crust does make any pizza look bigger and so, perhaps, enhances one’s perception of value, no small matter in shrinking times.

A nice bonus: if you show up in a ZipCar, you get 10 percent off. And ZipCar has only one Z!

BRUNO’S PIZZERIA CUCINA

Sun.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–midnight

Fri.–Sat., 11–2 a.m.

1375 Fillmore, SF

(415) 563-6300

www.sfbrunos.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MV/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Grand Pu Bah

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You might think, with today’s endless parade of television cooking shows, that the dining public’s appetite for a theatrical restaurant experience might be whetted. But mostly this does not seem to be the case. Oh, we have plenty of display kitchens, and soufflés finished tableside, and occasionally you might happen upon on a cheese cart, or a foie gras or champagne cart. Yet the typical restaurant experience is notably slim on any actual culinary drama, unless something goes dreadfully wrong: a steak burned, a chicken paillard undercooked, a tray of dirty dishes dropped.

Then there might be a scene, with some lively dialogue. But this doesn’t happen often. The usual course of events is that food is ordered and, later, brought, ready to eat. If your restaurant has a display kitchen, you might have caught a glimpse of line cooks doing something or other, but the likelihood is that you wouldn’t be able to figure out what they were up to, and almost certainly you would have no way of knowing whose plate they were working on.

Imagine my delight, then, when the chicken volcano ($19) at Grand Pu Bah, an 18-month-old Thai restaurant near the Concourse Exhibition Center at Eighth and Brannan streets, turned out to be almost as exciting as a high school science experiment. The roasted bird arrived, still mounted on its upright roaster. The server, after muttering a few cautionary words (or perhaps a prayer), emptied a small tumbler of some kind of liquor over the chicken (actually a game hen) — I thought I heard “151” and “tequila” — lit a match, and set my dinner gloriously ablaze. He did not say Opa!, as the Greeks do when lighting saganaki cheese on fire, but the omission did not matter, because the hen burned a beautiful, steady, Bunsen-burner blue for seconds that might have stretched into a minute.

When the flame finally died out, the bird had a crisp-crinkly golden skin as impressive as that of any roast chicken in town. Even if the dish had been bad, I would have said nothing, having enjoyed the show (and discreetly warmed my hands). But the meat was tender and moist, the accompanying roasted cauliflower florets and potato quarters tasty (despite not being torched), and the ramekins of mysterious dipping sauces (one red, the other neatly divided between red and green by a bisecting diagonal, like a flag) welcome. Even good chicken benefits from a bit of extra help. My only complaint: the hen was awkward to eat. The server, having kindled his blue blaze and departed, did not return to lift the finished item from its perch. Since I couldn’t see a graceful way to do it, I just hacked away as discreetly as possible while thinking there must be a more elegant way.

Elegance, interestingly, otherwise pervades Grand Pu Bah. Despite the silly name, the restaurant is surely among the most stylish Thai places in the city and is, really, stylish by any standard. The space, which spreads away from the entrance like a baseball diamond folding out from home plate, includes a handsomely backlit bar, walls textured with what appear to be wood cuttings and offset bricks, and paper lamps that hang from the ceiling like giant porcini stems being air-cured for some kind of mushroom prosciutto. The overall flavor of the design suggests a contemporary California restaurant, and indeed executive chef Teerapong Khantawisut’s menu emphasizes “local and seasonal ingredients.” At some point will this be required by law?

The menu offers “Thai beach cuisine” in the “family style” — sharing is encouraged — and includes a raw bar (with oysters and sashimi), a conventional array of appetizers, soups, salads, and main courses, and a large collection of shareable plates grouped under the rubric “street food.” Why the chicken volcano should have been slotted in here isn’t obvious; it’s hardly street food and not all that shareable.

Some of the other offerings here spread themselves around the table much more easily: sizzling spicy beef pad cha ($18), for instance, strips of flank steak tossed with slivers of bell pepper and fresh chile and cubes of Thai eggplant and electrified by kaffir lime leaf and wild ginger. For a slightly sweeter tack, there’s roasted duck in a broad-shouldered but well-behaved coconut-red curry sauce fructified by pineapple chunks, lychee nuts, grapes, and tomato quarters. (Tomato is a fruit, don’t forget!)

And, of course, appetizers and salads are shareable, even if they’re not marked that way. Sizzling spicy prawns ($10) were indeed sizzling — they arrived, like fajitas, on a hot cast-iron platter — and were souped up with chiles, cilantro, lemongrass, and lime. I liked the chunked taro root added as ballast to fresh rolls ($8), otherwise filled with a traditional jumble of tofu, basil, cilantro, and cucumber; the root meat was both creamy and weighty. A similarly moderating influence would have benefited the seafood salad ($14), which was a kind of southeast Asian caesar salad — romaine hearts tossed with prawns, scallops, and calamari — but finished with a spicy lime vinaigrette that was the spiciest vinaigrette I’ve ever had, including my own, and George likes spicy chicken. It isn’t every day you come across a salad that’s almost too hot to eat. This one had me panting like a dog on a blazing August afternoon.

We laughed, we shared, we panted, we thought the dessert menu was a little perfunctory and was the one dimension in which Grand Pu Bah is more Thai than California. Fried bananas ($8) come with beer ice cream — weird, slightly sharp but acceptable. And yet: never again. The beer is Singha, which is always good and is at its best when icy cold, not as actual ice.

GRAND PU BAH
Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.,
Sat.-Sun., 5-10 p.m
88 Division, SF
(415) 255-8188/9
www.grandpubahrestaurant.com
Full bar
AE/DS/MC/V
Loud
Wheelchair accessible

Tropisueno

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paulr@sfbg.com

Tropisueño’s resonant name hints at dreams, but you won’t be doing any dreaming there. In the evenings the restaurant — it’s a kind of urban cantina — catches fire like a piece of newsprint and blazes up into a fabulous, if noisy, party. (For purposes of this piece, I assume the existence of a world in which there is still such a thing as newsprint.) If the need to lose consciousness somehow overtakes you, getting blitzed isn’t a problem, since, in line with the current trend, the bar is seemingly omnipresent, and the restaurant offers various deals on cocktails. But even if you end up having to pay for your food or libations or both, you won’t hear the sound of the bank breaking; Tropisueño stresses value and offers it, especially considering the posh location.

That location is on Yerba Buena Lane, a brief pedestrian promenade that runs between Market and Mission streets and grazes the new Jewish Museum, just north of Fourth Street. In the past few years, this area has become as chockablock with shoppers as Union Square. They dart from Nordstrom to Bloomingdale’s to Hickey Freeman to St. John, and while no one’s buying much of anything these days, darters and window-shoppers do work up appetites. Add the museum-goers and the Yerba Buena Center-goers, and you have quite a stew. Stir briefly and serve.

On the spectrum of urban cantina styles, Tropisueño falls somewhere in the neighborhood of Chevy’s and Tres Agaves. It isn’t as vast as the latter, but it does claim a regional Mexican identity (as a Jaliscan beachside seafood joint, hence the "tropi-"). It’s also replete with rustic wood finishings, including those wonderful chairs that are Mexico’s answer to the Mediterranean’s ubiquitous taverna chairs. When you are inside, a certain illusion of Mexicanness does pleasantly flicker, like a tabletop candle. But if you look outside, through plate-glass windows framed with brushed stainless steel, you are back in the cold, hard city. A similar jarringness haunts Roy’s, just a few blocks up Mission: If you hold your gaze inside, you sense a faintly but agreeably Hawaiian aura, but if you look out, you see Muni trolleys plowing through seas of windswept trash.

Tropisueño also borrows from the grander Maya by functioning as a kind of giant street cart during lunchtime. On the menu: tacos, burritos, et cetera. Of course, some of these foodstuffs are of enduring appeal and do carry over into the dinner hour, when the restaurant assumes its restauranty guise, but the offerings broaden considerably beyond what even the most ambitious street-cart cook might attempt.

First, though, you have to take care not to stuff yourself with the bottomless basket of fresh, warm tortilla chips that reach your table soon after you do. Whatever quibbles one might have about Chevy’s, there’s no denying the excellence of their chips, and Tropisueño’s are every bit as good. You can dunk them in either of two salsas, one of avocado and tomatillo, the other tomato-based with plenty of smoke and spice.

Given the wealth of fried corn meal in our basket, I was secretly dismayed by the pair of tortilla disks that accompanied the ceviche de pescado ($7). The intention, apparently, is that you will break off chunks of the disks and spoon the ceviche onto them — a kind of DIY Mexican crostini. But we ended up dispensing with the disks (which were less delicate than their chip cousins in the basket) and eating the ceviche with spoons. The ceviche itself was wonderful: tiny boulders of plump, white fish (I would have guessed cod, but it was tilapia), puckered by plenty of lime juice and intricately punctuated with cucumber and onion dice, minced cilantro, and dabs of avocado.

We could have performed the same sort of triage, or diage, on the empanadas ($8), a merry little band of pastry turnovers stuffed with mushrooms and cheese, but this would have involved actual deconstruction — a kind of meatless butchery — rather than simply a refusal to construct. Plus, the pastry was outstanding and addictive.

The main courses range widely, from a vegetarian pozole — the traditional hominy stew, not traditionally vegetarian — to albóndigas, a.k.a. meatballs. But the house favorites are all from the sea and include the spirited camarones tropisueños ($16), good-sized, chubby, wild-caught shrimp sautéed and sauced with a purée of chile de arbol (a fairly mild red variety), lime juice, cilantro, and a little Mexican crema for softening. Throw in a sizable berm of Spanish rice, a pot of black beans, and a little steamer of fresh flour tortillas and you’re looking at …. well, fullness.

People who love to gorge themselves on chips and salsa while retaining a sense that dinner itself remains to be eaten will be relieved to learn that the menu also offers "old-school" combo plates of trusty favorites, such as chicken tacos ($9.95 for two), stuffed with shredded green cabbage, queso blanco, and cubes of boneless grilled breast. The tacos are quite tasty, with or without an extra dollop of salsa smuggled in from the chips basket. They’re double-wrapped in corn tortillas, which are soft though not as soft as their flour cousins, and this doubling up makes them both starchier and more rubbery. The ideal tortilla is soft enough to form a pliant pouch around its contents. These are not that soft, so ten cuidado or you will be the author of a mess.


Tropisueño

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.

75 Yerba Buena Lane, SF

(415) 243-0299

www.tropisueno.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

City Grill

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› paulr@sfbg.com

At this moment — at the cusp of spring — the most happening restaurant in Noe Valley is Contigo, which opened early in March in what had been a computer store. The crowd promptly swooped, with a thickness and intensity not seen in the neighborhood since the launch of Fresca nearly four years ago and without, it seems, much in the way of worries about the economic meltdown. You step into Contigo, find yourself against a wall of chattering people, and step out. You step around the corner to City Grill and breathe more easily.

City Grill is the good new restaurant in Noe Valley no one has heard of. It opened in January in what had been the Kookez space (before that, Miss Millie’s, and before that, Meat Market café) just a few steps away from Lupa. The owner of Lupa, Stefano Coppola, also has a hand in City Grill — but there the similarities between the two places end. Lupa serves Roman-influenced food, while City Grill is a kind of nouvelle American diner whose nearest culinary relation is probably Firefly, just a few blocks up the street.

The word "grill" makes me think of a place that serves grilled-cheese sandwiches and bitter coffee, while "city grill" makes me think of some shiny, clattery spot downtown where politicians meet at lunchtime to eat steak and hatch plots. City Grill is neither; it is, instead, a wonderfully woody neighborhood restaurant that manages to preserve much of the past while offering excellent, modern food. I’d like to add "at modest prices," but perhaps price perception carries an element of relativity. City Grill is about equidistant from cheap and fancy. You can pay quite a bit more and not do much better, and you can also pay quite a bit less and not do much worse.

At least one welcome change from the Kookez regime is that the kid-proofed menus, laminated in plastic as at innumerable chain restaurants along the limitless interstates, are gone. City Grill is kid-friendly but doesn’t go overboard about it. The space’s most unusual feature, from a visual or aesthetic point of view, is the exhibition kitchen, which is in the front third of the restaurant — where you might expect to find the bar — rather than (as is more usual) in or at the rear. Since the kitchen bulges out into the dining space and is a beehive of constant activity, the diner’s sense is of being in the audience at some sort of theater in the round, or near-round. Most of the tables and booths have some view of the animated troupe working the kitchen.

As to what emerges from the kitchen: it’s good stuff, and this isn’t surprising, given the quality of Coppola’s nearby Lupa. Coppola has somehow managed to bring an Italian ethic of simplicity and straightforwardness to City Grill’s Cal-American menu. Each dish tends to emphasize a single, principal ingredient, with additions and amendments deployed sparingly and quietly.

A broccoli soup ($6.50), for example, struck us as just broccoli in another form, puréed with some chicken stock, thickened with a bit of potato, and given a bit of tangy crunch by scatterings of croutons and Parmesan cheese. A bowl of mussels and frites ($9.50), meanwhile, was about as disciplined as it gets, with fat Prince Edward Island shellfish topped with a stack of golden fries and a sauce of white wine, garlic, butter, and streamers of tarragon for a bouillabaisse-like hint of licorice. Since we ran out of fries long before the liquid had been sopped up, we asked for a basket of bread. Odd that such a basket hadn’t been brought when we were seated — is this a new way for restaurants to cut back discreetly? — but the bread itself (French, not sourdough) was wonderfully soft and warm, and when we ran through the first basket, we were brought another.

Lamb chops ($24.50) — really a rack of lamb, with each rib bone carefully frenched) — were rubbed with herbs and roasted to the rare side of medium-rare, then plated with a whirl of well-seasoned, creamy mashed potatoes, a thicket of wilted broccoli rabe, and several mysterious, leathery hemispheres we guessed might be dried, pitted cherries.

A more fanciful preparation was a plate of pork medallions ($16) — a trio of what I took to be slices of roasted loin, each arrayed in a haybed of sauerkraut on a platform of russet potato. These layerings were set on the plate pointing outward, like the petals of a flower, while around the edges a country-mustard sauce had been napped. It all seemed naggingly familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I was halfway through: it was a rethinking of choucroute, the warming — and highly sustaining — dish of Alsace.

Then on to Vienna for some strudel ($6) — apple, of course, studded with raisins and topped with a scoop or two of ice cream (for a buck extra per scoop). Strudel is the ultimate pastry experience of Mitteleuropa, but it was brought (along with coffee) by the Turks and is a version of phyllo, like its Middle Eastern cousin baklava. City Grill’s strudel is golden and puffy and could stand on its own without any fruit or ice cream, just a bit of butter and a sprinkle of powdered sugar. Maybe a splash of coffee, or espresso, to wash it down. No matter how American we are, the world is always with us. *

CITY GRILL

Dinner: Tue.–Sat., 5:30 p.m.; Sun. 5 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.

4123 24th St., SF

(415) 285-2400

www.citygrillsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Bar Johnny

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Until quite recently, you did not often see the word "bar" associated with food-serving establishments in this part of the world. Hungry people slipping into Bar X for a bite were most likely in Europe, or the pages of a Somerset Maugham novel, not on the streets of San Francisco. But in the past few years, "bar" has become a consequential rival to "bistro" and "café" as a restaurant signifier, and we have seen a profusion of Bars: Jules, Bambino, Tartine, and let’s not forget Johnny, which opened about a year and a half ago on the swank flank of Russian Hill.

Unlike a number of its Bar-designated siblings, Bar Johnny really does seem to have some flavor as a bar in the American sense. The space (previously home to Tablespoon) is narrow, deep, and rather dimly lit, and its front half is dominated by a big, mirror-backed bar, complete with a flat-screen television showing sports events. The crowd tends to be young and boisterous, although (given the endless stream of ESPN) surprisingly mixed in gender. I have never seen San Francisco as being a city of blondes, but there are pockets, and Bar Johnny appears to be near the center of one of them. A certain Marina-ish haze hovers.

I also caught a whiff of urinal cakes one fine evening. The scent, at the rear of the public space and quite near the flapping double doors that lead to the kitchen, added to the bar spell while implying a degree of tidiness, but did not quite whet the appetite. This might be thought a daring strategy in an establishment that makes money by serving food to people. Are they so confident in their food that they can afford to run this risk? I wondered. Or is everyone here just supposed to get blotto and not notice much of anything? Bar Johnny does bear a subtitle — drink kitchen — and "drink" could be listed first for alphabetical reasons or ideological ones.

Bar Johnny’s nearest conceptual relative might be the Alembic on upper Haight, by which I mean: if you want to treat it as an ordinary bar, with drinks and interesting nibbles, you can. Chef Roland Robles’ menu opens with what are called "bites"; these range from a bowl of smoked habañero potato chips ($3) — fabulous if slightly under-salted — or warm mixed nuts ($5) to a grilled pizza ($13) bearing actual grill marks on the bottom of the nicely blistered crust. Pie toppings vary but do include entrants from the bianca ("white," i.e. no tomato sauce) family, such as bacon and mushroom. We found this to be a smoky, richly autumnal combination, subtly amplified by the grill char. The nuts, mostly peanuts and pistachios, with a few almonds and dried currants thrown in, were less fragrant but nonetheless both gobbleable and shareable. And while I don’t see any Cheers-type crowd hankering after kale — ever, under any circumstances — I do think Bar Johnny’s garlic-braised kale ($8) is as appealing as any of the other bites, despite its shocking virtuousness. The greens are tender, tasty, and a beautiful deep green — what more can we ask of any kale?

Bar Johnny does part ways with the Alembic and other tapas or small-plates menus by offering bigger plates under the aegis "more … " More food doesn’t necessarily mean more money. For the most part, these main courses cost in the mid- to upper teens and, considering how good they are, offer a pretty strong value. We did have a mild difference of opinion about the seared tuna loin ($17), which had been rubbed with five-spice powder — which for me tends to taste predominantly of cinnamon — before hitting the pan, from which it emerged a beautiful, deep-purple rare inside. A hint of bitterness in the seasoning was detected by a set of lips across the gorgeously burnished gray marble of the tabletop. But the accompanying Thai salad, a mound of finely shredded green cabbage accented with mint and basil, won general acclaim.

Also roundly applauded was a flatiron steak ($17), cooked to the rare side of medium-rare, sliced, and arranged atop a cauliflower purée napped with jus. The flatiron steak is taken from the shoulder and is a near relation of the chuck roast, from which hamburger is typically ground. If our chief concern is tenderness, we would probably be looking elsewhere, beginning with filet mignon. But Bar Johnny’s flatiron, while not exactly buttery, was tender enough and — the usual compensation for a hint of toughness in meat — very tasty.

At a lot of bars, the vegetarian option would be vodka. But Bar Johnny offers a real one, and it’s a full plate of food, not a bite, nibble, or nosh. It’s called "beans and rice" ($13) and includes some combination of legumes and rice — chickpeas, say, plump and glistening and colored up like a bit of Christmas with diced red pepper and slivers of pistachio. It’s flavorful and satisfying while leaving room for dessert, which — again, atypically for a bar — Bar Johnny offers with some panache.

It’s hard to go wrong with a basket of chocolate-chip cookies ($9) warm from the oven. One small hitch is that, as with a soufflé, there’s a wait of 15 minutes; another is that the cookies can stick together. Still. Another worthy possibility is the fruit cobbler ($7), which late in the winter might take the form of a boldly spiced apple crisp, topped with several globs of vanilla gelato and served in a shallow cast-iron pail complete with a handle. Perfect for your next visit to your favorite sand bar!

BAR JOHNNY

Dinner: 6–11 p.m.

2209 Polk, SF

(415) 268-0140

www.barjohnny.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Can get noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Spicy Bite

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› paulr@sfbg.com

We all have our little weaknesses, and one of mine is any form of the word "spice." "Spicy" is a particularly potent variation, since in common usage it doesn’t mean well-spiced in a general sense, with nutmeg and clove — like carrot cake or mulled cider — but flavorfully hot. If some dish is described as spicy, whether shrimp or French fries, I am going to have a hard time staying away from it. And if a restaurant has the word "spicy" in its name, I am going to have a hard time staying away from it, too. I am all ears. Or eyes. Or nostrils.

Despite this strong sensory awareness, I don’t know of many restaurants in the city that answer to this alluring description. There is Spices! on Eighth Avenue near Clement, a kind of hipster noodle house serving a pan-Asian menu with plenty of kick. Google also reports the reality of Thai Spice on Polk; this is news to me. But let’s not forget Spicy Bite, an Indian restaurant at the southern edge of the impressive restaurant row that has developed in recent years near the confluence of Mission and Valencia streets.

An Indian restaurant in these environs is welcome for its very Indianness. The neighbors include a wealth of Mexican and other Latin American restaurants, a smattering of Thai and Chinese places, the impressive Blue Plate (with high-grade new American cooking), and the endearingly quirky Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, a kind of alt answer to Pasta Pomodoro. So Indian, yes, good; spicy Indian, better!

"Spicy bite" could mean any kind of spicy bite, but your nose knows what awaits even before you step inside. The smell of curry drifts through the front door and hovers at the corner as a fragrant cloud and an advertisement. Few food establishments can match the olfactory signature of Indian restaurants — only bakeries and breweries, in my experience. Spicy Bite offers both beer and wine, but because south Asian cuisine didn’t evolve in the company of wine, I tend to find matching the two awkward and to prefer beer instead. (Beer is underrated as an accompaniment to food; it might not be as good as the best food-wine matches, but in my experience it pairs up with a wider variety of foods than does wine, while clashing with none. Certainly it goes well with spicy foods of every description. Almost no wine can make that claim.)

Given the centrality of India to vegetarianism, it’s not surprising to find that Spicy Bite is vegetarian-friendly in addition to being spice-hound friendly. You can do very nicely here without touching flesh, from lovely pappadum ($2) — the crinkly lentil wafers, with their faint sheen of frying oil, like freshly painted object rapidly drying — to a meatless biryani and a long list of what the menu calls "vegetarian dishes." These are none the worse for being familiar and include a richer-than-usual saag paneer ($9.50) with an abundance of cubed white cheese, and a fine chana masala ($8.50), with chickpeas in a velvety sauce softened by tomato. One also suspects butter as a player in many of these complex sauces — not an issue for most people, but possibly worth asking about for those who shun dairy.

Chili heat varies per your request, and there are three settings, as on an inexpensive blender. I like hot and spicy food, but one person’s hot is another’s incendiary and inedible, and asking the server for guidance usually produces a philosophical shrug. We ended up on the "medium" setting and found the dishes so seasoned to be plenty hot enough.

As for flesh: the tandoori chicken ($8.50) surprisingly disappointed. The half-bird was tasty and tender enough; it was an attractive rosy color and arrived on the customary hot iron skillet, complete with lemon quarters, tomato chunks, and sizzling shards of onion. But the meat turned out to be a little dry, despite what must have been an hours-long, or overnight, bath in a yogurt marinade.

Shrimp tikka masala ($12.50) were juicier — a set of nice, fat peeled prawns, roasted in the clay oven in a tomato-cream sauce. Purists often insist on cooking shrimp in their shells, I guess for flavor and moisture retention, but it’s certainly more end-user-friendly to shell them beforehand. Judging by the Spicy Bite example, it is indeed possible to cook shelled shrimp successfully without drying them out and ruining them.

No Indian meal is complete without either a side of basmati rice (cooked here with saffron, $2), or a round or two of naan, or — if you’re a starch fiend — both. The rice grains didn’t stick together (nice), while the bread was served already cut into triangles, like pita, which did slightly dim one’s Neanderthal pleasure in ripping out pieces as needed but was, on the other hand, much more convenient.

Take-out traffic can be heavy, with deliverers coming and going (free delivery is available in some areas until 10 p.m.). But while service often stalls at a restaurant that does a sizable take-out business, this isn’t the case at Spicy Bite. The wait staff is attentive and professional, the kitchen turns things out promptly, and the space itself — a corner box not unlike Emmy’s — has a certain presence. But if you want carrot cake for dessert, forget it. There’s kheer, kulfi, and a pastry made from milk and honey, each three bucks.

SPICY BITE

Dinner: Tues.–Sun, 4:30–10 p.m.; Mon., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

3501 Mission, SF

(415) 647-4036/7

www.spicy-bite.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Modest noise

Wheelchair accessible

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