Paul Reidinger

Colibri

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The biggest shadow hanging over many a pre-theater dinner is anxiety about getting to the show on time. Will the service be prompt, is there time for dessert, where is the check, can we cover four blocks in two minutes? The human element in these sorts of situations is always incalculable, but it does help if your pre-theater restaurant is across the street from the theater. That’s brick-and-mortar reassurance. And if we’re talking the Geary Theater and Colibrí Mexican Bistro, I mean right across street. But don’t jaywalk; the street (Geary) is insanely busy.

"Mexican bistro" is a phrase I would like to see more often. We have plenty of taquerías, a surfeit of them, but, perhaps, not enough restaurants that do justice to the sophistication and variety of Mexican cooking. Mexico is a huge land of deserts, seashores, mountains, plateaus, and tropical jungles, each of which produces a distinct set of ingredients. And, like its huge neighbor to the north, it’s a mishmash of cultures from old world and new. The result is a cuisine not quite like any other in the world, and Colibrí offers a nice sampling of it.

The restaurant (whose name means "hummingbird") opened a little more than four years ago in a space once held by a California Pizza Kitchen. The layout is a little awkward, especially at the front; the entryway is narrow and the huge bar bulges toward the door, so incoming guests must negotiate a series of tight curves before things open up farther back, toward the display kitchen. The look is that of a quietly stylish cantina, with plenty of wood, hand-painted ceramic tiles, and rustic tchotchkes — a water pitcher, say, perched at the edge of a booth.

For a sense of Mexican cooking’s singularity, we need look no further than to the nopales asados ($7.50), strips of young cactus leaf that have been marinated in olive oil, garlic, and herbs, then grilled and served with mushrooms and oregano. There could hardly be a greater symbol of the desert than the cactus, but the grilled leaves have distinctive tartness and plump texture a world removed from sandy desiccation.

Many dishes one has often seen on other menus benefit from little extra touches. Queso fundido ($12), a kind of Mexican cheese fondue, is frequently enlivened with chorizo (the chili sausage that leaks its signature orange grease everywhere) — and so it is at Colibrí, with the added attraction of mushroom slices, for a bit of extra heft without extra fat. Quesadillas ($9) are enhanced with your choice of either strips of fire-roasted poblano peppers or epazote. Even ceviche in the style of Veracruz ($16), a standard combination of cubed white fish, lime juice, cilantro, onion, jalapeño pepper, and olive oil, gets a sly tweak from green olives.

(Fungus-lovers, incidentally, will not only find mushrooms popping up in various dishes but also a canny deployment of huitlacoche, the fungus that grows on corn and is sometimes considered a kind of Mexican truffle, the very breath of the earth. Here it is stuffed into a chicken breast, along with some other savories.)

Several of the larger plates are sauced with a verve and style that would do a good French restaurant proud. Although the pan-seared duck breast in the pato en pipián ($18) was cooked a little more than I would have preferred, the sauce — a green mole of pumpkin seeds and tomatillos, peppery and fruity — was brilliant and singular. So was the tamarind mole, a caramel-colored elixir of dark, tart intensity, pooled around a clutch of sautéed prawns ($17). That plate included, for comic relief, a corn cake, like the last pillow someone forgot to pick up and put away after a sleep-over pillow fight.

The kitchen also offers a regional Mexican specialty that rotates monthly. We probably tend not to think of the Distrito Federal as a region; it’s the capital and center and a sprawling, smoggy megalopolis. But it’s also the home of peneques ($16), batter-fried dough pockets stuffed here with beans, set on a bed of corn kernels and zucchini dice with meanderings of black-bean purée, and topped with a blood-red tomato-chipotle sauce, some chunks of queso fresco, and a large rivulet of crema. The dish simultaneously suggests the bounty of Mexico and the culinary legacy of the Indians (whose agricultural trinity consisted of corn, beans, and squash), while giving vegetarians something to enjoy without having to make do with small plates raked up from the fringes of the menu.

The desserts are more routine but do go beyond flan. Pastel de tres leches ($8) is a little too much like Mexican tiramisù for my comfort, but Colibrí’s version manages not to overdouse the sponge cake while coating it with white meringue frosting and (a nice touch) shavings of white chocolate.

The nearest thing to a contemporary, postmodern dessert is probably negro y blanco ($8), a fine chocolate mousse served with whipped cream in a coffee cup beside what the menu calls a "white chocolate confection": basically a pointed cap of white chocolate filled with ice cream. The confection was tasty and visually striking, but the white chocolate seemed to have been child-proofed and was difficult to crack open and eat gracefully. There is always an element of theater to having dinner out, of course, and even the act of eating itself can offer moments of excitement and visual interest. But when theater becomes spectacle, with white-chocolate shrapnel skittering across the table and ice cream squirting onto neighboring lapels, you know it’s time to make like a hummingbird and whiz gracefully away.

COLIBRÍ

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

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

438 Geary, SF

(415) 440-2737

www.colibrimexicanbistro.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Radio Africa and Kitchen

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Radio Africa and Kitchen is described by its Web site as a "nomadic" restaurant, but if it has anything like a home, it’s Coffee Bar, the Multimedia Gulch spot kitty-corner from Circolo. This juxtaposition isn’t as unlikely as it seems. Although the first thing you smell when you step into Radio Africa is Coffee Bar’s coffee, the smell reminds you that coffee is native to the highlands of east Africa — and Radio Africa’s food is east African in influence.

The maestro of the project is Eskender Aseged. In the autumn of 2004, having cooked professionally in Bay Area restaurants for two decades, he began Radio Africa on a small scale in his own home, serving dinners that reflected the cuisine of his native Ethiopia to groups of 15 or 20 people. Today, more than four years later, the heart of the drill remains much the same: inventive and elegant cooking that emphasizes healthfulness and carefully chosen ingredients in an atmosphere of (sometimes raucous) festivity.

Despite the arresting name, Radio Africa and Kitchen is several steps removed from Africa. It doesn’t even much resemble the Ethiopian restaurants you find along Divisadero Street in the Western Addition. Coffee Bar, as a locale, is a redoubt of pure Mission District monied hipsterdom: a vault of brick, concrete, and stainless steel, with industrial-style lighting, a gigantic, heavy door, and a large mezzanine.

On that mezzanine you will find the flickering light of votive candles, for a monastery effect. There are also big tables for big parties, along with a dining counter overlooking the bar. The Wi-Fi connection must be especially good at the counter, because it seems to attract diners with laptops, who sit there with plates of food while gazing into glowing screens like hardworking controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, gobbling some takeout while maintaining radio contact during a space walk.

I do wonder about the etiquette of peering at a laptop, or into a handheld, while having dinner, especially when the food is as good as Radio Africa’s. Much as I love the traditional way of presenting the highly spiced dishes of Ethiopia and Eritrea — family-style, on mats of injera — I was delighted to find some of the flavors of east Africa handled in a different way. They’ve been passed through a California filter, in a sense. Also I was pleased to find meat de-emphasized, though I like meat. If you’ve been to one of the old-line places, you’ve probably noticed the prominence of beef. Radio Africa favors seafood and chicken instead, and many of the best dishes have no flesh at all.

We were particularly impressed by a green-bean salad ($6) — really an arugula salad with green beans, slivered almonds, dabs of notably creamy goat cheese, and long fingers of white, faintly blushing radish bound together with a simple vinaigrette. A salad like this one reminds us that there is an art to salad-making, particularly in winter, when not only is matériel in short supply but the human response to greens and uncooked vegetables is at its most reluctant and in need of coaxing.

Edamame hummus ($6) was very much like the usual chickpea kind, except with a faint sheen of green. The hummus was dressed with argan oil, which is derived from the pits of a fruit tree native to Morocco and is thought to have many health benefits similar to those of olive oil. For dipping, the kitchen offered rounds of Tartine sourdough baguette instead of the usual pita bread or lavash.

Were the mushroom crostini ($6) mounted on rounds of toasted Tartine bread? The menu did not give the bread’s provenance, and Tartine would be a reasonable guess, but the question was mostly mooted by the tastiness of the topping: a coarse purée of brown mushrooms seasoned with berbere (an Ethiopian form of chili powder) and swabbed onto the toasts along with bits of basil and shreds of manchego cheese, for a hint of tang.

Seared Maine sea scallops ($6) came embedded in a granular purée of cauliflower (about the consistency of riced potatoes) that had been stewed alicha-style. Scatterings of minced chive helped this plate avert a complete white-out, as did the nice crusting on the scallops themselves, which can be overpoweringly rich and sweet but weren’t here.

Usually a special vegetarian plate makes me suspicious, but Radio Africa’s fantasy ($16) was a small ensemble masterpiece. The dramatis personae included lentils in two guises (green were mashed into something like dal; beluga remained whole), an expertly seasoned eggplant caviar, a wintry tagine of fennel and chard spooned over a foundation of couscous, and (also charmingly wintry) a chestnut salsa to bind the players into a whole of still-discernible parts.

The fantasy was so good that the menu’s premier item, a chunk of true Alaskan cod ($20), crusted with flaps of artichoke heart and seated on a low hill of couscous in saffron broth, slightly paled by comparison. We devoured it nonetheless, while noisy birthday parties unfolded at spacious tables on either side of us.

As befits the abbreviated menu, dessert is typically limited to a single possibility, such as vanilla ice cream ($6) — organic, in two scoops — with a couple of fabulously intense lemon cookies, a few blueberries, and a puddling of chocolate sauce, the last two items combining in a strange harmony as well as providing a wealth of antioxidants and going well with coffee, which — not surprising given the circumstances — is available. Wine and beer too.

RADIO AFRICA AND KITCHEN AT COFFEE BAR

Dinner: Thurs.–Fri., 6:30–10 p.m.

1890 Bryant, SF

(415) 420-2486

www.radioafricakitchen.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Bearable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Hard Knox Cafe

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The password for 2009 so far seems to be "hard," as in hard times, hard luck, hard cheese. To this list we might also add Hard Knox Café, whose time has come, though it’s never really gone. By this I mean that when you can go into a place and pay $10 for three pieces of good fried chicken and two substantial side dishes, along with a complimentary cornbread muffin, chances are you’ll be back, regardless of Wall Street weather. And who needs dessert when Stella Artois on tap is just $3.50?

The ironist (a.k.a. yours truly) finds plenty to like at Hard Knox Café beyond the fried chicken and the Stella. There’s the fact that such a value-driven spot should have opened a decade ago, at the golden crest of the Clinton boom, and gone on thriving across 10 topsy-turvy (mostly turvy) years, only to find itself perfectly positioned — and named — for what we can hope will be a new era of value. (A second, and larger, venue opened last summer on outer Clement Street.) There’s also the fact that a restaurant serving American comfort-Southern-soul food should be operated by a Vietnamese family, the Huas.

But maybe that isn’t ironic at all. Maybe it’s just American. And even for confirmed ironists, non-irony has its attractions. Hard Knox’s interior design, of a roadhouse, is quietly witty, with wall panels of corrugated steel (shades of the original Straits Café!), floors of distressed wood, and booths upholstered in red vinyl. The crowd, like the neighborhood, is mixed: young and old, working class and tech-geek, people at a round table deep in conversation over piles of chicken bones while others wait just inside the front door for takeout.

It’s not hard to see why the food has such broad appeal. If you could only have one meal a day, you’d want something from Hard Knox. No, it isn’t fancy; the only foam you’ll find here is the head on your Stella. But it does have that mom-is-cooking authenticity. Everything tastes good. And the portions are big. You will not leave hungry.

We did have a slight salting issue with the beef short ribs (at $13 one of the pricier items on the menu). The meat, on its bracelets of bone, was fabulously tender but timid, like a pale partygoer clutching a plastic cup in a lonely corner, waiting to be teased out. Sprinkling salt on awkward party guests isn’t necessarily a winning strategy, but it does have a way of bringing beef to life — beef, which, even more than television, asks so little and gives so much.

The crusty fried chicken suffered from no such underseasoning: the coating was adequately seasoned, and the meat was tender, juicy, and flavorful. But we aren’t talking about Cajun or otherwise spicy fried chicken; the batter was crisp more than tasty, and while this had the virtue of letting the chicken taste like chicken — and I like the taste of chicken — it also didn’t set off any spice fireworks. Of course, none were promised.

At least as appealing as the big plates of protein are the side dishes. In fact you could make a meal of these, a kind of Southern-comfort tapas dinner. You get your pick of two with each main dish, but you can get them à la carte for $3 each, which isn’t bad at all.

The lack of glamour in the sides is almost glamorous. We were particularly taken with the stewed cabbage, the mere name of which stirred unholy memories from childhood, when "stewed" could only mean "boiled to death." And stinky! Like the reek of old shoes. But this cabbage — green, cut into thick shreds — had been gently handled; it was a little more tender than stir-fried versions, and very subtly scented with, perhaps, some bacon, fatback, or salt pork. Cabbage once filled me with fear and loathing, but I could eat Hard Knox’s version … well, maybe not every day, but often.

Mac and cheese was tasty if slightly gummy. Collard greens are underappreciated outside the South; they are among the tastier greens on their own, and when zipped up, as here, with garlic and a touch of vinegar, they can become almost addictive. Comparably underappreciated (and perhaps almost unknown) beyond the South are black-eyed peas, with their distinctive two-tone look and near-gritty texture; Hard Knox serves them with short-grain white rice, and if you feel inclined to add a jolt of hot sauce to this mildness — not a bad idea — a bottle of Crystal is sure to be near at hand.

Although Third Street has changed considerably in the last decade, with Muni Metro’s T-line now running down the median to relieve some of the tedium, the corridor is still industrial and can still have a sinister video-game sameness, especially at night. But finding Hard Knox Café is — dare I say? — easy. Look for the clumps of people milling around at the roadside. *

HARD KNOX CAFÉ

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

2526 Third St., SF

(415) 648-3770

also 2448 Clement, (415) 752-3770

www.hardknoxcafe.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Rue Saint Jacques

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If clothes make the man, then does the bistro make the neighborhood, or the other way around? This is a trick question, because the answer is: both. Part of the magic of any bistro is its neighborhood, which becomes part of the experience. And — the obverse — in a city of neighborhoods like ours, no neighborhood is quite complete without a bistro.

For neighborhood atmospherics, it’s hard to match the cloud village that floats on the back-country streets behind Grace Cathedral. A cable-car line, a shop or two, a run of handsome townhomes with a certain Parisian feel and a twinkling cityscape in the background — and, at the edge of things, a bistro, a quite convincing one, Rue Saint Jacques.

Don’t bother looking for a street named Saint Jacques, because you won’t find one — although you will find an authentic-looking Paris street sign in the restaurant’s front window. Don’t bother looking, either, for the strangely enchanting Uzbek restaurant called On Jackson, which until about four years ago could be found on Jackson, at Taylor. It’s in that snug corner spot that we find Eric Lanvert’s Rue Saint Jacques, with an appealing paint treatment (like butter washed with cognac), a distinct upgrade in furniture quality from Uzbek days (including rather Arts-and-Craftsy-looking chairs), and, of course, some first-rate French cooking.

By "French cooking" I don’t mean the haughty, haute kind with all the rich, intricate sauces, but the earthy kind, the bistro kind. Rue Saint Jacques’ menu is mostly an exercise in this sort of heartiness, carried off with considerable style. The dishes rely on a timeless appeal and are very much the ones you’d find in countless neighborhood bistros in Paris. They also rely on high-quality (often organic ingredients) and thoughtful, though not fancy, preparation.

For those of us who love the prix-fixe, Rue Saint Jacques is as good as it gets. A flat fee of $35 buys you three courses: any starter, any main dish, and any dessert. Some of the more luxe possibilities, such as lobster risotto and the very formidable cassoulet, do carry a surcharge, but these are the exceptions. The sans surcharge appetizers are not exactly shabby anyway; a gently beefy beef tartare is made from freshly ground Niman Ranch filet mignon and subtly spiced up with a bit of mustard, while charcuterie is presented as a duo of rich, housemade pâté slices, one of duck, another (and coarser, country-style) of pork. Meaty, chewy snails are served Catalan-style, in a chunky sauce of sausage, bacon, and melted cherry tomatoes in an earthenware crock.

The French onion soup is the color of espresso: a sign that the onions have been patiently and repeatedly caramelized for maximum intensity of flavor before being sealed under a cap of melted cheese. A pistou-style soup of winter vegetables, including cabbage, carrots, turnips, and white beans, is paler — pleasantly pale, really, though roasting the roots might have added some depth and weight. I did wonder about the addition of the out-of-season basil, which lacked its midsummer pepperiness.

The main courses, like their opening acts, are mostly familiar. Skirt steak (from Niman Ranch) is pan-roasted, sliced, slathered with a sauce of caramelized shallots, and plated with a stack of wonderfully slender, crisp herbed frites. Breast of local duck is roasted (to medium and perhaps then some), sliced, fanned over a bed of wild rice, and sauced with an ambrosial blend of cognac and green peppercorns.

The cassoulet is so heavy-duty that it reaches the table in a cast-iron skillet, complete with handle that must be oriented in an acceptable direction so as not to catch a passing thigh and send the whole thing flying. Within the skillet we find (in addition to a wealth of white beans lightly crusted with bread crumbs), confits of lamb and duck leg (the duck still on the bone), along with an entire boudin blanc and chunks of fatback. You pay an extra $7 for the cassoulet (or $26.75 à la carte), but the dish could easily feed two hungry people.

The one offering I hadn’t seen before was mijoté de porc, described by the menu card as "slow-cooked pork belly with a ragout of vegetables." Since pork belly is the source of bacon, I was expecting something rather fatty, in fact problematically fatty, but what turned up instead resembled a pot roast: chunks of tender meat in a thick, dark, slightly sweet sauce laced with wild mushrooms.

Rue Saint Jacques’ desserts are very much in the bistro mainstream and include a solid chocolate mousse and a creditable vanilla bean crème brûlée. The unconventional choice is probably the strawberry soup, which drew my eye in part because of its unexpectedness and in part because I hoped, after some heavy going through the savory courses, that it would be relatively light, despite the promise of Chantilly cream.

Dessert soups I’ve had in the past have been served in broad bowls, like regular soup, but this one arrived in a parfait glass: a base layer of soup, not too sweet and quite chunky, almost like runny preserves, with a thick cap of Chantilly cream, which is basically sweetened whipped cream. The boundary between the layers quickly became blurred, and the cream more or less self-folded into the soup, with a luxurious result.

The service staff is swift, professional, and proper, in the best French tradition. They do not fawn or make chitchat, but if something goes wrong — your order slip temporarily ends up on the kitchen floor, say, causing a delay — you’re likely to be comped a glass of wine or a shareable dish, and maybe even some excellent port to finish. Or was that Banyuls?

RUE SAINT JACQUES

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.

1098 Jackson, SF

(415) 776-2002

www.ruesaintjacques.com

Wine and beer

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Bar Jules

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› paulr@sfbg.com

From hither and yon comes word that the restaurant world is troubled. Nice spots are half-empty in San Diego, greasy spoons are going out of business in small Great Lakes burgs, and even in our own golden city, a slick new restaurant in the Mission District was pretty torpid on a recent Saturday in prime time, according to my friend the reconnaissance man.

Then there’s Bar Jules, which is snuggled into a slender spot next to Suppenküche in Hayes Valley, and still seems to be packing them in, even as the wreckage of the Bush demolition derby continues to accumulate, like rubble in the streets of a bombed city. If your idea of fun is to sit at a Parisian-snug bistro table, a mere elbow’s throw from tablesful of 30-ish wine hipsters — I lost count of the number of times I overheard the word "awesome" with respect to this or that cult vineyard or vintage — then you will love Bar Jules.

As for me: I find that while eavesdropping can be fun, compulsory eavesdropping is seldom fun. Also, I dislike the heavy-framed spectacles currently in hipster vogue, and I fear they come from France, a land I otherwise have the greatest admiration for. No elbows (or shoes!) were thrown at the hipsters, but I could not stop longing for some modified version of that big red Staples button, which, with an "awesome" floating toward me, I would push, and there would be a gentle, obliterating bzzzzt. That would be awesome, in the Dame Edna sense.

Bar Jules isn’t exactly a French restaurant, but it does have the bustling feel of a boîte in one of Paris’ edgier arrondissements. The restaurant, which opened last spring, features the cooking of chef and owner Jessica Boncutter, whose Zuni pedigree is very much in evidence on the menu. The cooking speaks largely in a Mediterranean vernacular; it’s peasant food that’s donned its Sunday best for church. But because this is California, other influences make themselves felt as well, and the restaurant quietly but firmly pursues a commitment to local and organic foodstuffs.

Among the least Zuni-ish of the dishes we came across was a shallow bowl of cochinitas ($10): shreds of pulled pork laid across a bed of short-grain rice, with twirls of pickled white onion scattered across the top. We were advised that the cochinitas were spicy, but apparently the sense of spiciness is relative, since we found the pork tasty but not even slightly incendiary. A little color would have been welcome, although in general the kitchen seems attentive to the visual dimension of food.

Among the most Zuni-ish dishes was an arugula salad ($9) tossed with walnuts and red beets, lifted by a creamy coriander vinaigrette. And I mean coriander not in the cilantro sense but in the spice sense; the plant’s seeds, when dried, resemble large white peppercorns and, when crushed, release a (to me) spicy-nut essence. That essence brought balance to the vinaigrette and helped boost the beets, which for me never taste quite as good as they look.

The bigger plates were nicely sized, not huge. A chunk of bluenose sea bass ($26) washed ashore on a rubbly winter beach of cannellini beans, shreds of braised fennel root, and black and green olives. I would describe this dish as quintessentially in the Zuni style: elegant rather than fancy, with enough high-quality ingredients to form an ensemble but not so many as to start drowning one another out.

The vegetable platter ($17), on the other hand, did suffer from a bit of crisping-bin clutter. The star of the plate was a single round of sweet potato, softened and lightly charred on the grill, and it was good. But around it clamored a madding crowd of grilled leeks, beets, cannellini beans, and quartered baby artichokes, each a worthy player but somehow not connected to the others.

Although I am not a vegetarian, I appreciate the fact that Bar Jules takes vegetarians into account. But a kind of "chef’s surprise" vegetarian platter did surprise me as being slightly retrograde; the better and more modern way is a seamless inclusion of dishes that are naturally meatless. Form lends coherence.

Chocolate nemesis ($7.50) sounded like such a forbidding dessert that we couldn’t resist it. What arrived was a wedge of flourless chocolate cake half-shrouded in whipped cream. To say that the cake was dense and moist is inadequate; it was a voyage into the very heart of well-moisturized chocoutf8ess. But I would have liked a raspberry or two — or even a blueberry — just for a touch of color. Like a bit of rouge on Dame Edna’s cheeks.

BAR JULES

Lunch: Wed.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

Brunch: Sun., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

609 Hayes, SF

(415) 621-5482

www.barjules.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Green Chile Kitchen

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› paulr@sfbg.com

You would expect that a restaurant with "green chile" in its name would serve at least one memorable dish with green chiles, and Green Chile Kitchen does. In fact, the restaurant serves a host of memorable dishes (some with green chiles, many others without) and, because it’s in the middle of NoPa rather than at, or just past, the edge of it, Green Chile could be the best restaurant in NoPa. Much would depend on our understanding of NoPa: region with definite borders or state of mind?

This is the sort of question some of us occasionally mull with respect to Mexico. There is, or was, Old Mexico, whose reach extended all the way up the Pacific Coast to the Strait of Juan de Fuca (near Seattle), and there was (and is) New Mexico, one of the Lower 48. The boundaries of Mexico have long been hazy; a legal border has existed since the end of the 1848 war (a good account of how it was drawn can be found in Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848), but, as travelers through the Southwest can attest, the reality is far more zonal and interesting.

Green Chile Kitchen serves a good deal of what the menu describes as "New Mexican" food, and much of this seems Mexican, or Mexicanish, with Indian and desert overtones: salsas and guacamole, tortilla chips made from blue corn, and pinto beans. The restaurant opened about three years ago in a location easily reached by USF students and Haightsters, and it strikingly combines elements of college-town café and stylish restaurant. You order at the counter and carry a numbered plastic doodad to your table so the service staff can find you, and while you wait you admire the soaring ceiling, the burnished wood trim, and the pale sage paint scheme. Full table service would seem to be about a half baby step away, but maybe the current arrangement provides some real savings. Even given the kitchen’s emphasis on organic ingredients, the prices are surprisingly gentle.

There is no better deal to be had on Green Chile Kitchen’s menu than the green chile stew ($4.50/cup, $6.95/bowl). The scale isn’t quite that of a typical pho at a Vietnamese restaurant, but it’s considerable, and the stew itself is an impressive, faintly smoldering collection of green chile strips, chunks of slow-roasted Niman Ranch pork, quartered potatoes, and bits of tomato in a clear, even-tempered broth. The broth (vegetable, I thought) was key; it didn’t add as much flavor as an animal-based stock might have, but, like subtly textured white walls in a museum, it let the main ingredients be heard without completely disappearing itself.

If you pine for the modesty of Fresca or Limon in their earliest incarnations, you will thrill to GCK’s rotisserie chicken (made with Fulton Valley birds). A half-chicken dinner costs $10.95; the bird is rubbed with your choice of herbed citrus or green chile and is served with blue-corn chips, Spanish rice, beans (pinto, black, or refried), and calabacitas, a succotash-like jumble of green and yellow squash cubes, corn kernels, and bits of green chile. The chicken itself was expertly cooked, the dark meat done through while the white meat remained juicy. That is the test of all roast chicken. The party of the second part did register some mild disappointment with the pinto beans, which were thought to be underpowered. A jolt of some blood-red salsa helped bring them back into trim.

I was slightly disappointed in the quesadilla ($3.50), which combined jack and cheddar cheeses to colorful effect but suffered from a dry and brittle tortilla. And the starters offered what little sticker shock there is to be found on the menu. The plato de aperitivos cost $11.95, and while it was full of bright variety — from a pair of tamales to a crock of pristine guacamole to a quartet of salsas and a heap of blue-corn chips to dip in them — the price seemed a little high for what was, after all, mostly starch, indeed mostly corn.

Still, the salsas were excellent: a tour de force of salsa-making. There was the regular tomato kind (seemingly darkened and deepened by roasting), a smooth-tart, pale-green blend of avocado and tomatillo, a pico de gallo, and — the standout — a habañero number the color of lobster bisque, with a hint of citrus fruitiness mixed in to temper some of the high heat. (Habañeros can be quite deadly to the tongue in their pure, untempered form.) When we wearied of using these salsas to coat chips, we started spooning them over the rice and beans and the forlorn quesadilla to pleasing effect.

In the evenings, the people come and go, talking of … well, probably not Michelangelo so much as takeout, which appears to be an appreciable part of the business. (So are breakfast and lunch services.) The clientele tilts toward hip-looking youth, although older people are not unrepresented and we even noticed what seemed to be a family grouping: a set of parents in late middle age and their young-adult children, everyone eating and happy in one another’s company, as if on a sitcom from the 1950s. Not many restaurants are able to cast so wide a net. Green Chile Kitchen, by serving distinctive, carefully made food in an attractive setting at a moderate cost, manages to appeal simultaneously to the price-conscious, setting-conscious, and quality-conscious constituencies. And for those of us who have finger in each of those pies — or stews — the word can only be jackpot.

GREEN CHILE KITCHEN

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

601 Baker, SF

(415) 614-9411

www.greenchilekitchen.com

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Zuppa

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› paulr@sfbg.com

As a charter member of the Globe fan club, I tend to be favorably disposed toward any of that restaurant’s descendants, cousins, siblings, or other relations. From the beginning, Globe has shared an ethos with Zuni and Chez Panisse, serving food that’s both sophisticated and hearty and can trace its origins to the peasant traditions of Italy and Mediterranean France.

Joseph Manzare, a pupil of Wolfgang Puck’s and an alumnus of both Spago and Postrio, opened Globe in 1996 and has marched onward since — if not quite at a pace of Puckish, imperial intensity, at a respectable clip nonetheless. His other major ventures in the city include Joey and Eddie’s, a seafood house that recently moved from Noe Valley to the old Moose’s space in North Beach, and Zuppa, which opened about three and a half years ago in dramatic SoMa location that had been home to Café Monk, a member of the Fourth-and-Brannan streets trifecta whose other principals were Fringale and CoCo500 (né Bizou).

Café Monk wasn’t a very good name for a restaurant. It made me think of monks, and who would want to eat at any place run by such abstemious, virtue-ridden persons? The space, moreover — a lofty cathedral of exposed brick and concrete, trimmed with stainless steel, wood, and spot lighting — resisted capture by the word "café." "Zuppa" is certainly an improvement, though far from perfect; the word means "soup" in Italian, and Italian soup means … minestrone. I like minestrone, but it’s humble and familiar in a way Zuppa is not.

Zuppa is, in fact, a rather marvelous Italian restaurant of the sort you’d think the city of St. Francis would be full of. It’s earthy and glossy, medieval and modern, intimate and buzzing, all at the same time. You never forget that you are inside an old, industrial building in a once-gritty part of town, but you are soothed by the votive candles flickering on each table — a kind of hushed chorus of light. There are many variations on these basic design elements around town, but Zuppa is among the most appealing; its physical reality is quietly assertive without crossing into stridency. You notice the look and appreciate it, then go back to your conversation.

The food, orchestrated by chef de cuisine Liam Bonner, makes for lively conversation. Zuppa’s kitchen, like the others in the Manzare consortium, tilts in favor of organic ingredients and humanely produced meats — both worthy goals, but we have heard plenty about the former and, possibly, not quite enough about the latter. Meat and poultry tend to dominate the main courses — a small reminder that Italians eat plenty of meat, particularly in the north. Even the front end of the menu is meaty, with a selection of cured flesh, including prosciutto, coppa, and soppressata ($8) — a kind of pepper salami in delicate slices, laid out like cards at a blackjack table — available as a light first course or nibble.

The heart of Italian culinary identity in this country nonetheless remains the battle-tested duo of pasta and pizza, and here (as elsewhere) Zuppa doesn’t disappoint. The pizzas begin with wonderful, thin, crunchy-chewy crusts and are laid out with high-quality toppings, among them a velvety housemade mozzarella, along with tomatoes and basil, on the margherita ($14), and caramelized onions, coppa, and slivers of green-bell pepper on the bianca ($15). I like the idea of pizza bianca — bianca means white, and that means no tomato sauce, which is daring — but without the temperate effect of oregano-inflected tomato sauce here (which softens and modulates the other flavors on the pie, as our fog does with heat), the sharp grassiness of the green peppers was a little too obvious for me.

Much as I love pasta in its illimitable variety, I don’t have it often in restaurants since I make it so often at home, for far less money. But I would speak up on behalf of Zuppa’s rigatoni ($17) al ragu di Campania: long tubes tossed with long-simmered minced pork, shreds of spigarello kale, and clumps of cacciocavallo cheese, a onetime Sicilian specialty now produced throughout the south of Italy. (Campania is the region around the southern city of Naples, including Mount Vesuvius.) The ensemble sauce is very hearty and warming on a cold winter’s night, and simmering a ragu is the sort of time-intensive operation a restaurant kitchen is going to be in a better position to undertake than most home cooks, even ambitious ones.

Just as tasty was a plate of linguini ($17) in a seafood marinara sauce. The seafood was supposed to be local squid, but we were told the kitchen was substituting rock shrimp instead. This struck me as a favorable switch, since shrimp of any kind are reliably sweet, whereas squid can bring an unwanted bitterness if not handled properly. Tomato and oregano with a counterpoint of briny sweetness is a potent melody.

The menu follows Italian practice in designating pasta dishes as primi and the heavier flesh courses as secondi. (You can also get contorni, or side dishes, such as verdure [$6], perhaps a medley of kale varieties braised with garlic and pancetta.) But if you make do with pasta as a main dish, you might find that you have room left for dessert, such as a block of chocolate-pumpkin brownie ($8), fabulously moist, piped with chocolate sauce and topped with a helmet — no, a globe! — of cinnamon gelato.

ZUPPA

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

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

564 Fourth St., SF

(415) 777-5900

www.zuppa-sf.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Nopa

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› paulr@sfbg.com

A hoary bit of wisdom teaches that we should be careful what we wish for, because we might get it — and if we are a new restaurant wishing for a meteoric rise, what might we expect? Few restaurants in recent memory have soared as sensationally as Nopa, which opened near the Panhandle in the spring of 2006 to widespread acclaim. By the end of that year the place was anointed by the San Francisco Chronicle as a "classic" and admitted to the pantheon of the area’s "Top 100" restaurants.

The only comparable spectacle I could think of was the birth of Firefly, whose first menus in the autumn of 1993 attracted the instant and adulatory attention of the food media, followed by galloping herds of the trend-involved. There are meaningful differences between the two narratives: Firefly was a fairly small neighborhood enterprise in a quiet neighborhood, whereas Nopa is a much larger operation on a busy thoroughfare in a bustling part of town. But the basic question remains: how does a young restaurant handle instant and massive acclaim, and what happens when the circus leaves town? Does the venture survive the decompression and adjust itself to life in the light of common day, or, having been over inflated, does it pop like a bubble? Bubbles do have a way of popping.

Buzz, like infatuation (of which it is a form), is a temporary condition, and people under the influence of buzz are in a state of altered consciousness in which they can fail to notice all sorts of sins, from uneven food to erratic service — problems that are most likely to afflict restaurants in their early, teething stages. But when the buzz wears off and the media turns to the business of telling everyone what to think about some other place, people regain their senses and start to notice what is in front of them at the place nobody’s talking about any more.

Nopa, like Firefly, has survived its passage through this crucible. The restaurant’s proprietors, Laurence Jossel and Jeff Hanak, have kept a steady hand on the tiller, and the result today is a buzzing convivium of mostly younger folk, animatedly gathered at the restaurant’s several foci, including a Chaucerian communal table at the front, a bar along the north wall, and a mezzanine overlooking the exhibition kitchen with its wood-burning oven. There’s even a gathering place for service staff, a round table near the foot of the stairs to the mezzanine, well-stocked with napkins, flatware, and other gear for resetting tables.

And there is Jossel’s excellent food. He made a splash a few years ago at Chez Nous, and he’s brought a similar urban-rustic flair to the kitchen at Nopa. An iconic Jossel dish might be a small crock of cannellini beans ($9), baked in the wood oven with tomatoes, feta cheese, and oregano for a distinctively Greek effect. One is tempted to describe this dish, which is crusted with bread crumbs, as a gratin, but it isn’t, really; there isn’t quite a word for it, and this is a big clue about the kitchen’s intentions and methods. Recombinant cooking carries its share of risks, but if, as here, it’s pursued intelligently, with a sense of place and past — if it’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary — it can produce exquisite results like this one, novel yet grounded.

God is in the details, in the kitchen as elsewhere. Most of Nopa’s dishes are recognizable, with small, gracious twists and innovations to set them apart. Calamari ($9) are braised in a golden-bronze saffron broth along with quartered new potatoes and a scattering of fried chickpeas. A soup ($8) of white beans and kale, along with plenty of bacon and a base of chicken stock, is like an unpuréed version of the Portuguese soup caldo verde. And flatbread ($14) resembles a little square pizza, topped perhaps with slivers of red onion, white cheese, and prosciutto.

We were particularly impressed with the pork chop ($22), which distinguished itself through a tender juiciness that could not entirely be attributed to gentle cooking. (The meat was done to about medium, I would say, with a broad hint of pinkness in the middle). Our server confirmed that the pork had indeed been brined for several hours in brown sugar; it ended up being plated on a bed of soft polenta dotted with roasted root vegetables and ribbons of fried taro root.

Quite as good in its own way was a braised lamb shank ($25) — still on the bone, Neanderthal-style — nested in a salad of toasted farro grains, shreds of chanterelle mushrooms (a pretty yellow-orange, though not as spectacularly colored as the examples I saw at a Helsinki farmers market in August), and a pile of mustard greens. There are only so many ways to describe meat so tender that it falls away from the bone at the touch of a fork or knife, and I have not found a new way. But this was meat of that sort.

The hamburger ($12), made from grass-fed beef, is simply sublime, one of the best I have ever tasted in the city or anywhere. It’s presented on a toasted bun of discreet robustness — not a fancy, fluffy focaccia but not a skinny hack job, either. Even the sometime vegetarian was impressed by the burger’s rosy juiciness, or perhaps he was faintly disappointed by his tagine ($17), a medley of root vegetables (mostly parsnips and turnips) gussied up with lemon yogurt. He described the tagine as "good," which would have been fine if everything else hadn’t been excellent.

Among the desserts, the primus inter pares is the sopapillas ($8), an array of pastry pillows, deep-fried, dusted with sugar, and ready to be doused with burnt-orange caramel sauce. You pour that out yourself from a ceramic flask, no sweat.

NOPA

Dinner: nightly, 6 p.m.–1 a.m.

560 Divisadero, SF

(415) 864-8643

www.nopasf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Cafe Mystique

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you squint — hard, on a night of driving rain, and you earlier washed your contact lenses down the sink by accident, leaving yourself legally blind — you might just catch a hint of a glimpse of a shadow of the Castro Street that figures so prominently in the movie Milk. Today’s Castro Street, like its 1970s antecedent, is dominated by the Castro Theater’s gigantic sign (a colorful spectacle even to the grievously nearsighted), and it’s still just a few blocks long, a brief run from Market Street to 19th Street. In college, driven by stomach-churning curiosity, we navigated this little stretch one night and wondered what all the fuss was about. This was it? Yes, it was and still is.

Oscar Wilde is said to have said that anyone who disappeared would sooner or later be seen in San Francisco. He might have had a vision of Elvis, or perhaps a premonition about Castro Street, which remains a semi-mythical — and yet quite real — Main Street for gay America and maybe the world. Sitting in a window seat at Café Mystique recently (on an evening of no rain and with contact lenses securely in place), I noticed several familiar faces from epochs past, not seen by me for years but still quite recognizable, like a parade of Fezziwigs from my own private version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In between these sightings, with the huge "Castro" sign glowing like a beacon across the street, we discussed Milk, a movie full of saintly intentions and virtually barren of actual characters except the tortured Dan White and the gently droll Scott Smith (Harvey Milk’s onetime lover), as played by James Franco.

Franco is tasty, with mystique: if he were a café, would he be Café Mystique? The food is tasty at Cafe Mystique, which until recently was a joint called Welcome Home. If Harvey Milk might have felt vaguely at home at Welcome Home, he would almost certainly be astonished by Café Mystique, which on the one hand is still a recognizably gay restaurant from the old school and on the other is dramatically good-looking and serves a Moroccan-inflected menu that would have seemed noteworthy anywhere in the city as recently as a decade ago.

First, the good looks: they’re neither North African nor Castro-homey but faintly central European, like a Vienna hotel or a Bavarian hunting lodge. The long north wall is clad in impressive wood wainscoting, punctuated by pillars topped with sconce lamps, for a street-light effect, while the paint scheme, of butter washed with caramel, enhances the sense of woodsy warmth.

As for the Moroccan touches, they’re all over the dinner menu (there are breakfast and lunch menus too), from the flatbread triangles accompanying a warm fava bean dip ($6) — like a slightly soupy hummus — to the mint in a cup of excellent, if under-seasoned, split green pea soup ($2). (Just add salt and voilà!) There are hints of influence from elsewhere around the Mediterranean as well; a bowl of cucumber sticks bathed in yogurt and boldly charged with lemon and garlic ($4) could easily pass for the Greek condiment tzatziki (itself an obvious relative of the Indian condiment raita).

None of these flourishes seems at all pretentious, since the cooking on the whole remains earthy and friendly. You can get a grilled cheese sandwich ($9), for instance, and it comes with really good fries, and if the cheese happens to be halumi wrapped in lavash, well … that just adds to the mystique. Halumi is a not-soft white cheese typically made from a blend of goat and sheep’s milk and is most closely associated with Cyprus; its firmness means that it resists melting under heat, retaining its shape and solid texture even while taking on a smokiness.

Grilling cubes of meat on skewers is common practice around the Mediterranean — and elsewhere — and at Café Mystique the mixed grill ($15) includes chicken and beef. Beef takes easily to the simplest preparations, such as grilling, while chicken typically needs some TLC to show at its best, so if I’d been asked to bet beforehand on which of these two contestants would command the plate, I would have chosen the beef. But the beef turned out to be rather tough, gray, and flavorless, while the chicken (boneless breast meat) was perfectly cooked, tender and juicy, with a nice dusting of spice. This uneven confederacy of flesh rested on a bed of couscous (which in its white coarseness resembled corn snow), and its chunks were interspersed with examples of grilled vegetables, among them onions, plum tomatoes, zucchini coins, and strips of red and green bell pepper. The bits of green and red on a carpet of white reminded me of Christmas trees and mistletoe wreaths left at snowy curbs in the Januaries of my youth.

Wilde might or might not have anticipated Elvis, but could he possibly have anticipated the Elvis crepe ($8), a gigantic dessert of bananas, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, nuts, and melted Nutella sauce, all piled, ladled, and scattered atop an actual crepe? Plowing through this mass of sugary calories was a little like eating a banana split that had been neglected for an hour or so on the hottest day of summer. And a cautionary note on Nutella, the wondrous Italian spread of chocolate and hazelnut that appeared from the ashen privations of World War II: it used to consist largely of hydrogenated vegetable oil, i.e. trans fat, which, as we now know, is a no-no. I stopped buying it even when it was on sale. Have they changed the formula? Reading ingredient labels now involves considerable squinting.

CAFE MYSTIQUE

Daily, 8 a.m.–11 p.m.

464 Castro, SF

(415) 865-9810

www.cafemystiquesf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderate noise

Wheelchair accessible

Cafe Kati

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If the second half of the 1990s stands to be remembered as an era of golden bubble baths in San Francisco, the decade’s quite different first half (less opulence, more calamities) might be remembered as a magical era of neighborhood restaurants. With the Great Freeway Shift that followed the 1989 earthquake — demolitions, re-routings, rethinkings — the city’s relationship with its suburbs changed forever; suburban diners could not be counted on as before to fill city restaurants, and young chefs migrated into the neighborhoods to start their own places in what amounted to a culinary diaspora.

Among the earliest of these pioneers was Kirk Webber, who opened his Café Kati in the borderland between the Fillmore and Japantown in 1990. Webber brought a high pedigree to the venture; he had been trained at the California Culinary Academy and had worked at Silks (in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel), among other places, before opening Kati. The restaurant, nonetheless, was a neighborhood restaurant, snug and warm, with a handful of tables and a sense that each dish was being carefully handmade in the small kitchen behind the dining room.

And so it remains. From the rustic, wood-cut-style street signage (reminiscent, for me, of Chez Panisse’s) to the intimacy of the dining room (which seats no more than 20 or so) to the wall art that resembles the famous cave paintings at Lascaux, France, Café Kati feels personal. It has been shaped by human hands and reflects a steady, guiding sensibility. Even the slightly retro black track lighting on the ceiling reinforces our sense that Café Kati has evolved and accreted — has earned its look over the years rather than having been sculpted all at once by a hired-gun designer who then was hired elsewhere and moved on, never to revisit.

Webber is one of the first, and remains one of the purest, of the so-called fusion chefs, the people who brought Asian touches to classic French cooking. A central goal for Webber was to cut down on the fattiness and richness of the traditional dishes without having them deflate altogether, and in this sense his food shares a root with nouvelle cuisine. Even after nearly two decades, it retains an element of invention and wonder without becoming contorted or attention-seeking.

The appetizers are the main, most overtly Asian dishes on the menu. One of Kati’s longtime customer favorites, in fact — the dragon roll ($18.95) — is as good a sushi-style roll as I’ve had in any Japanese restaurant. The roll includes avocado, cucumber, and wonderful crisp-fried shrimp, with flaps of smoked salmon laid like tarpaulins over the top of each rice round. And instead of serving the wasabi and soy sauce separately, Webber mixes them into a glossy sauce that shows signs of being thickened and softened with a bit of honey.

In another signature dish, Vietnamese-style spring rolls ($8.95) the sweetness of mango is modulated with plenty of cilantro, Thai basil (a little sharper than the Italian kinds), and, above all, mint. Webber doesn’t stint on plate decoration, either, having a particular fancy for complex coilings of ruby-red beet and for colorful heaps of cut carrots and microgreens. Plates can look like dioramas of a flower shop.

Main courses open out from Asian influences without forsaking them entirely. Hanger steak (at $29.95, the priciest item on the menu) gets a slightly sweet marinade of soy sauce and sesame oil before being grilled, cut into slices, and served with Blue Lake beans and sautéed spinach. The deft touch here is the pile of spicy Spanish fries, really a version of patatas bravas, the gently crispy quarters of waxy (in this case some kind of baby yellow) potato.

From steak and potatoes to fried chicken ($16.95) — in this case a Cornish game hen, given a Cajun-scented batter, then lightly fried and served with buttermilk mashed potatoes, a mop top of wilted pea tendrils, and a marvelous, bewitching gravy inflected with citrus. If there’s a heaven, the home cooking there will include something like this.

Desserts are all $8.95 — a price point I would describe as neither high nor low — and sing in a more mainstream key. You might find a sundae, a flourless chocolate cake, a crisp, a butterscotch pudding. The last is presented in a parfait glass and consists of layerings of homemade butterscotch and whipped cream — like a sundae with no ice cream, or a planet (like Jupiter) with no definite surface. Butterscotch is basically caramel with vanilla, and Kati’s version is barely sweet with a faint, keen edge of smoke and a rich color like that of tarnished gold. These are strong hints that the butterscotch has been made by a practiced hand, someone who isn’t afraid to skate near the edge of burnt sugar and to give character to the result. (The big giveaway for commercial, mass-produced desserts is that they are predominantly, often overwhelmingly, sweet; they taste as if they were made from sugar and little else.)

Kati’s wine list is substantial though not overwrought, with quite a few decent choices by the glass, and service tends toward flawlessness. As in many pint-sized restaurants, the door opens right into the dining room, which can be disconcerting, especially in the season of cold drafts. I mean wind, not beer.

CAFE KATI

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

1963 Sutter, SF

(415) 775-7313

www.cafekati.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Anchor and Hope

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If there are more architecturally compelling restaurants in the city than the troika assembled by the troika consisting of the Rosenthal brothers and Doug Washington, I don’t know of them. The Rosenthal brothers are, Steven and Mitchell, who ran the kitchen at Postrio for years before leaving to open Town Hall, while Washington (who’s worked at Postrio and Jardinière, among other places) has long been their front-of-the-house presence.

Town Hall was launched in 2003 on the ground floor of a handsome and historic brick building at the corner of Howard and Fremont streets. In 2006 the trio opened their second spot, Salt House, just a few blocks away, on Mission near First, in an old printing plant. And in April came Anchor and Hope, in a gorgeously made-over brick warehouse on Minna Street, more or less wedged between its older siblings.

Restaurant architecture is always relevant, but it’s particularly relevant in SoMa in these days of massive construction projects: gigantic residential towers, buildings of bare concrete, plate glass, and squiggly rooflines, with planes of mesh at odd angles, like giant mosquito screens half-toppled by the wind — all of it suggestive, somehow, of exhibitionism (by architects and occupants alike), an obsession with industrial materials instead of craft and technique, and a blithe attitude toward ugliness.

Too many of these buildings look garish and disposable, as if an artisanal human hand has never touched them, and I suspect they will look dated and cheap before it becomes necessary to tear them down and recycle them into lawn chairs or bidets. When they do come down, it might be that Anchor and Hope will still be standing, its patrons eating oysters and other delicacies from the sea while demolition dust swirls outside.

If there is something almost European in the troika’s architectural sense — an instinct to preserve old buildings and their memory of the past by polishing and refitting them to modern standards — the Rosenthals’ food continues to transcend categories. Town Hall serves a full-throated menu the brothers might have put together at Postrio, Salt House adds a hip-tavern note, and now Anchor and Hope gives us a version of that SF classic, the seafood house.

Step through the enormous plate-glass portal — your first big clue that this isn’t a rehash of Tadich Grill or Sam’s — and you find yourself in a huge open dining room under a peaked ceiling of exposed rafters. The chapel-of-industry effect is similar to that at Acquerello or Chez Spencer but much more imposing. A long bar occupies much of the east wall. Despite the hard flooring material, the noise level is well-managed. The high ceiling must help, while the brushed-steel chairs surprisingly don’t hurt. They can be a little chilly, though, on wintry nights, and you might need a little something to warm your hands over.

How about a bowl of fabulous crab chowder ($10), thickened with parsnips (a flavorful relative of the potato) and some black-pepper cream and heavy with crab meat? Crab doesn’t need much tinkering, in my experience, but in this simplest of soups, the crab flavor shone clearly.

We warmed our hands over a big bowl of clams ($10.50), steamed in a basil-wine broth that gave a teasing whiff of summer. Batter-fried smelts ($9) — "fries with eyes" — didn’t give off any restorative steam, but they were crisp and tasty, and the rémoulade served on the side for dipping the little fish had a serious pepper kick. My only complaint about tiger prawns ($12.50) simmered Thai-style in coconut red curry (with a side of jasmine rice) was that one has seen versions of this dish before, not infrequently.

I was surprised, and perhaps slightly disappointed, to find the menu devoid of sustainability information. Dungeness crab is presumptively local, as is petrale sole (roasted whole here), but the salmon was from Australasia, and the lobster (in a pot pie and on a roll) couldn’t have been local. When in doubt: throw caution to the wind. While I generally steer clear of cioppino, I was drawn to the server’s description of a special, cacciucco ($24), which means "little pond" in Italian. The dish (whose roots are traceable to the Tuscan port city of Livorno) turned out to be something like bouillabaise, a mix of salmon and cod cubes, shrimp, and mussels (of astounding, pillow-like plumpness) in a simple broth of white wine, garlic, and tomato paste that somehow managed to be smoky. The smokiness might have come from the chunks of grilled bread adrift like charred ice floes in the middle of the bowl.

Landlubbers turn up everywhere, even at seafood houses, and at Anchor and Hope they are not slighted. The kitchen even turns out a creditable cassoulet ($24) with duck confit, duck sausage, and pomegranate seeds scattered over the top like rubies. The pomegranate seeds did not sit well with the orderer of the cassoulet, a connoisseur of sorts, but I found they brought not only visual interest but a subtle fruity sharpness that helped cut the fat richness of the meat.

The dessert menu is terse, and the connoisseur thought the prices, which mainly hover between $8 and $9, were moderate. This is possible; today’s real cash cow is the $12 cocktail, which may have relieved some pressure on dessert prices. A rectangle of dense chocolate blackout cake ($8.50) was tinctured with espresso and adorned with a caramel-like brittle of sea salt and pistachio — an elegant and composed treat and plenty for three, if rather modest in the architectural flourishes that seem to define so many of today’s desserts. Still: in modesty, hope. Could this be an aegis for a new year, newer than most?

ANCHOR AND HOPE

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

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

83 Minna, SF

(415) 501-9100

www.anchorandhopesf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Well-modulated noise

Wheelchair accessible

Henry’s Hunan Restaurant

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› paulr@sfbg.com

In ages past, I belonged to a small literary society — a sect, if you like. Let us call this society the Out of Print Society. (It actually bore another name, which decency forbids me from proclaiming in print.) The members of our little group met weekly at a Chinese restaurant to trade gossip and pour out the frustrations that have a way of accumuutf8g in literary life; although we did not drink beer from tankards or pound those tankards on the tabletop as a way of demanding refills, we did like kung pao chicken and Hunan fish, and we drank lots of green tea, poured from a pretty pot into dainty little cups.

The restaurant that served as our meetinghouse was Alice’s, corner of Sanchez and 29th streets. The food was cheap and good, and the location was both out of the way and central, perfect for our fugitive natures. At this time, in the second half of the mid-1990s, the Chinese-restaurant picture — indeed the entire restaurant picture — in upper (or is that outer?) Noe Valley was … sleepy. The whole neighborhood was sleepy, and Alice’s was the jewel in the crown atop this nodding head.

Although the Out of Print Society is no more — has gone out of print, we might say — Alice’s is still there. But these days it’s facing competition as the dominant local purveyor of fine, inexpensive, and spicy Chinese food, for just a block away, over on Church Street, an outpost of Henry’s Hunan Restaurant has opened, in the space that belonged most recently to Pescheria and, an iteration or two before that, the estimable but short-lived Café J.

It is one of my beloved maxims that oft-flipped restaurant locations sooner or later become sushi joints, but now there will have to be a new, or another, maxim in light of the spectacle of a Hunan enterprise moving in to cast a calm upon troubled restaurant waters. The look of the space doesn’t seem to have changed much since Café J days; the footprint of the dining room is the same, with the tables laid out in a kind of backward J around a long bar. The chairs, in brushed steel or nickel, are very urban modern, as are the red-shaded halogen lights suspended from the ceiling. In a bow to Noe Valley’s famed sunshine (which real estate people have a way of perceiving more keenly than the rest of us), a few tables and chairs sit outside, nestled against the building’s façade.

So Henry’s Hunan doesn’t look like a typical Chinese restaurant. This appears to be a trend, and is a welcome one. The food, meanwhile, is outstanding and moderately priced. As at Brandy Ho’s over in the Castro District, the menu includes a selection of Hunan-style smoked meats. The usual suspects of Chinese restaurants are also well-represented, from wonton soup to Mongolian chicken. But Henry’s also offers some dishes I’ve never seen before.

One of the most memorable of these is Diana’s special meat pie ($6.95), a stack of scallion cakes buffered by tasty minced meat (pork, I suspect) and plenty of shredded iceberg lettuce. The cakes take on an almost pastry-like flakiness from deep-frying, and the dish as a whole is like a cross between a club sandwich and a tostada: a layered golden disk cut into quarters you can eat with a knife and fork or with your hands, sandwich-style. (Here, incidentally, we have the heretofore unheard-of reality of a Chinese dish even an expert couldn’t eat with chopsticks.)

Henry’s chopsticks are the plastic kind, incidentally, which limits their utility. Dumplings ($5.50), a.k.a. potstickers, aren’t chopstick-friendly in any case, so it was a relief to find them served in a shallow bowl, from which they could be fork-speared without slipping around too much. And chopsticks are blissfully irrelevant in matters of soup, such as mo soi soup ($6), a sizable bowl of steaming chicken stock thickly invested with chunks of chicken, tofu, and egg and shreds of baby-spinach leaves. This is a lovely, satisfying soup, especially in cold weather, but you should make sure you have it before the spicy stuff starts coming, or it could seem lost and pale.

And the spicy stuff is spicy, although the heat is well-controlled, like a 104 mph fastball that shaves the outside corner at the knees. Henry’s special seafood dish ($10.50), a mélange of scallops, shrimp, and chunked chicken breast tossed with carrot coins and tabs of water chestnut, takes its charge from red chili garlic paste, whose distinctive flavor tends to be a little dominant. If you like that flavor, you’ll like it here.

More subtle is spicy curry show main ($7.50), which can be had with chicken, pork, beef, or vegetables. I am wary of curry dishes in Chinese restaurants; too often they taste of canned curry powder, which too often tastes mostly of can — a metallic harshness that overwhelms neighboring flavors, as a huge ugly building can cut off the sun to buildings around it. But Henry’s curry seasoning, though almost certainly a powder (to judge by the yellow tint it imparts to the noodles: a sign of turmeric), has an attractively rounded flavor that accepts the presence of other ingredients (meat, slivered scallions, julienne red bell pepper) and doesn’t stomp on them.

The dish (like Henry’s seafood special) is marked on the menu with a chili pepper — a sign of either welcome or warning, depending on your views about heat — but the kitchen will dial down the chili charge on request. Your server will ask you how hot you like it, along a range from mild to tankard-banging.


HENRY’S HUNAN RESTAURANT

Daily, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

1708 Church, SF

(415) 826-9189

www.henryshunanrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Amber India

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Whatever you think a tony Indian restaurant might look like, you’re probably not picturing Amber India. On the other hand, if you’re wondering what a tony Indian restaurant smells like, you probably already know: it smells like the regular kind, which is to say, it smells of curry. Amber India smells bewitchingly of curry while looking like, in its elegant stackedness, Postrio.

You step inside from street level — or lane level, since the restaurant lies along a pedestrian plaza, Yerba Buena Lane — and find yourself at the host’s podium, on a small platform, while the restaurant opens out below you like an enchanted, hidden valley. Amber India doesn’t quite have Postrio’s Gone with the Wind staircase or exhibition kitchen, but it does have gorgeous flooring (large tiles of what looks like polished sandstone); impressive columns; a partly coffered ceiling; square leaves of gilded, pressed tin tethered to some of the light fixtures; and atmospheric golden lighting in general. Given the hardness of the flooring material and the scale of the restaurant (which can accommodate nearly 200 people), noise is notably under control.

Amber India opened in the city just this past June, in a neighborhood that has seen drastic changes in recent years. (The restaurant’s siblings, scattered across the Peninsula and South Bay, have been a presence in the Bay Area for nearly 15 years.) For one thing, there is now an actual neighborhood, with people living just steps away — mostly overhead, in the condominiums above the Four Seasons Hotel, and in the many other residential buildings that have sprung up in SoMa. The restaurant is also convenient to shoppers, museum-goers (the new Jewish Museum is just across the walkway, while the Yerba Buena Center and Museum of Modern Art are barely more than one block distant), and out-of-towners.

Why would they come to Amber India, apart from its convenience and style? One reason might be that the food emerging from the kitchen is gratifyingly spicy. We were particularly exhilarated by the dal Amber ($12.95), a shallow dish of black lentils swimming in a thick, rust-colored sauce the menu described as consisting of "cream, tomatoes, and spices." "Spices," in the world of Indian restaurants, is a come-hither word that tells you practically nothing; it doesn’t have to mean "spicy" — i.e. hot — but it does here. Dal is often soupy and can be indifferently prepared in other restaurants, but Amber India’s version had a velvet smoothness that left an erotic tingle on the lips.

If you want the standards, many of them are here. But the menu offers a wide array of imaginative cooking, including the use of unorthodox ingredients. Duck? How about duck tikka kebab ($10.95), chunks of boneless breast meat marinated in spicy yogurt, pan-seared on skewers, and served with an eerily addictive dill-caper sauce the color and consistency of homemade mayonnaise? The meat was beautifully tender and didn’t even need the sauce, but once the meat was gone, we kept dipping out spoons into it as if it were a separate dish.

Thanks to saganaki and The Simpsons, many of us are familiar with fried cheese, but grilled cheese — as in actual chunks of cheese, not packaged in a sandwich — is another matter. Amber offers it as paneer tikka lal mirch ($15.95), elongated cubes of mild white cheese, marinated and grilled. If you’ve eaten grilled tofu, you’ll have a good sense of the look and feel of this dish, although the cheese has more tang.

As a boy, I was unimpressed by the cans of spinach devoured by Popeye the Sailor Man: I liked Popeye, but spinach was repulsive, period, new paragraph. Then, in early adulthood, I discovered saag paneer, an exotic version of creamed spinach punctuated with chunks of white cheese. Every Indian restaurant I’ve been to — except, now, Amber — offers an interpretation of this standard. Amber’s spinach dish is called teen saag ($14.95); it consists of spinach (plus some dill and mustard greens) wilted with cumin and garlic and, for counterpoint, mushroom caps and spears of baby corn instead of cheese chunks.

I would count that dish as vegan, despite a small suspicion that cream was involved. Indian cooking is expansively vegan- and vegetarian-friendly, but if you are a sometime or intermittent vegetarian, or a pesco-vegetarian — or even just some kind of poser — Amber doesn’t disappoint. Our tongues were left pleasurably smoldering by the "thecha" shrimp salad ($9.95), a clutch of small shrimp marinated with garlic and chilis, sautéed, and nested in mixed baby field greens. The masterstroke: a vinaigrette scented with lemon verbena, an herb that, like lemongrass, is lemony in a way distinct from plain lemons.

It’s possible that people eat in Indian restaurants without having naan, but I have never seen such a display. Amber isn’t the place to experiment with the naanless life, either; its flatbreads are wonderful exercises in blistered tenderness, and the signature Amber rounds ($3.95) come with a variety of toppings, including a fragrant and nippy blend of chili and thyme.

On the other hand … $3.95 for a disk of bread sprinkled with a few herbs isn’t exactly the steal of the century. Amber’s prices are, I would guess, about 50 percent higher than the Indian-restaurant average in the farther reaches of the city. So you pay a city-center premium that reflects convenience and the affluence of the surroundings. But you won’t find better Indian food, and in that sense the premium, although steep as a percentage, is modest as a fact.

AMBER

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

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

25 Yerba Buena Lane, SF

(415) 777-0500

www.amber-india.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Andalu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Before small plates go the way of the brontosaurus and the leisure suit, I thought I should look in on Andalu, which has held down the corner of 16th and Guerrero streets now for the better part of a decade and was one of the progenitors of our much-discussed "global tapas" trend. The restaurant replaced a slightly dodgy taqueria called Maya back in the halcyon dot-com days — this would be two busts ago — and, with its neighbor, Tokyo Go Go, helped bring a luster of money and youth to a neighborhood that was a little lacking in luster of any kind. (Tokyo Go Go’s older sibling, Ace Wasabi’s Rock’n’ Roll Sushi, né Flying Kamikazes, is in the Marina District, to give you some idea of the social flavoring. I wouldn’t say the immediate area is Marina South, but I wouldn’t say it isn’t, either.)

From the beginning, Andalu has enjoyed at least one large basic asset — a surprisingly brick-and-mortar one, considering the restaurant’s birth in the age of Internet pixie dust: it isn’t just located at the corner of 16th and Guerrero, it’s right at the corner. It commands the corner, and it’s a busy corner. You can’t miss the place, with its distinctive green sign — a big green A with a swoosh, like something from The Jetsons — aglow in the twilight. The restaurant is, in effect, its own billboard.

The name, meanwhile, reminds us of Andalucia, that sunny province in the south of Spain, and the reminder subtly helps set us up for small plates. These will turn out to be wildly variegated, borrowing influences from around the world, but the menu does open in distinctively Iberian style, with several sherries and ports, along with a plate of seriously spicy Andalucian-style green and black olives ($3.25). The olives are marinated with fennel, lemon, chili peppers, and garlic — and it’s the last two you notice, since they appear whole, as pod and (peeled) clove.

But after this brief bow to the old country, the world is suddenly our oyster. Unlike nearby Ramblas, which does hew to a certain Spanish authenticity, Andalu’s kitchen turns out versions of items as diverse as miso-glazed sea bass and spare ribs braised in Coke. (The menu doesn’t offer oysters, incidentally; those inclined to shellfish will have to make do with mussels.)

Since I am perpetually curious about macaroni and cheese ($7.50), I was interested to see what freshening could be given to this most American of dishes. Typical restaurant fancifications involve the use of chic cheese — Gruyère is a frequent choice — but Andalu’s menu card described the mac and cheese as "crispy." What could this mean? A particularly heavy fall of buttered bread crumbs over the top — a kind of super-gratin? Whatever I was expecting, I wasn’t expecting what came: wedges of what must have been a kind of mac-and-cheese pie, breaded and flash-fried. The wedges themselves reminded me of slices of Brie or a runny triple-cream cheese within an edible rind. The wedges’ rigidity made them suitable for dipping in a stainless-steel ramekin — like a giant’s thimble — of herbed tomato vinaigrette.

Fish tacos ($10 for four small ones) — a SoCal favorite — were dolled up here with grilled ahi, but mostly they tasted of the mango salsa ladled over their tops. In other words, sweet. Better balanced was a hailbut paillard ($9.50), a thin disk of tissue dressed with a tasty mix of cilantro, ginger, soy, and hot grapeseed oil. The fish was like cooked carpaccio, with the flaw being that it had been cooked right onto the plate, so that eating it was like tearing up a sub-floor.

Who can resist Moroccan lamb cigars ($7.25)? Not me. Flutes of pastry filled with seasoned minced lamb and deep-fried to golden crispiness should have been spectacular — worthy members of the egg roll-flauta family — instead of just very good. The lamb seemed under-seasoned (rather odd, since Morocco is one of the lands of spice), and the accompanying yogurt-mint sauce offered only partial restitution. I had a similar reaction to the sliders ($9.50), a trio of miniature hamburgers on buns slathered with basil aioli and presented with a bird’s nest of battered, deep-fried shallot rings.

The rings were a lovely, more delicate version of onion rings, but the little burgers were overcooked and served on disappointingly thick, not-warm buns. They might have been better, ironically, if they’d been made with the lamb that went into the cigars.

One of the best dishes on the menu is bread salad ($9.25) — what the Italians call panzanella, cubes of stale (or, in this case, grilled) bread tossed with cut tomatoes and basil. Here the herb was arugula — a sly innovation — with the traditional basil being supplied through a vinaigrette. Toasted pine nuts probably aren’t unheard of in Italian bread salads, but I’ve never seen a recipe that called for blobs of burrata, a mozzarella-like cow’s-milk cheese produced in southern Italy. The cheese brought visual interest — it looked like patches of snow receding from a late-winter landscape dotted with hints of spring — and a suggestion of softening creaminess to the plate’s various sharpnesses.

Dessert at the end of a repast consisting of macaroni and cheese and hamburgers with onion rings would have to be something like brownies. Andalu’s version ($5) is pretty satisfying: a plateful of moist, cake-like squares, ankle-deep in warm chocolate sauce, dusted with confectioner’s sugar and each topped with a raspberry, like a ruby in a voluptuous display at a jeweler’s. Or, perhaps, a rose clutched in the hand of an unfortunate fellow clad in a chocolate-brown leisure suit with a red carnation, circa 1975: a Paleolithic era in the annals of style, and Andalu still ages off.

ANDALU

Dinner: Sun.–Tues., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Wed.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

3198 16th St., SF

(415) 621-2211

www.andalusf.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Can be noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Good Pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Are hotel restaurants second-class citizens? Do they fly coach? Not all of them, certainly, in this city: several of our grandest restaurants, including Masa’s, Campton Place, and the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, are in (grand) hotels. Still, the hotel restaurant, as a general proposition, gives a brief shiver. One has the abiding suspicion that these enterprises serve a captive audience consisting of out-of-towners — people here for conventions or conferences, or maybe just plain old tourists. In a tourist town like ours, tourists are the objects of considerable ambivalence. They spend money, yes, which is a particularly attractive gesture during times of economic apocalypse, but they’re also suckers for cable-car rides and dishes like cioppino served in hollowed-out rounds of sourdough bread.

They’re also not too likely to be found at such places as the intersection of Seventh and Mission streets, where, after nightfall, the look and a good deal of the feel of gloomy Gotham City in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie set in. Scraps of stained newspaper rustle in the gutters, and passersby mutter to themselves. You wouldn’t expect to find a hotel here, and yet there is one: it’s called Good Hotel, it’s part of the Joie de Vivre chain (which has made something of an art of bringing alternative style to sketchy or otherwise unlikely sites), and its restaurant is called Good Pizza. Yes, a hotel restaurant that’s a pizzeria! This could be a first.

Tony pizzerias have been blooming in the city in the past few years, and Good Pizza is one of them. It emphasizes high quality ingredients — how about some fromage blanc from Cowgirl Creamery, or bacon from Nueske? — and it’s also bright and good-looking in a way that reminded me of IKEA. The main color is an orange-peach, but there’s plenty of warm wood trim, glass, and shiny stainless-steel for the Stockholm look. The bright and generous lighting, in addition to making the interior glow, also flows out to the street. The pizzeria is a lantern on its otherwise ill-lit corner.

The menu is quite limited, with a twist. On the non-twisty side, you can choose from among nine pies with predetermined toppings; the possibilities here range from a simple, classic margherita pizza (tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil) to a more oddball pie featuring the aforementioned fromage blanc in the company of seasonal organic apples, toasted walnuts, and scallions. The twist is that you can put together your own pizza, which, so far as I know, isn’t permitted at such places as Delfina, Pizzetta 211, Piccino, or Gialina.

Perhaps there is wisdom in not permitting people the freedom to command their own pies. Seinfeld‘s Kramer tried to put cucumbers on a pizza, until Poppie smacked him down. Let this be a lesson to us all.

Cukes aren’t an option at Good Pizza, but one evening we did order a pie that we supposed would be a splendid, if brief, monument to vegetarian possibility but didn’t turn out quite right. The culprit, we decided, was the sun-dried tomatoes, which in certain contexts can add a sausage-y weight but in others can be noisy and uncooperative. Our pizza, a 12-incher ($13), began with the included tomato sauce and a proprietary cheese blend, and we added (besides the sun-dried tomatoes), roasted mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and fresh tomatoes (an extra $1 each). We couldn’t quite put a finger on the exact nature of the clash, although artichoke hearts can be as recalcitrant as sun-dried tomatoes, and the fresh tomatoes had been added after the pizza had been lifted from the oven, leaving them raw and untethered to everything else.

Much simpler and therefore more coherent was the pepperoni pizza ($14 for the 12-incher). Has there ever been a bad pepperoni pizza? This one was made with Hobbs pepperoni, which made it sound a little hoity-toity. But the sausage was not only garlicky and peppery but greasy; it left little pools of orange everywhere, like chorizo in a queso fundido, which made me feel that it was half-time at a college football game somewhere.

No pizza is complete without a salad, and Good Pizza offers one, and only one: the good salad ($8 for the large version, with an herbed flatbread). The salad is basically a Greek salad without feta cheese; its players include tomato and red bell pepper slices, chunks of cucumber, kalamata olives, and artichoke hearts, all bathed in a memorable lemon-oregano vinaigrette.

No pizzeria experience is complete without some beer or wine. You could enjoy a Moretti ($4.50) with your pie — Italian beer is underrated — but a livelier choice might be a glass of red or white wine ($5.75) from Más Wine Company in Cloverdale. In a small irony, the beers (there’s also Coors Light) come in bottles, while the wines by the glass are on tap. The Más 2006-vintage vino was an impressive proprietary blend of syrah and cabernet (with a dash of petite sirah) that tasted strongly of cherries and was indeed, as the winery’s Web site promises, "food friendly" and "approachable."

Given the ovens that must be the center of any pizzeria’s kitchen, it isn’t surprising that Good Pizza’s shiny display cases are full of baked goods, including scones, muffins, and cookies — wonderfully intense lemon-sugar cookies for just 90 cents. Not bad. (The baked goods aren’t actually baked onsite but come from Pacific Baking Company.) The scones and muffins also clue us in that Good Pizza, like many another hotel restaurant, does a smart morning business. Who wouldn’t love the smell of breakfast calzones in the morning, with the sun breaking over the corner of Seventh and Mission and a fresh newspaper to read?

GOOD PIZZA

Mon.–Fri., 7 a.m.–3 p.m., 5–10 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.

112 Seventh St., SF

(415) 626-8381

www.jdvhotels.com/dining/good_pizza

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Cossu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Having spent many months — too many months — watching presidential aspirants address television cameras from cavernous halls, I stepped into Cossu recently and found it oddly familiar. The restaurant is cavernous, and it even has a spotlit stage, although not for presidential candidates or other bloviating politicos but live musical acts. It also, until recently, was called Pasha.

The place has changed hands and changed chefs, according to one of our servers, and it’s even (we were reassured) been redecorated. It didn’t look much different to me, I must say: the lighting tends toward nightclub dimness; the walls, flooring, and tented ceiling are all a red-burgundy shade — like being inside a huge box of red wine — and, in a slight ergonomic crisis, the square tables are still awkwardly low, with awkwardly low ottomans and banquettes to sit on. The tables are also still set with brass inlays that say "Pasha." I didn’t particularly care for Pasha, so I wasn’t particularly thrilled to see a recurrence of the name. On the other hand, it’s hard to read table inlays in dim light. So, a wash there.

The big change has been in the kitchen, where executive chef Hijam Senhaji turns out a "Moroccan fusion" menu. As one of our servers told us, the idea is (if I might be allowed a moment of Emerilspeak) to kick it up a notch. The result is mostly impressive; if you’ve liked the food at Saha, Medjool, or the original Baraka, you’ll likely like the food here. Of course there are traditional tagine and couscous dishes, but the cooking can soar well beyond the old boundaries. It can also catch the occasional wing in power lines.

The best dishes have at least one foot firmly planted on the soil of tradition. The bastilla, for instance — a packet of phyllo pastry filled with something savory, like a giant flaky raviolo — is a staple in Moroccan cooking (and, under various other names, throughout the Mediterranean). Cossu’s Essaouira version ($14) is filled with a mix of shrimp and calamari in a chermoula paste — a fragrant blend of garlic, herbs, lemon juice, olive oil, cumin, coriander, and (guessing by the color) some saffron. The bastilla reaches the table looking like a big fat wallet and isn’t sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. Some might account this omission a small mercy.

Another traditional Moroccan preparation is the salad of shredded spinach called bakoula ($8). It’s not exactly a beauty queen; in fact it looks like one of those clumps of wet grass you sometimes have to pull from the lawn mower, if you happen to have mowed a damp lawn. But it’s punctuated with slivers of green olive and imbued with the haunting, sour-salty flavor of preserved lemons. Even served cold, it casts a spell.

While you wait for the next treat to appear, you gnaw on your warm sesame-seed bun and nibble at your plate of green and black olives in their spicy marinade. (A word to the wise: most of the olives are pitted, but not all.) Maybe you’ve opted for the French fries ($6) as a kind of intermezzo; they’re wonderfully slender and tender-crisp, but they offer no discernable hint of Moroccan (or indeed any) fusion.

The kitchen saves the bulk of its innovative effects for the big dishes. Slices of Muscovy duck breast ($26) don’t, to me, suggest north Africa in the least, but the meat is expertly roasted to order (we asked for rare and got it rare — lovely reddish-pink flaps, with plenty of juice), and it’s sauced with a viscous, honey-like essence of apricot and cinnamon. As someone who is wary of the usual pairings made between fruit and flesh, sweet and savory (pork with apples or cherries comes instantly to mind), I found this combination to be winsome — and, in my experience, unique.

Well, semi-unique, since the sauce accompanying the black and white tuna ($24), also featured a cunning deployment of cinnamon, a supple and sublime spice we occidentals tend to underuse. Here the cinnamon was added to a tomato coulis, with the result being a distant relative of barbecue sauce. The fish itself, meanwhile, was sprinkled with black sesame seeds, seared to order, and presented on a bed of saffron rice.

So far, so good with these fusion dishes. The kitchen even served the duck with a pine-nut-and-parsley couscous, to distinguish it from the saffron rice. But both plates were piled high on one side with the same, not particularly interesting, medley of sautéed vegetables, mostly green and yellow summer squash, carrot tabs, and shreds of red cabbage. Of course these are all estimable — and colorful — foodstuffs; they are good for us and even, to a degree, seasonal. But they also suggest a kind of mass production that’s not quite consistent with the high ambition of turning out distinctive food, plate by plate. It’s especially jarring when the stars of each plate are so distinctive; it’s as if cheap tires have been fitted to a Lamborghini.

Is this disjunction a lingering ghost of Pasha? We attempted an exorcism by inquiring about dessert but were told our choices were limited to baklava and coffee. I like baklava well enough, but because it’s suffered overexposure on these hither shores — like tiramisù — and drifted in the direction of cliché, I almost never order it and didn’t here. Our knowledgeable and radiant server quietly supported us in this choice. She and her troupe, in fact, were altogether cosseting. *

COSSU RESTAURANT, BAR, AND LOUNGE

Tues.–Sun., 6 p.m. to closing

1516 Broadway, SF

(415) 885-4477

www.pasharestaurant.com

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

A long look

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you’re old enough to remember Loongbar — and I’m too polite to ask — you might experience a moment of confusion about Long Bar. You might wonder if there’s a familial connection, and why did the name of the restaurant split in two (some kind of verbal mitosis?), and what happened to the other O? But … no worries, as the Aussies say. Long Bar (whose principals are Alan Walsh and Bill Garlock) has nothing to do with Loongbar, the Mark Miller venture of the late 1990s that lived its brief life in a spectacular Ghirardelli Square setting before ending up in the hands of the actor Don Johnson under the name Ana Mandara.

Long Bar was, until spring 2007, the Fillmore Grill, a stalwart of that stylish street and a pubish sort of place. If your idea of a smart pub includes a long bar, then you won’t be too disappointed by the morph. Long Bar is aptly named; its bar (of Honduran mahogany) might not be quite the match of the big daddy that helped make Stars famous, but it is sizable, with seating for at least a dozen atop posh-looking stools, each with an unimpeded view to the large flat-screen television mounted on the wall, a window on the world of sports.

As impressive as the bar is, it takes up only a quarter or so of the dining room, with the rest given over to the usual suspect (tables and chairs in various configurations), a color scheme heavy on a cayenne or burnt-sienna hue — rich and warm, if under inflected — and, most appealing, a small selection of U-shaped, low-rise booths in a far corner. Long Bar isn’t what you’d call beatifically quiet (another sense in which the name is spot-on; will anyone ever open Quiet Bar?), but the noise level in the booths is far from unbearable, even as the restaurant fills up with Pacific Heightsers, some fresh from a movie at the Clay Theater across the street.

They’re hungry, of course, the P.H. crowd: they want good food but not fancy food, and they want it at a reasonable price, since, like everybody else, they must be feeling the wind a bit these days. What is a reasonable price? That, as Hamlet might say (in a yet-to-be-imagined turn as restaurant planner), is the question, and it’s a tricky one to try to answer in the midst of our present economic maelstrom. I will note that Long Bar’s main-course prices range mostly from the high teens to the mid-20s, which isn’t exactly bargain-basement country, but could be worse. A strong theory of relativity obtains in restaurant pricing, and any calculus must consider where the restaurant is located and who’s likely to go there.

So while it seems quite possible that the bulk of the clientele — vigorous, middle-aged-looking people who don’t appear to be poor — would consider Long Bar moderately priced, I would have to cogitate a bit before agreeing. Then I would agree. A grilled salmon filet perched on a bed of quinoa salad dotted with cauliflower florets, for $22? That’s not bad for casually sophisticated cooking.

Of course, no bar would be complete without a full complement of bar food, and bar food is so often deep-fried and greasy, maybe on the theory that the grease helps soak up excess alcohol, as if it’s some kind of blotter. (A friend recently told me a similar story about the therapeutic powers of tripe, which, prepared in a stew called menudo, is commonly served in Mexico on Sundays, when some people might need help clearing away the haze left by the previous night’s revels.)

Fried onion rings are often a spectacular example of this kind of cooking. Hence their migration to fast-food-land. But executive chef Ryan McDonald’s version ($6) was notable for its restraint. The rings were cut from red onions, for one thing, then given a tempura batter, which fried up strong and dry, without sogginess or a sheen of grease on the plate. We dipped the rings in the companion ramekin of plain ketchup, which was fine, though not quite as fine as the rings themselves.

Monterey calamari ($12) was a more typical item, with the rings and tentacles swaddled in a heavy golden coat of bread crumbs. Despite the slightly lurid look, the seafood itself was tender and gently sweet-briny, with a colorful salad of frisée and slivered carrot and lime aioli on the side for balance.

Comparably golden, though not as heavy, were crab cakes ($16), a matched pair of plump pucks made with a generous amount of actual crab meat (filler is a perennial problem for crab cake aficionados) and plated with a fabulously tart little salad of apple threads and tendrils of watercress. Lemon-caper aioli provided a final zest kicker.

Yes, the Long Bar kitchen has a flair for salads, of all things. Even the caesar ($9) was excellent, despite a lack of anchovies. The croutons were crunchy and plentiful, the Parmesan shavings were piled up like drifts in a blizzard, the dressing was notably lemony, and the romaine spears were immaculate and crisp. I did wonder why, given the considerable scale of the caesar, why no grilled-chicken upgrade is offered. With a little protein, this salad could easily pass as a light main course.

Desserts, we were told, are due for an upgrade, from a pastry chef whose arrival is imminent. In the meantime, the choices are a bit TGI Friday’s but perfectly serviceable: mud pie ($8), a fluffy chocolate mousse under a glossy cap of dark chocolate; and mango cheesecake ($8), also fluffy, in a graham-cracker crust that’s worth its weight in … well, graham crackers, at least.

LONG BAR

Dinner: Sun., Tues.–Thurs, 5–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

2298 Fillmore, SF

(415) 440-1700

www.longbarsf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Chinafornia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The specter of linoleum haunts the neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Many of us have paid visits to these purgatories, where the food is tasty and cheap but the lighting is harsh and fluorescent and the flooring looks as if it had been laid down, without much love, during the Eisenhower administration. One ponders this trade-off, wondering, in particular, whether it’s inevitable. Then one goes to Kathy’s California Chinese Cuisine and finds an answer.

Rumors of Kathy’s’ culinary excellence had been reaching me for some time. I had seen the place often enough, certainly, in its snug little commercial strip at the dizzying confluence of Dewey and Laguna Honda boulevards and Woodside Avenue, just steps from Muni’s Forest Hill metro station. But I only recently stepped inside for the first time and felt myself transported to … Vienna! Of course, I had only just been to the real Vienna — for the first time — over the summer, so that wedding-cake city in the heart of Mitteleuropa was on my mind.

Kathy’s isn’t about wedding cakes or Mitteleuropa, but it does offer surprisingly gracious old world atmospherics, if one discounts the burbling aquarium just inside the front door, the scattering of gourds on the floor (in honor of Halloween and the autumn harvest), and the general storefront-spaciness of things. (There is no host’s podium, just the fish tank, while the server’s station is all the way at the rear of the dining room, like the check-in counter for an obscure airline in an obscure country.)

The floor is laid with handsome tiles that look as though they were quarried from a stormy sea, the walls are a discreetly sensuous peach color, and soft light flows from a pair of rather resplendent glass chandeliers, as well as from sconce lamps on the wall. From an unseen sound system I heard playing one evening — for our final Viennese touch — the final movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E flat major. Also some Bach. The music was present but not obtrusive, which these days seems to be very much the exception to the rule. Considering that Kathy’s does a lively takeout business, the restaurant’s dining room is a startlingly attractive place to sit and have dinner, at least if your idea of having dinner includes conversation.

When "California" is used as a modifier with respect to some traditional cuisine, I immediately think of zucchini. Zucchini grow like weeds in our part of the world, and they turn up in highly unlikely spots, such as hor mak talay, the Thai dish of coconut milk and red curry. And they turn up at Kathy’s, along with eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. Somewhere in the kitchen is a ratatouille crying out to be made.

Kathy’s isn’t that Californianized, or Californicated, but there is a nice plate of stir-fried vegetables, the vegetable deluxe ($7.95), that features plenty of shredded napa cabbage, carrot coins, broccoli florets, and chunks of Japanese eggplant, with plenty of garlic and ginger and — the special touch — a ring of tissue-thin tomato slices arranged around the edge of a platter, like a link fence. The fence is both visually attractive and the source of a subtle acid zip.

Most of the food has a familiar north-China look, although there is the occasional wrinkle, such as red dumplings ($6.95), an octet of Chiclet-shaped, half-dollar-sized dough packets filled tight with minced, gingery pork and bathed in a thick, glossy reddish-orange sauce that’s both sweet and hot.

Similar dumplings recur in the wonton soup ($6.95 for two), although the real stars here are the chicken stock (intensified through reduction and not too salty) and the wealth of vegetables bobbing alongside the wontons. The roll call here includes more shredded cabbage and broccoli florets, along with quarters of button mushroom and (a non-vegetable) peeled shrimp.

Our intel source, a local, suggested that we would find the walnut prawns ($10.95) exceptional. Since I have never found walnut prawns exceptional, I was prepared to be disappointed. But … Kathy’s walnut prawns are exceptional! The large, plump shrimp are shelled, then stir-fried in a creamy sauce spiked with some sort of liquor (brandy or rum?), and scattered with candied walnuts and raisins. It is very tricky business to introduce this much sweetness into a savory dish; a balance must be struck, lest you end up with some kind of shrimp dessert. Kathy’s version strikes that balance.

Tangerine beef ($10.95), meanwhile, left me secretly chagrined, since the flaps of beef, while tasty, were not coated and deep-fried to heart-stopping crispness before being tossed in a thick and glossy orange sauce. The drill here was more of a conventional stir-fry (with a medley of vegetables) in a soy-based sauce, with the tangerine figuring as an occasional burst of zest. More interesting, or at least unexpected, or unadvertised, were the lithe slices of green apple ringing the platter; their sweet-tartness helped balance both the saltiness of the soy sauce and the richness of the meat.

Other pluses: service is practiced and friendly. You can get brown rice instead of white. Transport logistics are, apart from the terrifying intersection, rather painless, with Muni just steps away and street parking quite easy. The relaxed, well-mannered crowd is easy to take. And, on that happy note, I’m done with Chinese food for a bit. Probably.


Kathy’s California Chinese Cuisine

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

408 Dewey, SF

(415) 665-6888

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

My kingdom for a dumpling

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› paulr@sfbg.com

As kingdoms go, Kingdom of Dumpling is a rather Lilliputian affair — a runt, actually, if that word can be used in conjunction with "kingdom." Dumplings are small objects, of course, even the Bavarian ones made from potatoes, also known as knödel, and they seem even smaller when described in the singular. Kingdom of Dumpling? Is there only one kind of dumpling, or only one permitted per customer, or (our worst-case scenario) only one of one kind permitted per customer? The answers are No, No, and No — but I leap ahead.

The Kingdom (an adjunct of Kingdom of Chinese Dumpling, on Noriega) opened last spring, in the snug Sunset space once occupied by the excellent David’s Kitchen. That restaurant was a culinary multilinguist, fluent in the major idioms of east and southeast Asian cuisines; it was like a miniature Straits Cafe. The new place has retained much of that spirit, right down to the Magic Marker board that hangs above one corner of the dining room proclaiming the day’s specials, such as duck curry. David’s Kitchen offered a similar dish, if I remember rightly.

What is different is the massive infusion of dumplings, steamed buns, and general dim-summery. If you’re a haunter of noodle bars, this is an alternate universe. It’s as if some restaurant geneticist created a hybrid by mixing the DNA of a pan-Asian place and a dim sum house — and did so in a space that would feel crowded with a dozen people inside. But the space is still an attractive shade of creamy yellow, the tables and chairs are comfortable, and the food is excellent.

The truly fresh, handmade Chinese dumpling is a revelation, when you actually find one and bite into it. KoD’s are warm and juicy inside their soft pouches of dough; eating one is like biting into a piece of perfectly fresh fruit that’s been warmed by the sun, except the flavors aren’t fruity but (in the main) meaty, with generous tweakings of ginger and garlic. I liked the pork dumpling with napa cabbage ($5.95) slightly better than the chicken dumpling with corn ($6.45), mainly because the chicken didn’t assert itself with quite the same quiet sensuousness as the pork, and the peak-of-the-season corn was a little too sweet. But either way, you get a dozen for about six bucks, and the individual dumplings aren’t small.

The appeal of warm food is primal — does the heat sound an ancient echo of fresh kill? — but cold dishes have their own charms, especially when they’re as tasty as KoD’s. Marinated seaweed salad ($3.95) is a treat I associate with Japanese restaurants, but KoD’s is just as good, if in a quite different way. The seaweed itself, for starters, isn’t a mass of green, crinkled threads but a bowlful of what look like julienne poblano peppers, or perhaps tiny eels that have only just stopped writhing. And while Japanese seaweed salads are typically dressed with some form of ponzu sauce, KoD’s carries another charge, more savory and with less citrus-tart balance.

A salad of bean stick ($4.95) consisted of flaps of bean curd — corrugated, like Ruffles potato chips — and tossed with plenty of chopped cilantro. With some minced garlic and grated ginger, this simple ensemble became addictive, and the fact that was served cold — not cold, really, more on the low end of room temperature — faded from one’s consciousness, bite by bite.

More minced garlic was assigned to enliven crispy lotus root ($5.95), an enormous platter of cream-colored disks punctuated by vacuole-like interior spaces. I had the brief sense of examining a cross-section of bacteria under a microscope. The root sections themselves were indeed tender-crispy, as if they’d been briefly stir-fried, steamed, or otherwise tenderly handled; lotus root is really a starchy rhizome, and while some authorities compare it to potato, it reminded me of a cross between jicama and daikon. The root is rich in various vitamins and minerals as well as dietary fiber and is widely enjoyed throughout east Asia.

XO sauce, as browsers at Asian markets may know, is an irresistible, if pricey, confection — a lumpy paste — of dried seafood (including shrimp and scallop) along with various seasonings and degrees of chili heat. It’s quite good right out of the jar, as I am embarrassed to say I know from personal (though not recent) experience. How much better, though, to use the precious XO to flavor a dish like beef chow fun ($6.95), a Cantonese festival of wide noodles, strips of tender meat, and bean sprouts. The color palette here was a little too thoroughly earthen to be ideal, but the glistening of the noodles and beef did bring a bit of joy to the eye.

It’s not surprising that a restaurant serving food this tasty, interesting, and carefully prepared at such modest prices should attract young people, nor that — given the restaurant’s location deep in the Sunset District — so many of those young people should appear to be of Asian ancestry. Their presence suggests that some kind of college or university campus must lie nearby, but we couldn’t think of one. City College? Not too close. San Francisco State? Closer, though hardly at hand. The Sunset might be a neighborhood not a kingdom, but it’s a pretty good-sized neighborhood that shows signs of reinvention and renewal — and now it has a place where you can eat like a king, for a lot less than the king’s ransom.


KINGDOM OF DUMPLING

Daily, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1713 Taraval, SF

(415) 566-6143

www.kingofchinesedumpling.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Bearable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Flaming in the Castro

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› paulr@sfbg.com

At Brandy Ho’s newish outpost in the Castro District, the fuchsia-colored paper place settings are embossed with the image of a chili pepper. For spice freaks, this is the equivalent of the famous blinking boob in North Beach — the neighborhood that is the home of the original Brandy Ho’s, which turns 30 next year. Let us meditate on the complex irony of all this.

People in the vicinity of their 30th birthdays often find themselves with procreation on the brain, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising that restaurants sometimes develop a similar fever. It probably isn’t too shocking, either, that Brandy Ho’s should have chosen to spawn in the heart of the Castro, a heavily foot-trafficked neighborhood with something less than a cornucopia of Chinese restaurants. For years I was a quiet fan of China Court, a block away at the corner of Castro and 19th streets, but that place folded and became something else a few years ago, leaving the field pretty lightly uncontested. It might be more shocking that Brandy Ho’s offspring bears so little physical resemblance to its parent.

Brandy Ho’s in the Castro isn’t just a Chinese restaurant: it’s a good Chinese restaurant, and it’s a Hunan Chinese restaurant. It’s also rather sensationally good-looking: a rosewood-lined cave — or mining tunnel, or (since this is the Castro) sauna — fronted with enormous, ground-to-ceiling panes of plate glass, which makes it easy to observe those who are observing you as they drift by. You are either inside or outside the human aquarium, and it doesn’t matter which. The Castro is a kingdom of darting eyes. If you struggle with chopsticks, you might draw a crowd of gawkers here. Brandy Ho’s chopsticks are plastic, and that’s not the best news for beginners and the inept. Wood has more grip and is much more forgiving.

Why does Hunan matter? Because Hunan food is spicy food, and while I have high regard for steamed Cantonese or Hakka delicacies for their fineness and subtleties, I prefer some fire on the plate. I love Szechuan food, but there isn’t a lot of it to be found in San Francisco. Hunan is just about as appealing and, perhaps, just a wee bit more refined, at least as it’s turned out by the kitchen at Brandy Ho’s.

And — to invert an old saw — where there is fire, there must be smoke. At Brandy Ho’s, the smoke comes not from tea leaves but from hardwood, and it results in a set of dishes that are exceptionally flavorful and quite unlike any other Chinese food I’ve eaten. Our server cautioned us that there were those who found the smokiness of smoked duck Hunanese ($12.95) "too strong," but the meat, when it finally floated in as a set of osso buco-like pieces on a carpet of carrot coins and bamboo shoot tabs, was reminiscent of Canadian bacon or some other kind of pork that had been roasted over a campfire. The smoke was smooth, hearty, and gently dominant in the manner of a good dark beer. Modest inconveniences: remnants of bone and dried skin. There was some chili heat too, but it deferred to the smoke.

Many of the dishes aren’t spicy at all. Steamed dumplings ($5.50) turned out to be potstickers, a half-dozen of them chubby as well-fed goldfish and filled with a tasty but well-behaved mince of pork, ginger, garlic, and scallion. Hot and sour soup ($3.50) was hot mostly in the hot-weather sense, but mostly it was bitter. The roster of ingredients seemed unremarkable — eggs, bean curd, bamboo shoots, and carrots — but had some unannounced greens been stirred into the mix, sharpening the soup’s edge?

And mo si vegetables ($8.95) — mu shu is the more familiar English spelling — rely mainly on garlic and ginger, not hot peppers, for their effect. Nonetheless, their effect is quietly potent, abetted by the hoisin sauce you swab on your pancakes before filling them with the actual stir-fry, whose main players are shredded napa cabbage and tree-ear mushrooms, bound together with egg. As much as I’ve loved mu shu pork over the years, I found this porkless version of the dish to be quite as convincing as its fleshier siblings and did not miss the meat.

Seinfeld‘s George liked his chicken spicy — and in the third person — and he would have liked Brandy Ho’s gon-pou chicken Hunan ($8.95), a fabulous mélange of boneless chicken cubes, onion slivers, chunks of red bell pepper, garlic, water chestnuts, and — most fabulous of all — wok-fried peanuts. There was plenty of chili-pepper heat in here somewhere. We mentioned to our server that we wanted the food to be spicy but didn’t want to burst into flames, and he’d nodded sagely, as if he heard this sort of thing every day and took it as a precise instruction. We ended up tingling yet unflaming, so the message must have gotten through somehow.

What was more remarkable was the dish’s uncanny resemblance to that old Szechuan favorite, kung pao chicken. What could distinguish the two, besides the spelling? The wok-frying of the peanuts? Is that some expression of Hunanese character, or just a flourish from this particular kitchen? Hunan and Szechuan provinces do adjoin each other, so maybe neighborliness accounts for some of the apparent cross-pollination.

Considering the quality and noteworthiness of the food and the restrained high style of the setting, Brandy Ho’s is notably inexpensive. Although portions are generous, many of the dishes cost less than $10, and even the pricier ones struggle to reach into the low teens. If you’re tired of fretting about the stock-market burn-off but aren’t yet ready for the depths of Carl’s Jr. or microwaveable burritos, Brandy Ho’s could very well be the place.

BRANDY HO’S

Continuous service: Sun.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–midnight

4068 18th St., SF

(415) 252-8000

www.brandyhos.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Moderate noise

Wheelchair accessible

Little Delhi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Manhattan joke: a part of Murray Hill, along Lexington Avenue in the ’20s, is known as Curry Hill because of its profusion of Indian and Pakistani restaurants. Even if you hadn’t heard the joke, you would probably recognize the neighborhood’s scent: no cuisine I’m aware of has a stronger or clearer olfactory signature. (Backyard barbecuing might deserve an honorable mention.)

We have our own Curry Hill, but it’s on Nob Hill, which pretty well mutes the word play, if not the scent. A major curry locus can be found on Jones Street south of Geary Boulevard, where the perfumed air is reminiscent of a spice market. But there is another node not far away, although perhaps — to vitiate the pun utterly — not on Nob Hill at all. I speak of the corner of Mason and Eddy streets, just a few steps from Union Square, the theater district, and the glamorous Westfield San Francisco Centre, and even fewer steps from the Tenderloin. If you’ve ever wondered what economic stratification, third world-style, might look like in a big American city, a brief reconnoiter of this largely flat area would give you a pretty good idea.

As for the corner itself: the air is redolent of curry, and for some of us, that means seduction. On one side of the street stands Punjab, wonderfully fragrant but with no table service, while on the other we find Little Delhi, an Indian restaurant that’s as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes, with table service.

As someone who bears witness to a great many restaurants that seem to have entered the world fully-formed under the godlike guidance of some designer, I warm to a place whose interior isn’t designed so much as accreted. Little Delhi has a well-lived-in look; its creamy walls are hung with portraits, tapestries, a map, and a flat-panel screen showing sports. The crowd is equally ad hoc: we noticed several tables full of what appeared to be (non-English-speaking) tourists, several more of possible neighborhood dwellers, including students (CCSF and Academy of Art College have campuses nearby), and a generous smattering of people who could have been of south Asian descent. This last convergence suggests, to me, a degree of authenticity. If people who grow up eating a cuisine later turn up in a restaurant serving the cuisine, there’s a reasonable chance the restaurant is turning out creditable versions of the food.

And Little Delhi is doing that — at moderate prices. Most of the menu consists of dishes that cost less than $10, and portions are generous. There are plenty of familiar faces in the crowd, including a notably good saag paneer ($7.99) — spiced spinach with cubes of white cheese — whose mild seasoning let through more spinach flavor than is usual. We were vaguely reminded of the creamed spinach that is a fixture of many a holiday repast in our part of the world.

A preparation I hadn’t seen before was badami chicken ($9.99), boneless chunks of tandoori-roasted meat in a curry (and yogurt-thickened?) sauce laced with slivers of pistachio and cashew nuts. It was a near, and crunchy, relation to that lovable stalwart, chicken tikka masala, but what most impressed me was a smokiness in the meat that managed to be heard through the assertive saucing.

Quite similar was lamb tikka masala ($9.99), cubes of tandoori-roasted lamb in another sensuous sauce, this one a bit redder, sweeter, and more tomatoey than its badami cousin, due perhaps to the presence of ketchup. (Ketchup — English ketchup in particular — plays a central role in the evolution of tikka masala.) Lamb’s gaminess stands up to strong saucing, though I caught no hint of smoke here as I had with the chicken.

As is typical at south Asian restaurants, the list of meatless possibilities is extensive, and this is good news for vegetarians, even us flexos. We were particularly impressed with chana masala ($6.99), a classic dish of chickpeas, enlivened here with slices of tomato and whole cardamom pods. These softened some from being braised and, when chewed on, gave off their refreshing woody flavor, with its hints of cinnamon and ginger. Cardamom is rich in a substance called cineole, a natural antiseptic that can fight bad breath. FYI.

From the oven: perfectly good naan ($1.50), cut into triangles for ease of use in sopping up all those irresistible sauces. For whole wheat aficionados, there’s roti (also $1.50) — virtually the same thing, except made from whole grain. Also useful for sauce-soppers is rice pillau ($2), a sizable dish of basmati rice. "Pillau" looks suspiciously like "pilaf," which would mean rice cooked in some kind of stock. This rice appeared to have been cooked in plain water, which didn’t do much for its color — it looked like a gritty heap of corn snow — but did show its wonderful nutty flavor to clearest effect.

Basmati is so tasty, in fact, that demand for it has been surging in India and throughout the Middle East. According to a story published in July in The Wall Street Journal, its price has risen between 100 and 200 percent in the past two years. So let’s count ourselves lucky to be able to enjoy this modest luxury for so little — a treat that won’t break the bank, not that there are all that many banks left to be broken. May the Fed be with you. *

LITTLE DELHI

Daily, 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

83 Eddy, SF

(415) 398-3173

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Chan Chan can cook

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› paulr@sfbg.com

One is tempted to say that Chan Chan Café Cubano is authentically Cuban, but one has no idea, really. These days it is easier for Americans to visit Albania than Cuba, which, after nearly 50 years, remains sequestered behind the rusty remains of the iron curtain. Maybe Barack, if he manages to fend off the dazzling Republicans — he a grizzled ex-maverick with recurrent skin cancer, she a sporty gunner-down of wolves from helicopters (Tail Gunner Sarah?) — will rethink the wisdom of our Cuba policy. First, of course, he’ll have to put Wall Street’s Humpty Dumpty back together again while finding some path out of two ruinous wars. The book of Genesis informs us that God created the earth in six days, "and he rested on the seventh day from all the work which he had done," but the president who succeeds the present crew won’t have it so easy.

The endless and preposterous isolation of Cuba reveals itself in many ways, among them a paucity of Cuban restaurants. We have a few, and we’ve had a few fail, among the latter the homey Los Flamingos (in Duboce Triangle) and the grander Habana (at the edge of Russian Hill). At the moment we have Laurel’s (in Hayes Valley) and Café Lo Cubano (in — oh, irony — Laurel Heights). And of course Chan Chan, which is nearly as isolated as Cuba itself.

The restaurant (opened in August by Ana Herrera and Michel Alvarez) occupies a snug space, very nearly at the head of 18th Street, that previously housed another restaurant but whose most historic occupant was Fran Gage’s Patisserie Française, a boutique bakery that helped set the table for today’s wealth of boutique bakeries. The patisserie was destroyed by fire in 1995, and the building seemed to sit there as a charred hulk for many months, perhaps years.

Signs of the fire are long gone. When I first stepped into Chan Chan, I discreetly looked for them and sniffed for them, but all I noticed were handsomely distressed wood frames around the doors and windows and the smell of flowers. Maybe my companion was wearing too much (flowery) cologne. The restaurant is small, with seating at about a half dozen tables for maybe 20 people. One wall looks like a gigantic finger painting, and there is a semi-exhibition kitchen where Alvarez, the young, rakish chef, works his magic.

And magic he does work. Chan Chan might look like a café, with a menu whose dishes are all demurely described — and modestly priced — as tapas, but the food is sophisticated and often sublime. Even the dipping sauces that accompany the warm bread are carefully conceived and executed; among these are a garlic-and-honey vinaigrette flecked with herbs and a smoothly savory tapenade of sun-dried tomato. (The restaurant’s menu describes the cooking style as "fusion," hence some of these cross-cultural borrowings.)

The salads and other vegetable-intensive dishes are of a lushness that might appeal to Cézanne. The tibia salad ($10.50), for instance, a variation on spinach salad, is a springtime meadow of deep green, tender leaves tossed with pine nuts, raisins, and chunks of seared apple, all of it bound together by a voluptuous, sweet-tart dressing. Similarly verdant is the aguacate relleno ($12.50), a beautifully ripe avocado split, peeled, filled with sautéed shrimp and scallops, and nestled in garden greens. Eating this dish is a little bit like stumbling on an avocado-shaped treasure chest in the woods and opening it to find a fortune of edible gold.

Given the historical importance of pork in both Spain and her New World colonies, it is slightly surprising that Chan Chan turns out such a wondrous lamb shank ($15). (The eating of pork has long served to distinguish Christians from Jews and Muslims, two groups well represented in medieval Spain, while pigs — carriers of brucellosis, among other diseases — were brought to the New World as a reliable and prolific food source by the conquistadores, as Charles C. Mann discusses in his incomparable book 1491. Lamb, meanwhile, has long been associated with the hot, dry climate of the Mediterranean and not so much with the muggy tropics.) The shank is braised in beer until the meat is tender, though not mushy, and it’s plenty big enough for two, especially if you have a plate of Spanish rice and black beans ($6.50) on the side. You should, if only for authenticity’s sake, although we did find both rice and legumes to be underseasoned — the only dish of which this could be said.

Flan for dessert teeters on the brink of cliché. In this sense it’s the Latin American answer to tiramisu. But Chan Chan actually has a good one ($6); it has something of the texture of bread pudding and the flavor of dulce de leche, and because it’s served as a square cut from a pan, like lasagna, its housemade provenance is apparent.

Chan Chan feels more isolated than it is. It sits in a tiny commercial strip (next to a busy hair salon) in a quiet residential quarter well uphill from the heart-of-the-Castro hubbub. But Muni’s 33-line trolleys glide by periodically, and Market Street is just steps away. And — I almost never get to write this — parking is easy! There are often spaces on 18th Street, and even more on Market. Free! In the Age of the Bailout, you can’t beat that.

CHAN CHAN CAFÉ CUBANO

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 6–11 p.m.

Breakfast/lunch: Tues.–Sat., 9 a.m.–2 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–4 p.m.

4690 18th St., SF

(866) 691-9975

www.chanchancafecubano.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Feast: The fixe is in

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› paulr@sfbg.com

In the horse race of American shibboleths, it’s neck and neck between "choice" and "democracy" down the unending stretch. But maybe not in the kitchen. Well-settled folk wisdom teaches that the best kitchens more closely resemble autocracies or fiefs than serene republics. "A kitchen is not a democracy" — what sage said this, or should have? And out there in the dining room, it can be equally true that choice is sometimes more a burden than a benefit. Many of us have known the quiet horror of sitting down in a Chinese restaurant and being handed a menu whose numbered items run into the hundreds and whose heft is like that of an appropriations bill. Choice is not always for the faint of heart.

One of the reasons I retain a particular affection for Chez Panisse in Berkeley is its fixed menu. It changes every night, but on any given night, they serve what they serve. The presentation of the menu card is something of a formality, a polite advisory. You are being clued in but not actually consulted. And, in a strange way, you relax, as if you’re strapping yourself into an airline seat. You surrender your autonomy, say your little prayer, and trust in the fates to take you (and your luggage) where you want to go. And that’s what happens. There’s no point worrying, since it’s out of your hands. You’re free to direct your energies elsewhere.

As far as I know, Chez Panisse is the only restaurant in the Bay Area that uses this kind of absolutely set menu, the king of the prix-fixes. (And only downstairs. If it’s choice you seek, upstairs you must go, to the excellent café.) But in recent years, I have noticed a gentle bloom of lesser prix-fixes: some offered beside a regular à la carte menu, others that give a few options for each course. While quite a few of the restaurants are French, as we would expect, an increasing number aren’t — so you won’t necessarily get stuck with crème brûlée for dessert.

The prix-fixe isn’t for everybody all the time, of course. There have been moments when I’ve forsaken a tempting one because I didn’t want dessert (which is almost always one of the courses offered). At other times, a dish on the regular menu strongly appealed. Prix-fixe dishes have long seemed quite mainstream to me; they’re the kind of things a kitchen can produce without too much struggle that appeals to a broad swath of customers. In return, you generally do get more for your money. The greatest prix-fixe deal I ever came across was at Hawthorne Lane, in the autumn of 2001: three courses for $28 at one of the best restaurants in the city, where even the modest dishes were memorable. Those were strange days, true, and the restaurant itself is no more, having morphed into Two. But silently, with only my lips moving, I compare all subsequent prix-fixes to that one.

The George W. Bush Wirtschaftswunder has brought, among other delights, steady upward pressure on prices, especially food prices. Yet there is at least one restaurant in the city where you can get three courses for less than $20 — only a nickel less, but still. The restaurant is Le P’tit Laurent (699 Chenery, SF. 415-334-3235, www.leptitlaurent.com), an atmospheric bistro in the heart of the Glen Park village. On nights when rain smears the windows, the street scene looks almost Parisian. Inside it’s warm and cozy, with bustle. The prix-fixe is available until 7 p.m. and includes soup or salad, a main dish (perhaps sautéed prawns or roasted veal), and a dessert from the dessert menu, maybe the sublime profiteroles. My lone sorrow here is that if you want the restaurant’s excellent cassoulet, you’ll probably end up having to order it à la carte.

Only slightly more expensive, at $23.50, is the three-course prix-fixe at Zazie (941 Cole, SF. 415-564-5332, www.zazisf.com), another bistro that feels authentically French, though more Provençal than Parisian. The prix-fixe possibilities here are marked on the menu card with asterisks; soup, salad, mussels, salmon, and chocolate pots de crème are some of the staples. Quite like France. A bonus draw is the restaurant’s large rear garden, which is made habitable even on chilly winter nights by those heating trees you often see at ski lodges.

In a much more urban quartier we find Le Charm (315 Fifth St., SF. 415-546-6128, www.lecharm.com), which since the mid-1990s has been an oasis of civilized clattering in the scruffy heart of SoMa. The prix-fixe is a little pricier here — $30 for three courses — but the cooking might also be a bit more urbane. Recent starter choices included salmon carpaccio and escargot, while among the desserts lurked a financier and a sablé. The restaurant also has a small patio for the al fresco–minded, and let’s not forget that SoMa tends to be warmer and less windy than the city’s more westerly neighborhoods.

Not all prix-fixes must be French. One of the better deals of the non-Gallic — indeed, of any — sort going at the moment can be found at Roy’s (575 Mission, SF. 415-777-0277, www.roysrestaurant.com), an outpost of the Hawaiian-fusion chain. The restaurant’s three-course set menu changes seasonally and, at the moment, costs $35 — making it something of a successor to the $28 Hawthorne Lane bonanza. There is typically a choice among two or three starters and a like number of desserts, with a slightly greater variety (perhaps three or four possibilities) among main courses. The San Francisco version of Roy’s doesn’t much resemble its older siblings on the islands; those places are rustically elegant, while ours is unmistakably urban, with a lot of glass, hard surfaces, high ceilings, and gloss. But the food is excellent, and at $35 for a full dinner in such a stylish setting, it’s a bit of a steal.

Firefly (4288 24th St., SF. 415-821-7652, www.fireflyrestaurant.com), which turns 15 this fall, has been well worth seeking out all these years, prix-fixe or no. (The prix-fixe — $35 for any starter, main course, and dessert — is a post-millennium wrinkle.) From the beginning, the restaurant has offered its wondrous shrimp-and-scallop potstickers while providing for the tastes of vegetarians and flesheaters alike, with no apparent fuss. It’s as good as a neighborhood restaurant could be, in a gastronomically-minded city where many of the best restaurants are in the neighborhoods. And with a prix-fixe option allowing a full range of motion across a supple and changeable bill of fare, it’s also an enduringly good deal.

Far to the west, near the shores of the sea, we find Pisces (3414 Judah, SF. 415-564-2233, www.piscessf.com), a seafood house with a minimalist look (including a bold black facade) New Yorkers would call "downtown." The twist here is not one but two prix-fixes, one for $23, the other for $33. What does the extra $10 buy you? A choice of desserts, for one thing; the $23 folk must settle for, say, vanilla-bean crème brûlée. A little ordinary, but there are worse fates, surely; how often do bad crèmes brûlées turn up? The price premium also results in somewhat tonier savory dishes — Dungeness crab cake rather than clam chowder as a first course, for instance, or ahi rather than salmon as a main course. On the other hand, if you want cioppino, the famous seafood stew, you might end up spending less, since sometimes, even in America, less is more.

Lately one has heard a good deal of crashing and clatter coming not from restaurant kitchens but from Wall Street. The great leviathans of finance seem to be going down like torpedoed battleships, while the press struggles to decide if the nation is — pick your cliché — "drifting," "stumbling," or "sinking" into a recession. Whatever. Are we there yet? I would not be so bold as to suggest that prix-fixes are the answer to the many and large problems afoot in this land, but I do think prix-fixe menus are about value, and value is a value from which we stray at our peril. The last time the economic sky looked quite this ominous was seven years ago, after a terror attack and the popping of the dot-com bubble. We began to take a bit less for granted in that strange autumn, and people seemed to awaken for the first time in years to the understanding that champagne did not, in fact, flow from their taps. It made sense to spend more prudently, to look for deals. That was then and this is now, and suddenly now is looking a lot like then. While the high and mighty ponder their big fixes, the rest of us can once again enjoy our small ones.

>>More Feast: The Guardian Guide to Bay Area Dining and Drinking

Janitzi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

It’s hard to imagine a restaurant actually failing on Valencia Street, but from time to time one does notice a casualty. The west side of the block between 22nd and 23rd streets, in particular, has turned out to be something of a killing field lately. The long-running Saigon Saigon folded two years ago, leaving a memorial — I hope not permanent — of boarded-up windows. Next door is a sliver of a space, once home to the amazing Gravity Spot, that has had multiple occupants since the mid-1990s. At the moment it appears to be a nascent wraps shop.

Then there is the larger, and quite handsome, setting at 1152 Valencia. Around the turn of the millennium it opened as Watergate and featured a façade of tall casement windows and enough woodwork inside to do justice to a London gentlemen’s club. Later occupants included Watercress and Senses, each coming and going with a bit more alacrity than its predecessor, in the manner of some of the later Roman emperors.

Now we have Janitzi, which opened Labor Day weekend, serving "the cuisine of the Americas." The space remains as appealing (to me, at least) as ever, although the woodwork inside has given way to a paint job of vibrant lime green (along with ochre-colored floors that combine concrete and wood planks), while the unmissable facade, with its pilasters, has been painted sky blue with canary-yellow trim, just to make sure no one can possibly miss it.

Serving a pan-American cuisine is such a self-evidently good idea it’s a wonder we don’t have many such places — but at least we have this one. Janitzi’s direct culinary ancestor would probably be Yunza, which offered a similar menu along lower Fillmore but did not long survive an obscure and slightly seedy midblock setting. Janitzi has a large advantage here, despite the spotty history of the address.

And what is the nature of the menu? Janitzi’s Americas of "cuisine of the Americas" begins at the Rio Grande, apparently, and reaches south to Cape Horn. It includes favorites from Mexico (queso fundido), Peru (ceviche), Brazil (yucca fries), Venezuela (arepas), and Argentina (milanesa). And after being cooked up in the large exhibition kitchen at the rear of the dining room, it’s served in various portion sizes, at reasonable prices, on stylish modern tableware, spare white but with sexy undulations.

An unexpected theme of unification is french bread, the first rounds of which arrive at your table, accompanied by a marvelous salsa of avocado pureed with garlic, cilantro, and lime juice, soon after you’ve been seated. Another cycle turns up with the queso fundido ($9), which is less about queso than a heart-stopping wealth of Mexican-style chorizo. Usually you scoop queso fundido with tortilla chips or ladle it into warm tortillas; the bread rounds were adequate here, though not ideal.

Also in a Mexican vein were a pair of pasilla peppers ($9), charred, peeled, stuffed with shredded chicken and queso blanco, then bathed in a mild, creamy tomato sauce. The peppers had just enough bite to assert themselves through the sauce, and yet more bread rounds were on hand for mop-up duty.

A salad of shrimp and avocado ($14) left us underwhelmed, particularly considering the price. True, there were six or eight shrimp of decent size, peeled and tasty, and the avocado was artfully arranged in thin slices around the edge of the dish, like markers on a sundial. But most of the salad consisted of chopped romaine lettuce, which was about as interesting to look at as it was to eat, and that was not very, despite a heavy shower of toasted squash seeds added for texture and flavor and a potent-sounding vinaigrette of cilantro and jalapeño.

If the shrimp salad was overpriced, the rack of lamb ($20) made up for it. The ribs had been expertly frenched and arranged in the middle of the plate, like the frame of a wigwam. Elsewhere were pats of thyme butter and miniature logs of (mysteriously raw) baby carrot. Our only complaint was that the meat was slightly overcooked; there was just the faintest hint of pink inside. Juice flowed liberally, however, and the flavors were rich and full.

It was hard to tell if the Tarasco cakes ($12) — patties of seasoned, shredded beef leavened with oatmeal (or, the hamburger as experienced by the Tarasco Indians of Mexico’s central plateau) — were juicy or not. They didn’t need to be, since they were bathed in the same creamy tomato requesón sauce that coated the pasilla peppers. But even without that sauce, they would have been flavorful.

So-called protein dishes (the various meats, the seafood) include your choice of two sides, and these are among the most satisfying items on the menu. Corn, of course, which is native to the Yucatán peninsula, figures prominently in them. It doesn’t get much simpler than corn grilled on the cob, and if the corn is height-of-the-season white corn, it doesn’t need much tweaking beyond a hint of sweet butter.

Arepas, corn pancakes common in Venezuela and Colombia, were unadorned but creamy inside a nicely blistered crust. Yucca fries could have been crisper but still offered their distinctive sweet savoriness. Braised cabbage turned out to be a close relation of coleslaw, with shreds of red and green cabbage brightened with lime juice.

And, for dessert, a hint of the north: the vanilla dome ($6), vanilla ice cream encased in a shell of dark chocolate, with a heart of caramel. It’s like a big Dilly bar that slipped off its stick — the Dilly bar being, for some of us, one of childhood’s most memorable bits of (norte) Americana.

JANITZI

Daily, 10 a.m.–10 p.m.

1152 Valencia, SF

(415) 821-2310

Beer and wine pending

AE/DISC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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