Paul Reidinger

Cuckoo for Coco500

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An adage favored by the paterfamilias: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He has generally deployed this wisdom in the matter of automobiles, while for me it has tended to apply to … well, practically everything. Bizou, for instance. This was the restaurant Loretta Keller opened at the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan in 1993, a time when the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan was a pretty lonely place at night. There was as yet no baseball park or light-rail line nearby, just the dowdy Caltrain station and lots of empty-looking warehouses slouching in the gloom.

Keller had worked at Stars in its glamorous heyday, but her restaurant, which served rustic French and Italian foods in a setting of rustic elegance, most closely resembled Zuni Cafe. The place was always, in my experience, discreetly stunning, and when I learned a few springtimes ago that she was recasting it for contemporary tastes, I thought, Oy. The subtext of the change seemed to be that the city’s most recent bevy of young, rich plutocrats was uninterested in a restaurant with a hint of Provençal languor; to lure them in, you needed halogen spot lamps, unadorned surfaces, certainly more noise, and a menu promising excitement.

Coco500, Bizou’s successor, does answer to this description, but it is nonetheless just as stunning in its own way and is a worthy bearer of the torch. I went in warily, full of skepticism, and was almost instantly won over, and that is about the loudest hallelujah I can sing for any restaurant, reinvented or otherwise.

Most of Coco500’s magic has to do with the food and the service, it must be said. The redesign of the interior emphasizes blond wood and is reminiscent of a Scandinavian Designs store or a sauna, and while there’s nothing wrong with the Danish modern look, it doesn’t exactly send the most accurate subliminal signals about what sort of food to expect. If the cooking is no longer about Provence and Italy, it’s still Cal-Med in some fundamental way. You’re not likely to find lutefisk on the menu, though there is plenty of seafood, and even in California an ethos of seasonality has to account for winter’s being one of the seasons. Bizou was good at this; so is Coco500.

Let’s start with a marvelous flat bread ($10), like the thinnest of thin-crust pizzas, topped with a fine mince of mushrooms and, for some extra chthonic intensity, truffle oil. The sense is of eating slices of especially flavorful winter-dampened earth, and the crust could not be better.

Seafood is more seasonal than we’re sometimes aware, though most Bay Areans probably associate king salmon with summer, and this Bay Arean associates halibut with winter. Ono, on the other hand, I associate with Hawaii; it’s one of those marvelous fish taken from the deep, clean waters around the islands, and while it makes a doubtful entrant on a restaurant menu in San Francisco, thousands of miles distant, Coco500’s kitchen does manage to turn it into a delicious crudo. The chunks of opalescent white flesh are sprinkled with fennel shavings, drizzled with a blood orange gastrique, and wrapped in wildly unseasonal, but tasty, basil leaves. It’s like eating prescooped Chinese lettuce cups.

More winter: celery root ($6), roasted with thyme and neatly cubed, could almost have passed for some sort of potato dish. A cream of cauliflower soup ($6) did not lack for cream — an ingredient of underappreciated potency that can overwhelm through sheer richness but didn’t quite here. Bits of chervil and squirts of paprika oil over the soup’s surface helped maintain balance.

Duck is also wintry for me, maybe because it’s a close relation to goose and roast goose is a classic holiday dish, dramatic if, in the end, more trouble than it’s quite worth. Boneless duck breast, on the other hand, is a type of flesh for all seasons: red and meatlike for bad weather but also highly grillable and always easy to deal with. At Coco500 the duck breast ($23) was grilled (medium), sliced, and presented with two extraordinary companions. One was a whole braised endive, almost like a torpedo onion, the other a duck baklava, rillettes under a pastry roof — completely unexpected and natural at the same time. Also delicious.

Alaskan black cod ($23), also known as sablefish, was another faraway fish, and I should have resisted it on carbon footprint grounds if nothing else, but I was lured in by the bit players: smashed (skin-on) fingerling potatoes and creamed rapini, like creamed spinach but with a sharper edge. The gently sautéed fillet itself, delicate and immaculately white, was good though not exceptional. I did find some ex post facto consolation at Seafood Watch, which reports that black cod is a best choice; the fish are line-caught from well-managed and sustainable fisheries. Please, restaurants, trumpet this kind of information! Don’t assume we have it or always have the presence of mind to ask for it.

We might not have had the presence of mind because we were probably thinking ahead to dessert and other postprandial wonders, such as Armagnac ($10), my latest passion in the liquid fires. Less fiery but not less worthy was a warm apple-huckleberry tart ($8) — basically a single-serve apple pie stained blue by the berries, with an immensely flaky (in the good sense) crust. As for the fruit: I love apples and apple pie, but the huckleberry (a close relation of the blueberry) is an American original, so how about a starring role someday?

COCO500

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

500 Brannan, SF

(415) 543-2222

www.coco500.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately loud

Wheelchair accessible

Sugar and spice

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In response to a recent column about quick reconstructive surgery for oversalted dishes (add some sugar!), a reader wrote with the news that it’s also possible to salvage dishes made inedible by too much chili heat. The procedure is simple: peel a raw potato, preferably a russet (starchy is better than waxy here), put it in the afflicted dish, and cook until it shows signs of disintegrating. Remove the still-whole spud, cross fingers, and serve.

Thanks to Gabriel Bereny for this intel, which apparently he got from his wife and her mother. My only question: where were you 23 years ago, when I was making so-called Chinese chili from a recipe in the Chicago Tribune, a reputable newspaper, and the directions called for a quarter cup of cayenne pepper, which did seem like quite a bit, but I put it in anyway because that’s what it said to do? The result was what I came to call, in later years — when time had softened the episode’s more severe edges — Chernobyl chili. I ate the Chernobyl chili, I suppose to prove that it could be eaten, but I glowed in the dark for days afterward. And that wasn’t the worst of it: for our guest, who scorched her lips with her first tentative taste, I whipped up some hasty pasta. I still have the Chinese chili recipe, but I have corrected what even my neophyte eye should have seen as an obvious typo; a quarter cup is now a quarter teaspoon. There is a meaningful difference.

Starch’s value as a culinary fire retardant extends beyond the potato. If you find you’ve taken a bit of something too incendiary for your comfort, you can find relief in plain starch: a mouthful of white rice, for instance, or unadorned bread. Boiled white rice is standard-issue with some of the world’s spicier cuisines, including those from India and Korea.

And a final word in defense of sugar as a savory player: add a pinch of it the next time you make a vinaigrette (I use the darkest brown sugar I can find) and note the pleasant balancing of salty, sour, and sweet. You can make a pretty good vinaigrette with some Dijon mustard, a quality vinegar (balsamic, red wine, rice), and some good extra-virgin olive oil, but good becomes great by adding just the tiniest hint of sweet.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Namu

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Of the city’s many village centers, I have always had a special fondness for the Inner Richmond enclave along Balboa, from Arguello to Eighth Avenue or so. Here you find Russian bakeries nestled across the street from sushi bars, with a Korean barbecue at one corner, a Chinese joint at the next, and a chic Cal-Med spot a few steps beyond the traffic light. Add a butcher shop, a nursery school, and a cleaners, and you have a self-sustaining little world. It’s like a less-trafficked Clement Street.

The backwater charm has persisted for years, despite the occasional incursions of upscaleness: Katia’s Russian Tea room, with its immaculately starched tablecloths, and, of more recent vintage, the Richmond, which opened a few years ago in the old Jakarta space. The latest spit-and-polish entrant, Namu, isn’t as conspicuous as either of those two restaurants; it opened about a year ago in a midblock storefront, and you could easily walk right by it if you weren’t paying attention.

At least you could in the middle of the day. By night, Namu attracts the young the way a lantern attracts moths on a summer evening; they gather in clusters on either side of the door and along the curb, dressed in night shades of blue, gray, and black, talking on cell phones while waiting for a table to open up or the rest of their party to appear. If you were rushing along the sidewalk, you could probably pick your way past without too much fancy footwork, but you’d notice the crowd, certainly, and wonder what was up.

Part of what is up is certainly chef Dennis Lee’s cooking. (Lee owns the place with his brothers, David and Daniel.) Although Namu’s menu includes elements of both Japanese and fusion cooking, its most striking quality is its elegant recasting of Korean themes. It’s not quite a Korean bistro, but it’s more than a step in that direction and away from the traditional Korean barbecue, an honorable example of which stands at the corner.

Namu does offer that well-known Korean staple, kimchee (cabbage pickled with garlic and red chiles), and it’s just about indistinguishable from the corner barbecue’s: both offer excellent, sour fire. But at Namu the kimchee is served as part of a banchan plate (the first is complimentary, after that $4), in the company of, say, surprisingly rich sautéed chives and coils of pickled carrot, all presented on a museum-of-modern-art dish that looks like a flattened candelabra. There is a sense of stylish balance in both presentation and flavor that announces the kitchen’s sophistication.

You could satisfy yourself entirely with Japanese items, if you were so inclined, and you might even be able to convince yourself that you were at a sushi bar. Although there’s no sushi on the menu, the restaurant’s look is agleam with dark minimalism, including the unframed urban-industrial photographs hung on the walls as if at a hip gallery. Anyway, tataki — lightly seared tabs of fish — is almost like sushi, and Namu’s version ($10), with albacore tuna, is cleverly enhanced by a drizzle of Thai chili ponzu. Seaweed salad is also a sushi bar standard; here it’s called ocean salad ($8) and is made from a jumble of red, green, and wakame seaweed and looks like leftover Christmas wrapping. Nice touches: halved cherry tomatoes beneath the seaweed, and ume vinaigrette (ume is a pickled Asian plum) to give the salad fruitiness that isn’t quite sweet.

Pan-seared dumplings (a.k.a. pot stickers) are a commonplace throughout east Asia. Here ($9) they’re filled with slivered shiitake mushrooms and served in a shallow bowl with yet more shiitake slivers and a dashi broth reduced to dark intensity. (Dashi is one of the basics of Japanese cooking and is a stock made from kelp and dried skipjack.) Fresh rolls are also an east Asian commonplace, but Namu’s version ($6) feature a cross-cultural twist: chunks of grilled skirt steak, for a hint of the American southwest and, simultaneously, Korea. Just as unexpected is the mung bean cake ($6), and if you shy away from mung beans as the principal ingredient of indifferent desserts, you’ll be surprised here by the resemblance to crispy polenta triangles, suitable for dipping in ponzu sauce. And there is an explicitly Italian touch to the buckwheat noodles ($9.50); they’re tossed with shiitake mushrooms but also pesto (from Thai basil!), pine nuts, and garlic before getting a good sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese.

We didn’t particularly respond to the broccolini ($7), which wasn’t bad but wasn’t special despite embellishments of yuzu ponzu and fried garlic. It seemed too much like ordinary steamed broccoli. But we did respond to the prawns ($9), which had been glazed with den jang (a Korean fermented bean paste similar to miso) and grilled in pairs on skewers.

Too much culinary globe-trotting? The hamburger ($9), then, is restful in a juicy, tasty, villagy way, with a first-rate bun and good fries that would be just a bit better if more svelte, more in the frites line. Of course, even B+ fries tend to get gobbled up, even by those who mean to save some room for dessert. Namu’s desserts are well above the ordinary: a chocolate brioche bread pudding ($7) for instance, napped with raspberry sauce (is any dish with brioche disappointing? I say no), and a puddinglike crème brûlée ($7) lifted from the mundane by little butter cookies flavored with our friend ume, the distinctive Japanese preserved plum last observed in the seaweed salad vinaigrette. Some plums certainly get around.

NAMU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

489 Balboa, SF

(415) 386-8332

www.namubar.com

Beer, wine, sake

AE/MC/V

Noisy if crowded

Wheelchair accessible

Green winter

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When I was in college, I was pleased to discover that spring in these parts began to make itself felt in February. The sun strengthened, the air grew mild — at least if it wasn’t raining — and people lay out to sunbathe. All this was very different from my native northern clime, in which winter nastiness often lasted well into April. April baseball games were sometimes snowed out, and May snow wasn’t unheard-of.

A warming world might soon be giving us reasons to rethink our understandings of the seasons, and perhaps Winnipeg will become a haven for snowbirds, but some of us have already made certain psychological adjustments. Spring for me — for instance — no longer means sunbathers in February but strawberries, asparagus, and artichokes, and while we await these delicacies, it’s the end of January, the Meyer lemon bush in the drippy garden is heavy with globes the color of summer sunshine, and markets are full of tubers and greens.

There are so many sorts of greens, arrayed in such abundance at farmers market stalls, that one feels a certain anxiety in choosing one kind but not another. Mixed baby salad greens are an almost automatic choice, since all they need is a splash of vinaigrette. Only slightly less demanding are baby spinach leaves, which can be wilted with some pine nuts, garlic, and currants to make a swift and classic Sicilian side dish. Romaine? You can make Caesar salads from it (and from its immature version, little gems), but I also found it turning up, braised, in a friend’s exquisite posole last week. I must make posole, I thought — a kind of chili made with hominy instead of beans — and I might or might not put romaine leaves in it, but I will try it with chickpeas.

Speaking, yet again, of legumes: lentil soup is a good place to stash all sorts of greens. I’ve put chard in there, and arugula, and even dandelion greens, though they have a bitterness that must be carefully handled. Dandelion greens work better in a pasta sauce, with garlic, chile flakes, sausage (poultry or soy if you like), some crushed black peppercorns, and a good grating of Parmesan or Romano cheese. The greens’ assertiveness matches up better with these comparably strong flavors. By the time you’ve cleaned your plate, it could be February, and strawberries for dessert.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Serpentine

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If you didn’t know that Dogpatch’s newest glam restaurant, Serpentine, is the younger sibling of the Slow Club, would you guess? Signals are mixed, and your answer might depend on whether you concentrated your attention on the menus or the physical particulars of the related pair. On the latter point, we have a sort of local restaurant version of Wills and Harry, the British princelings beloved of paparazzi: a confounding blend of similarities and dissimilarities, evidence that could go either way. If you squint, you suspect a family likeness, but you know you’re not looking at twins.

The Slow Club has always struck me as a descendant — a noisy one — of speakeasies. (Is there such a thing as a speakloudly?) The look is low, velvety, and slightly secretive; there are few windows, and the spot lighting is spare. Serpentine, by contrast, soars like a cathedral in its old industrial site. Brick walls? Yes, it has them, punctuated with vast factory windows that face the west and the afternoon sun, but there is also an exposed ceiling of poured concrete laced with electrical conduits. This vault of open space, rising a full two stories above the dining-room floor, might be a considerable factor in swallowing up noise; Serpentine looks like it should be deafening, but it isn’t, even when full. It helps, in this respect, that the floors aren’t reflections of the ceiling but are of burnished wood, warming and elegant and not quite as cacophony producing as poured concrete. Also warming: the wealth of votive candles, several to a table, that lend the restaurant a sense of rustic intimacy. It’s as if a country inn had decided to squat in one of Charles Dickens’s abandoned blacking factories.

Not many country inns, on the other hand, whether in Dickens’s time or our own, have served food quite as good as Serpentine’s. California cuisine has gone from novelty to cliché to beyond cliché and back again, but at Serpentine it does what all good cooking should do: cause you to pause, to notice, to inquire. What is that, and how did they do that?

"Is this tomato soup?" my companion asked, jabbing a spoon into the creamy puree that had been set before me. And the correct answer was: no, not tomato but carrot ($7.50), and not even carrot with ginger or curry but just plain carrot, adorned only with a few fried sage leaves. The soup’s color was difficult to make out in the dim light, so on that basis alone I granted a pardon on the tomato-or-carrot question, but there was also an aromatic fruitiness I would never have associated with plain carrot soup.

Interesting and unexpected ingredients enhance the restaurant’s spell. I’d never heard of spigariello; I would have guessed it was some obscure pasta shape, but in fact (according to the well-schooled server) it’s a toothy green from the broccoli family, composed by chef Chris Kronner’s kitchen into a handsome salad — with crumblings of blue cheese, bread crumbs, and a pepper vinaigrette — that resembled a small holiday wreath.

The menu doesn’t force you toward big plates, and many of the smaller plates are sizable and rich enough to satisfy. A plate of lamb riblets ($11.50), for instance, featured about a half-dozen pieces of achingly tender meat still on the bone, and that was plenty, even allowing for some shameless raiding from across the table. The raider and I did agree that the seasoning palette — of pickled shallots, feta cheese, and mint salsa verde — was missing something. A hint of sweetness was needed, a splash of balsamic vinegar, maybe, or some interesting honey.

Meanwhile, we shared the savory bread pudding ($11.50 with an add-on heap of mesclun), a baked, caramelized delight of some scale that glowed gold in the candlelight and spoke of sustenance on a wintry night. The pudding was fortified with roasted butternut squash, buttermilk, and blue cheese — a sturdy and honest combination. And, for a bit of spice, peeled prawns on a bed of white grits ($10.50) were dressed with poblano pepper sauce, a demure-looking, muddy green puddle that really lit up the room on making contact with a human tongue. At least that was this human’s experience.

For those of us who use a caloric equivalent of zero-sum budgeting — i.e., each indulgence must be offset by a savings — Serpentine is a forgiving place to eat. On the one hand, there are subtle lightenings to be found in un-looked-for places; a nice example of this was a sandwich of roast turkey slices and sauerkraut on rye bread ($9.50) that amounted to a reduced-calorie Reuben and reminded us, yet again, of turkey’s many uses.

And, on the other, there are the desserts, which, like good poems, depend on concentrated effects rather than volume to establish their place in memory. A particularly noteworthy example might be the chocolate-hazelnut tart ($7.50), an almost fudgelike (and not too huge; about the circumference of a baseball) disk trimmed by a fluted pastry crust and dotted with hazelnuts. The tart (served with a scoop of chocolate ice cream from Bi-Rite Creamery) was like an upper-crust relative of a dark chocolate–with–nuts candy bar: a Snickers wrapped in buttery pastry.

The crowd is eclectic. We noticed plenty of young people, but more than a few older folks too, parenty types in the company of adult children. As an adult who once took his parents to the Slow Club only to watch them struggle with the noise, I looked on these entourages with an odd mix of remorse and approval, though more of the latter than the former. Serpentine: same great taste, less deafening.

SERPENTINE

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

Dinner: Tues.–Sat., 6–10 p.m.

2495 Third St., SF

(415) 252-2000

www.serpentinesf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Note: Serpentine observes a no-reservations policy

Nursing the ratchet effect

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If good cooking is about improvisation and flexibility, it’s also about certain rigid rules. One of these is the culinary version of the ratchet effect: once you add certain ingredients, you can’t unadd them. The only path open to you is forward. There can be no retreat. Cayenne pepper is the classic example. Once it goes in, it’s in, and if you put in too much, you’re stuck. Either you issue the necessary warning to the people who will be served your 10-alarm chili, or you empty the pot into the compost bin and start anew, taking special care with any high-heat elements.

Salt is similarly impossible to extract once it’s gone in, and oversalted food is commonplace in the wondrous realm of prepared and packaged items. Saltiness, in fact, is often the preeminent characteristic of ready-to-eat foods plucked from the grocery shelves, just as overweening sugariness is so often the only flavor you can detect in commercially prepared desserts. Recently I gave a friend recovering from minor surgery an attractive jar of tomato-basil soup from Lucini, a purveyor of various Italian delicacies. One of the soup’s virtues was that all you had to do was heat it up in a pot and eat it — a simple enough procedure even for someone not feeling well. A few days later the call came: the soup was good, but too salty. I apologized on behalf of Lucini, noted what a common shortcoming this is, and then proposed an easy remedy. For saltiness, unlike chili heat, can be masked. You can’t get rid of it, but you can cover it up, the same way you might paint over hideous wallpaper.

The tools are simple: sugar and acid, whether from lemon or lime juice or, in a pinch, white vinegar. Sugar and acid are most effective as a duo, since each helps balance oversaltiness from a distinct angle. But you can use just one and still succeed. Sugar is a little gentler, while acid adds a zing that distracts from saltiness at least as much as balancing it. I just add little pinches of sugar to a too-salty dish, stirring them in, until harmony is restored. Then, maybe, for good measure, a discreet dribble of lemon juice. Follow-up question: could judicious salting rescue a too-sweet dessert?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Cassis

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In the Big Book of Troubled Restaurant Spaces, there will have to be a long chapter (with footnotes!) devoted to 2101 Sutter. Since the mid-1990s this unassuming but hardly forbidding site has been home to Nightshade, Laghi, Julia, Winterland, and now Cassis, and I might be forgetting a few. The comings and goings have been many and hasty. Why the address’s occupants should have such a nomadic bent, one after the other, isn’t obvious when considering the physical particulars. 2101 is a perfectly nice setting, a sort of fat reverse L with the entryway, bar, and small dining area on one axis and, on the other (beyond a psychedelic screen that resembles strips of vinyl studded with disks of glass, like a hippie’s belt collection), a larger dining area with an exhibition kitchen. The kitchen had been covered over during the brief Winterland era, the picture-window opening plugged with drywall, but now the view is back, and we notice a pizza oven among the other handsome implements.

Yes, pizza, though Cassis (as the name suggests) is a French restaurant. But the cooking isn’t generic French; the street signage advises us that the restaurant serves "cuisine niçoise," and Nice is a French Riviera town quite near Italy. The city’s most famous contribution to culinary annals is probably the salade niçoise, that likable jumble of tuna, red peppers, quarters of hard-boiled egg, and black olives, but the city is nearly as pizza crazy as Rome, and that’s saying something. To sit at an outdoor table at one of the many cafés along Nice’s pedestrian promenade, drinking chilled rosé and eating thin-crust pizza, could be the ultimate experience niçoise.

Cassis can’t match these plein air atmospherics, of course. For one thing, it’s in San Francisco, which is not an alfresco town, and for another, it sits in a remarkably nondescript building in a neighborhood filled with nondescript buildings. Even if you could sit at a sidewalk table, you almost surely wouldn’t want to, since Sutter and Steiner are not, to say the least, charming pedestrian promenades, while nearby Geary Boulevard is a roaring sluice of automobile traffic. So, inside! The big horseshoe bar is welcoming, the outer dining area relaxed — but you like to see your chefs in action, and that means a table in the main dining area, beyond the hippie-belt screen.

The screen is a Winterland holdover, but subtle changes to the sleek chill of that restaurant’s design have brought some cheering warmth to Cassis. The return of the open kitchen is one; another is the faux brickwork on the support pillars. The rise in ambient temperature has, like global warming, caused a palpable shift in the mammalian population; gone are Winterland’s droves of 30-year-old, gelled-hair, tech billionaires in black mock turtlenecks, and in is an older contingent, rather Pacific Heights–looking. These are people who might not have responded too enthusiastically to Winterland’s sea urchin foams but are perfectly happy with Cassis’s simple but intense lobster bisque (a steal at $6.25), enriched with cognac, or the pissaladière ($7.50), the classic tart of caramelized onion that’s like a solid version of French onion soup.

The master of the kitchen is Stephane Meloni, who opened the restaurant last year with his brother, Jerome. Jerome runs the front of the house. The brothers grew up in Nice, which among its other winning attributes is not far along the coast from Cassis, a picturesque, cliff-hanging village. Hence the restaurant’s name. Those with total recall might remember that there was another Cassis in the city in the mid-1990s, a bistro in Cow Hollow. But there is no other connection between the two places.

I would have dispensed with the coil of fried onion atop the pissaladière. It had been fried to toughness rather than crunchiness, could not be cut, and was generally an inconvenience. Otherwise, the kitchen didn’t miss a step; the cooking is a series of gentle euphonies, polished versions of bistro favorites. (There is a real difference in France between a bistro and a restaurant, and les frères Meloni calling their place a restaurant isn’t a casual choice.)

Duck confit ($22.50) is a rustic staple on many a bistro menu, but here the leg (good crispy skin!) was accompanied by a boneless half breast grilled to a gratifyingly steaklike medium rare. Lending the plate architectural interest and style: a cylinder of gratin potatoes, looking like a pillbox.

Potatoes — fingerlings — got a more natural treatment with the roasted monkfish ($23). They were simply steamed, halved, and thrown into a peppercorn sauce, velvety but with sharp edges. Lying at the edge of the sauce pool was a bundle of pencil-thin asparagus (too early to be local, I’m afraid), baby pattypan squash in green and yellow, and a fine dice of tomato. I would give this combination no better than a C for seasonality but an A for color and texture.

Even the small dishes are memorable. You hardly ever see panisses ($4.25) — the chickpea fries of Provence — anywhere, but Cassis’s are excellent: crisp outside, creamy within, and presented in a geometric stack. And spinach ($5), seared with garlic and shallots, unfurls on a long platter like a length of knotty, kelp-swaddled rope recovered from a long-sunken ship.

Cassis doesn’t seem to have generated the buzz of its most recent predecessors, and maybe this offers us a clue to its prospects. Although it’s a nice destination, it’s not a destination restaurant but a neighborhood one, and the neighbors, having reclaimed the space after a long struggle, seem to be pleased. Everybody likes a new chapter.

CASSIS

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

2101 Sutter, SF

(415) 440-4500

www.restaurantcassis.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

When the lights go off

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While snow chasers — not to be confused with chub chasers — spent much of last week zooming to the mountains in pursuit of virgin powder, the rest of us coped with such storm-related inconveniences as no electricity for hours at a time, from dusk to dawn and beyond. I went to brew myself some consoling tea, only to be reminded, when the burner under the kettle would not catch, that while the stove is a gas stove, its ignition elements are electronic. These small but indispensable bits of gadgetry had gone into involuntary hibernation, as had the ignition element for the furnace (ergo: no heat), along with the modem, the router, and the cordless telephone. I lit some candles, but I couldn’t brew tea with them.

By nightfall, I felt as if I were on the set of a Brother Cadfael mystery. Naturally, we went out to dinner. Alice Waters once described how she cooked an entire meal in a fireplace in some remote but charming inn; I would like to go her one better, by describing how, lacking even a fireplace, I cooked an entire dinner over a Shabbat candelabra (and used a fully lit menorah for searing), but I can’t, because I couldn’t. Instead it was off to a cheery Italian place in the neighborhood, with iffy bread, butter pats wrapped in foil (does any get recycled?), overlarge servings, and a stiffer-than-expected bill. Had the Google riche discovered this once-homey spot? Had their electricity failed too? Why didn’t they just stay in their luxury buses?

Privately, one was galled to find the power on and lights burning brightly just a few blocks away. One then screamed, somewhat less privately, at the utility’s automated complaint line, with its endlessly shifting stories of what had happened and ever-changing predictions of when it would end, and the automated voice’s chirpy implacability in response to one’s frothings. These days the best customer service appears to be robotic customer service that induces despair and causes the unserved to hang up and go away.

The temperature in an unheated San Francisco house in mid-January soon falls into the middle 50s, which — lo! — is a good temperature to serve red wine at. I cracked open a bottle of holiday-basket Concannon cab and bathed my tender larynx. Let there be light. And at last, past my bedtime, there was.

Navio

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When preparing coastal cuisine, it helps for a restaurant to have a coast at hand, to get both the kitchen and the patronage in the mood. Navio, which serves this sort of cooking in the baronial Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, does enjoy the services of a rather scenic bit of coast, with heavy surf beating rhythmically at the edges of a links-style golf course that unfurls itself like a gray-green ribbon beneath the restaurant’s windows.

The Bay Area is often compared with many places around the world — Italy, France, Greece, and Australia, to name a few — but Scotland is not one you hear mentioned too often. Yet during the glide down 280 on a misty and lowering winter afternoon, with the Crystal Springs reservoirs gleaming silver, like a string of lochs nestled at the feet of brooding green highlands, one did find oneself thinking of kilts and bagpipes. And the Half Moon Bay Ritz, which commands its stretch of craggy coast like the clubhouse at St. Andrews, strengthened this pleasant illusion.

The hotel’s long axis runs parallel to the shore, a straightforward design technique that gives an ocean view to the largest number of windows. Navio, accordingly, is long and narrow, like the dining car on some huge railroad train of yesteryear. If you want a table next to a window, you’re likely to get one, and if you’re interested in a little more privacy, one of the cabinetlike booths (complete with drawable curtains) along the inner wall might well suit. There is a third line of tables running along the dining room’s spine, and maybe being seated here is something like being assigned to the middle rows on a wide-cabin airliner — today’s version of steerage, and good-bye to the civility of travel by rail. But Navio’s windows are big enough so that even those consigned to these least-exalted seats have a good view of sea and sky.

We wound up in a far corner next to a window, from which vantage point I could easily observe the golf course. The weather was apparently too blustery for golfers and their speeding carts, and the course was lonely; the only sign of movement was a couple walking their golden retrievers along a path near a fiendishly positioned sand trap.

Coastal cuisine. Thoughts turn to seafood, of course. Fritto misto ($14) is probably not the most imaginative way to prepare marine delights, but it is a crowd-pleaser, and Navio’s kitchen (under the command of chef Aaron Zimmer) manages to get out of the way without tripping over its own feet. We found, in our amply heaped dish, a wealth of nongreasy but nicely battered calamari rings and tentacles, along with carefully peeled shrimp, while on the side sat a stainless-steel ramekin of pungent, fat-cutting garlic aioli, ready for dipping duty. The leftover aioli would have gone beautifully on the warm bread (from Bay Bread), which they will keep bringing to you, so be careful. We stopped the procession after two basketsful.

This restraint was something of a loss, since the soups are also bread friendly. Given the kitchen’s nonradical intentions, it wasn’t surprising to find a clam chowder ($11) on offer, New England–style, milky, with chunks of potato and clam. The chowder was rich and elegant if not quite striking; also pricey, but that is the new Half Moon Bay, a onetime fishermen’s foggy enclave now abloom with luxury housing.

A better soup, I thought, was the carrot-ginger version ($9), a puree the pastel shade of tangerine sherbet and thickened to a velvet smoothness by a bit of potato. Carrot soup sounds like something Gerber might put in little jars for the nursery school set, but in the right hands, like Navio’s, it becomes memorable, a blend of earthiness and (thanks to the ginger) ethereal twinkles.

Beautifully crisped confit of duck leg ($20) might not be coastal, exactly (though why not?), but it certainly is classic, especially when nested in a bed of Puy lentils and featherings of braised frisée. As a recent dabbler in the art of confit, I was impressed not only by the crinkly golden skin but also by the meat, lasciviously moist and well seasoned. (Seasoning is perhaps an underrated aspect of making confit; all the hullabaloo is about the slow cooking in the fat, but how liberally the uncooked flesh is rubbed with salt and spices makes a big difference in how the dish turns out.)

As for wild mushrooms: I see them as being at least as seasonal as spatial, and it rains as much at the coast as anywhere else, perhaps more. Certainly the rainy season is the season for wild mushrooms. They turn up, in a jumble sweaty with butter, as the sauce for a plate of hand-cut linguine ($17), noodles (of flour and egg) whose soft texture and subtle absorbency set them apart from macaroni pasta.

The dessert menu is a trove of comfort foods — cobbler, cake, toffee, crème brûlée — but it might be idle to point this out, since most desserts are comforting in some primal sense. (Either that, or they are ambitious disasters strewn with spun sugar.) An apple cobbler ($10.50), capped by crumbly crust and with slices of fruit still firm enough to evoke their once-fresh state, was like a treat pilfered from Grandmother’s windowsill while still cooling. And for the ultimate in shareable desserts, there is the cookie jar ($10.50), an impressive array of handmade delights including macaroons, chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies, and brown sugar sticks. Only the oatmeal raisin cookies disappointed, and they disappointed only me, who inexplicably just didn’t like them. Had they been made with Irish oatmeal?

NAVIO

Breakfast: daily, 6:30–11 a.m.

Brunch: Sun., seatings at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

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

Dinner: Mon.–Fri. and Sun., 6–9 p.m.

Ritz-Carlton Hotel

1 Miramontes Point Road, Half Moon Bay

(650) 712-7000

www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Properties/HalfMoonBay/Dining/Navio/Default.htm

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Remember the main

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Our end-of-’07 road tour, with a Where have you gone Nancy Pelosi? theme (to be sung to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s "Mrs. Robinson") took me to two states I’d never been to before, Idaho and Montana. In the former, no Larry Craig sightings, but we did keep out of REIs. In the latter, mammoth main courses in restaurants, about which more presently. As for the states-visited list, it is sizable if not mammoth, with Texas and Florida still in the penalty box. There I expect they shall remain. Daniel Walker Howe’s excellent (if mammoth) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford, 904 pages, $35) contains a fine account of the exertions required on our part to wrest Texas from Mexico, and as a reader luxuriating in hindsight, I found myself thinking: this was not wise.

The main course has been taking a hosing lately, and it isn’t hard to see why. If you think these dishes are too big here — and they are — you’re likely to split a seam at what’s being served beyond the Bay Area bubble, out there in our beloved red states. The situation is like a culinary version of grade inflation; side dishes are sizable enough to be appetizers, while appetizers are big enough to be main courses, and main courses are basically indescribable. Immense. At the Lodge at Whitefish Lake one evening we naively opened with a Mediterranean flat bread, a kind of pizza with olives, feta, and tomatoes and a ramekin of hummus on the side, before moving on to soup and salad, and then the main event.

Why, I thought too late, did I order pot roast after all that? The pot roast was excellent, but was it necessary to include two six-ounce slabs of beef, along with mashed potatoes?

Across the table a cooler head prevailed, and a more modest main course was ordered: shrimp diablo on a bed of multicolored orzo. And the cooler head wisely didn’t even eat all of it. For various bad reasons ("Live, live all you can!" Henry James wrote. "It’s a mistake not to!" Plus, you’re on vacation!), I ate all of mine, in addition to nibbling at the orzo, and wondered if I would live.

We can’t blame restaurants for serving (and charging for) 4,000-calorie plates when there are people dopey enough to eat them. Memo to dopey self: Think small. Remember your stomach. Choose life.

Paul Reidinger

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Cafe Andree

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Someone says the word global and — quick! — what’s the first association that occurs to you? Warming? Expect a congratulatory phone call from Al Gore. I like Gore and wish he’d managed to become president, but he won’t be calling me, because I would shout out knives! in response to global. Global knives, beloved of sushi chefs, are those ultrasharp Japanese knives made from ceramic material.

There’s no sushi on the menu at Café Andrée, though executive chef Evan Crandall describes his new menu as global. On the other hand, there is tempura — but I am getting ahead of myself. The restaurant might deal in a world’s worth of food, but its aesthetic tone is low-key Euro; it looks like a bistro that’s somehow been engulfed by a London men’s club. (Actually, it’s part of the Hotel Rex, a Joie de Vivre concern.) An entire wall is given over to a set of framed drawings that amount to a kind of study, while atop a tall wooden breakfront at the rear of a dining room perches a globe. There is a reddish bordello glow to the small space that faintly insinuates we’re not seeing the whole picture; does the breakfront peel away to reveal a secret staircase?

An issue haunting the diner in any hotel restaurant is the suspicion that the surrounding tables are filled with travelers, tourists, and other itinerants, people too tired, busy, or anxious to get out there and see the city and mingle with the locals. These people prize convenience and often have the expense account funds to pay for it, and hotel restaurants are generally obliging on both counts. On the other hand, more than a few hotel restaurants are worthy in their own right; some of San Francisco’s best restaurants are to be found in hotels. The question, then, is whether Café Andrée is a nicely tricked-out expense account joint or a bona fide interesting restaurant or, possibly, both.

The prices, certainly, are worthy of the Union Square neighborhood. Many first courses cost well into the teens, while main courses cluster in the mid- to upper 20s. For those kind of bucks, we expect some serious bang, and lo! Café Andrée delivers it. Crandall’s food is simply splendid: innovative but not sloppy or overwrought, carefully plated, and attentively served. By the time you’ve finished, you really don’t care anymore whether the people at the next table are from Tulsa or Aberdeen or Mint Hill, and from the satisfied looks on their faces, they don’t care where you’re from either.

Let’s start with some bread, slices of sweet baguette, still warm and presented with a tray of butter and salt granules in their respective chambers. I liked the flexibility here, though the butter was too chilled to handle gracefully. It would have been clever to use the bread to mop up some soup or sauce instead of trying to spread it with uncooperative butter, but the soup we’d had our eye on, a Cajun crab chowder, had sold out. Apparently the pent-up demand for crab around here is considerable. So, no sopping.

I could not regard a roasted beet salad ($10) as proper restitution, even if enlivened with a Mediterranean mélange of fennel shavings, toasted pine nuts, and a vinaigrette lumpy with goat cheese, but the beet connoisseur loved it. And halfway around the world we went — the other way — for crab, not in chowder but in a panfried cake ($14), with shrimp: a single entity looking like a gilded Easter egg, riding on a magic carpet of Thai cucumber salad (thin pickled slices, perfumed with Kaffir lime essence), with a sweep of red curry aioli arcing across the plate as if from a painter’s brush.

A fillet of black cod ($25) was coated with a caramelized persimmon glaze, and while I’m not wild about persimmons, I liked the glaze. It flattered the fish the way the right clothes can help somebody skinny look more substantial. The bed of lacinato kale and maitake mushrooms was both visually interesting and tasty, but the most arresting characters on the plate were the pair of butternut squash tempura, tabs of orange flesh battered and flash-fried. "They’re sweet!" cried my tablemate, a noted dessert maven, but they weren’t that sweet and also retained a savory richness.

And speaking of savory richness: we come now to the mushroom ravioli ($22), the free-form kind, like a trio of round sandwiches built with disks of spinach pasta and filled with a dice of sautéed wild mushrooms lifted to the sublime by the earthy breath of black truffles and an impressive, buttery wash of what the menu card calls "mushroom consommé." Here at last we had a liquid worthy of being sopped up with the fine bread, but the fine bread was long gone by then.

Bread pudding is an exercise in both frugality and expansiveness, so why not make one tres leches–style ($8), with an angel food–like cake soaked in various forms of milk? For additional interest, sauce it with dulce de leche (sugar caramelized in milk) and toss a few tapioca pearls in there. The result was sweet but not cloying, substantial but not heavy, and wet but not soggy. Our knives went right through it, and they weren’t even Globals. *

CAFÉ ANDRÉE

Breakfast: Mon.–Fri., 7–10:30 a.m. Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 7:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF

(415) 433-4434

www.thehotelrex.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Pleasant noise

Wheelchair accessible

Eat the faith

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Michael Pollan’s just-published book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin Press, $21.95 cloth), has a placental look: its monumental predecessor, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006), appeared not even two years ago, and at about 200 pages the new volume is slight. But don’t be deceived: Defense isn’t an afterthought. It makes up in passionate intensity what it lacks in heft, and, page for page, it contains more intellectual and moral nutrition than practically any other book I’m aware of.

If Omnivore was a large conceit, Defense is a potent essay whose subject is, finally, the ways in which food science has misled us into various foolish wars: against fat, against carbs, and on behalf of supplements, to name just a few. With each battle, we eaters of the so-called Western diet — that scientifically produced and not very healthy amalgam of refined flour and sugar, industrially manipulated fats, and grudging sprinkles of monocultural vegetables, fruits, and meats — drift further away from our evolutionary moorings and must depend on yet more science (this time medical) to help right the balance. Great fortunes have already been made in the selling of lousy food to a captive and credulous population that then must pay out another fortune in health care bills. Nice work if you can get it.

Defense certainly rends the veil of infallibility in which contemporary science tends to cloak itself, and in doing so it raises the question of what we mean by "science." The word’s pop meaning is clear enough and involves microscopes, centrifuges, supercomputers, and a presidium of authorities in white lab coats. But the word’s Latin root means "to know," and Defense convincingly establishes that knowledge is not the exclusive purview of the lab-coat people. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio," Hamlet instructs us, and they won’t all surrender their secrets to Horatio’s fancy gadgetry. We put ourselves at risk, in fact, when under the rubric of science we set aside millennia of human discoveries and understandings of the world — when we stop eating what we’ve long eaten, for instance, and open a bag of manufactured quasi food, like Doritos.

Science should be about skepticism, not faith, and perhaps in laboratories it still is. But these days, when it enters the public domain it morphs into something else — something suspiciously like dogma.

Paul Reidinger

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1300 on Fillmore

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Ordinarily one would be distressed, though these days hardly surprised, by the news that a farmers market in the midst of the city was being displaced by a brand-new building full of luxury condos, with a fancy restaurant on the ground floor. Although farmers markets, like coyotes, have been modestly flourishing in the city of late, they are still a delicate species whose natural habitat — often parking lots — invites predation by developers. Then there is the horror of contemporary architecture, which reflects, simultaneously, our fetish for the industrial and our indifference to the touch of the human hand, the small but artful detail that gives warmth and life to big buildings with expansive spaces. Without that touch, too many of our just-raised edifices are nothing more than triumphal and simplistic tombs made of concrete, steel, and glass.

The Fillmore farmers market began in the spring of 2003, in a parking lot at the corner of Fillmore and Eddy, and was of particular value not least because it brought high-quality fresh produce at reasonable prices to one of the city’s less golden neighborhoods. One chilly evening a few weeks ago, I found myself at that corner and was completely disoriented; a huge building had sprung up in the parking lot, like a giant mushroom after an autumn rain, and the few blocks of Fillmore below Geary seemed more than ever like one of Manhattan’s canyons, with the valets at Yoshi’s smiling and motioning to passersby like those guys who try to lure people into girlie shows in North Beach.

We weren’t on our way to Yoshi’s, as it happened, but to 1300 on Fillmore, a quietly glamorous new restaurant that brings a touch of Mecca SF–like magic to a historic, jazz-inflected neighborhood. (Meantime, to end the suspense, if any: the farmers market, though displaced, survives nearby, at Steiner and O’Farrell.) Although the restaurant keeps a poker face to the street — just a succession of smoked-glass panels, like a display of the world’s biggest sunglasses — its L-shaped interior is both spacious and clubby. A wealth of wood glows with warmth under the halogen spot lamps, while all of those windows are hung with tall, gauzy draperies, ready to billow in a breeze that will never blow through.

If we were somewhere in the South, the absence of a breeze would grow oppressive at a point well before high summer, and we would stomp our feet and demand mint juleps or iced tea. But we’re here, in our blue state and ice blue city, so we must make do with the Southern touches chef and owner David Lawrence brings to his sophisticated menu, beginning with the triangles of corn bread that quickly appear at the table, ready to be spread with butter or, for those with a bit of derring-do, pepper jelly, or best of all, with both.

The smaller courses range from homey to urbane. An example of the first is a plate of hush puppies ($13), half a dozen peeled shrimp dipped in a peppery batter, deep-fried, and presented in a crock with a side pot of ancho chile rémoulade. The cosmopolite, tempted by but wary of deep-frying, might let his companion order this dish, and maybe the fat fries too ($6), with homemade ketchup, for overkill, while choosing for himself the oyster bisque ($9) — classy, but tasting at least as much of cream as of oysters — or the sautéed wild mushrooms ($9) seated on a bed of white polenta. These last two dishes were brought to us slightly underseasoned, but a handsome little tray of salt and ground pepper was already on the table, which made it easy for us to take corrective action and implied we were meant to.

Undersalting was a more serious issue with the maple-glazed beef short rib ($28), a thick disk of meat with a bit of bone sticking out of the middle. It looked like a wheel that had flown off a Weber kettle. We could taste the maple on the surface of the meat, which was fork tender and moist, but once we penetrated to the interior of the great disk, we found ourselves in dim lighting indeed. The beef’s enveloping sidekicks — fried onion rings on top, mashed potatoes underneath — were good but peripheral in every sense.

Better was arctic char ($25), a salmonlike fish presented as a breaded and crisped fillet, almost perfectly square, nested atop a tasty hash of roasted brussels sprouts, fingerling potatoes, bits of lobster, and balsamic gastrique. I didn’t detect much Southern influence, but the flavors and textures were beautifully integrated and the portion size was ideal, especially with the wheel of beef looming across the table.

If the savory courses seem as much Pacific as Gulf Coast, the dessert menu speaks with an unmistakable drawl. There are first-rate beignets ($8), three doughnut torpedoes lightly dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar and ready for dunking into either warm chocolate sauce or coffee foam, which had a root-beerish fizz along with a hint of chicory: New Orleans coffee, we guessed. A gingerbread napoleon ($8), meanwhile, looked "like the de Young Museum," according to a tablemate with whom I’d been pleasurably commiserating about the de Young Museum. At least the napoleon — an elaborate modernist construct of wafers, gingerbread pudding, whipped cream, and a square of apple-caramel jelly — was edible, as opposed to bulletproof.

Service: attentive if slightly erratic (some dishes to the wrong people). These are usually teething troubles, and the best thing about teething troubles is that you outgrow them to have a long run, which you’re pretty sure you will. You’re jazzed. *

1300 ON FILLMORE

Daily, 5–11 p.m.

1300 Fillmore, SF

(415) 771-7100

www.1300fillmore.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Well-modulated noise

Wheelchair accessible

Why I am not a foodie

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As the year dwindles and we start to see our breath in the evening cold, we don our scarves and indulge in little sentimentalities and considerable amounts of alcohol. Also, it’s time to clean out the e-mail box. Now or never. I find a note, half buried in a drift of messages slowly composting into cybermulch, announcing a new foodie Web site, www.foodiebytes.com, which is there to assist you when you crave a particular dish and need to locate a restaurant that serves it. You just type in the name of the dish, and the Web site quickly returns a list of nearby places where you can find it and at what price. A Google Maps or MapQuest feature seems inevitable.

Even sheathed in a pun — an obvious one at that — the word foodie provokes a shiver, and I am a wearer of scarves. Some of my best friends are, or I suspect them of being, foodies; it is important to distinguish between the self-confessed types and the latents and cryptos. We are able to converse about food, these foodies and I, often to our mutual pleasure and benefit, but I am not one of them, and they know it.

Through some quirk of temperament, I am not able to go ice-skating over the smooth surfaces of foodie Web sites that cater to people’s cravings. It is my fate instead, as a wonderer and a ponderer, to find myself needing to know the history of a particular dish or technique. And how did it get here? And can I do it, or something like it, at home? All of this is part of my experience of buying, cooking, and eating food.

Food separated from the past, from the ligaments and other connective tissues of culture and custom — food flattened to one dimension — loses much of its power to nourish our souls, our whole human selves, in much the same way that nutrients packed into pills don’t do us the same kind of good as nutrients eaten as part of the foods in which they naturally occur.

We live in a culture that exalts monomania, pops pills for every ailment, and tirelessly resists the past, and in such a context a foodie obsession (got a craving? get a fix!) is hardly unusual. But like most other forms of monomania, it isn’t necessarily all that interesting either.

Nickie’s

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Cooking styles have their seasons, just as nature does, and lately there has been a delicate springtime for restaurants serving Louisiana-style food. By this I mean Cajun and creole, a pair of slippery terms that are almost always mentioned together but, despite an implication of fungibility, don’t mean quite the same thing. Cajuns were French speakers who in the 18th century left northeastern Canada and drifted down the Mississippi Valley to the bayou country south and west of New Orleans, where they established a rural and isolated culture that persists to this day. Creoles, by contrast, were citified types who traced their origins directly to Europe; New Orleans was their capital and remains their symbol.

These distinctions, fiercely policed by the interested parties, carry a diminished and blurred charge here in our polyglot land of blurred distinctions. If you see crawfish étouffée (a classic Cajun dish) on a menu, you’re likely to see jambalaya and gumbo too, with beignets (the sophisticated little holeless doughnuts) for dessert. And where would you be looking at such menus? Possibly at such old-timers as Cajun Pacific or the Elite Café, or at such newcomers as Farmerbrown and Brenda’s, whose openings have helped fill the void left by the departures some years ago of Jessie’s (on Folsom Street) and Alcatraces (on 24th Street).

Amid all of these comings and goings and endurings, the question of convincingness has never quite dissipated. A friend with Cajun roots scoffs at the Bay Area’s Louisiana-style restaurants, but it’s likely he hasn’t yet been to Nickie’s, which serves a jambalaya (among other Cajun-tilting treats) that can fairly be described as incendiary, in not the likeliest setting: a remade pub with sports-bar overtones on one of the sketchier blocks of lower Haight Street.

Haight east of Divisadero these days bears some resemblance to the Valencia Street of 15 years ago. The sense of stratification is vertiginous; at the corner of Steiner stands RNM, a clubby restaurant of voluptuous urbanity, but take a few steps east and you are passing badly lit Laundromats, a "low cost" butcher shop, and the occasional pedestrian mumbling soliloquies to a shopping cart in the middle of the street. Then you see a large N glowing green in the night, and you step inside and order a Stella Artois on tap — Nickie’s offers 13 varieties of draft beer, plus pear cider, beer in bottles, and mixed drinks and wine — while scanning several flat-panel windows into the wide world of sports. And you are hungry.

There is no connection I know of between sports bars and Cajun-creole food, but a pub is a pub and should have at least some pub food, sports screens or no, and Nickie’s does. If fish-and-chips is the staple dish of English pubs, then the burger has to be the staple of ours. Nickie’s version ($11) is a triple threat: a troika of little burgers on little egg-washed buns, each with a different topping. The avocado and cheddar edition didn’t quite work for me (clash of creamy yet assertive personalities), but Swiss cheese went well enough with mushroom, and the blue cheese–and–bacon combination was intense.

As for the accompanying fries: they were good with ketchup but even better dipped into the spicy aioli left over from our rapid devouring of the shrimp cakes ($8), lightly crisped like any good fritter and insinuatingly lumpy with crustacean meat. You can get coleslaw instead of fries, but really, who has a burger — let alone three burgers — with slaw instead of fries? And what would you do then with your leftover aioli? Stick your finger in it? Who, me?

We’d ordered mac and cheese ($6.50) as a sort of shareable starter, and it might have held its own if it had appeared as the opening act, ahead of the jambalaya. Instead it turned up in the same armful of plates as that formidable dish and ended up being overwhelmed by it. (Service is attentive enough, if not exactly polished.) But there was no dishonor here, since the jambalaya ($10) left us gasping with pleasure. The dish was studded with peeled shrimp and knuckles of seriously spicy andouille sausage, and the low volcano of rice, cooked with tomatoes and green bell peppers, had been infused with enough cayenne to be spicy-hot in its own right.

In keeping with the complex, squabbling-siblings narrative of Cajun and creole, there are Cajun and creole interpretations of jambalaya. The latter (and perhaps the original) kind includes tomatoes and is accordingly reddish, while the former is tomatoless and acquires its brown color from the initial searing of meat in the pan. Either way, jambalaya is a New World descendant of paella and, like its close relation gumbo (a child of bouillabaisse), reflects the complex play of influences — French, Spanish, Caribbean, African — that produced the well-seasoned cultural stew of New Orleans and South Louisiana.

I would add Irish to that list if there were (but there isn’t) any historical warrant for doing so, since Nickie’s feels somehow Irish, and to be served excellent Cajun and creole food, along with a foamy glass of draft Guinness, by a server with an Irish accent in a pub on Haight Street in San Francisco is one of life’s delightful little paradoxes. Paradox is the spice of life — let’s get that into our book of quotations, truisms, aphorisms for all occasions, and words to live by. *

NICKIE’S

Mon.–Fri., 4 p.m.–2 a.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon–2 a.m.

466 Haight, SF

(415) 255-0300

www.nickies.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Feeding the food brainiac

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Amid the agonies and anxieties of last-minute holiday shopping can be found at least one sure stocking stuffer, provided your list includes a food brainiac (with a Christmas stocking). You’ll know one when you meet one; a large clue will be a passionate interest in not merely recipes and restaurants but also the cultural story they help tell.

And what is that sure thing, in a world where many a gift goes astray like a bad JDAM? A book, of course, since the reports of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated and the food brainiac loves books. One of the better food brainiac–friendly books available is Lilia Zaouali’s Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World (University of California Press, $24.95), whose subtitle, A Concise History with 174 Recipes, suggests that we aren’t talking about a volume with a companion Saturday-morning, how-to-cook-it series on public television.

No, Zaouali’s book dwells more on the history than the recipes, which are interesting though possibly too vague to be of much use in the contemporary, anal-retentive kitchen. Even a reasonably competent home cook is likely to be uneasy about such instructions as "put some red meat cut into small pieces in a pot with some water. When it is cooked, strain it and brown it in fat" (from a recipe for rutabiyya, or meat with dates).

But even if your brainiac never boils a dollop of honey in a splash of vinegar (medieval Islamic cooking being rich in sweet-sour effects), pleasurable sustenance can be had from the book’s many fascinating historical nuggets: the migratory route of couscous from North Africa through Sicily into Tuscany, for instance, or the Moorish roots (culinary and linguistic) of the dish the Spanish call escabeche, or the religious importance to Muslims of eating meat (other than pork) with most meals. As Zaouali puts it, "One may wonder whether a vegetarian could be admitted to the community of believers."

Of transcendent interest is not the bequest of medieval Islamic cooks to their modern heirs in both the Middle East and Europe but their own debt to the Romans, many of whose ingredients and flavor patterns they adopted and continued. The Roman gastronome Apicius, who lived at the time of Christ, is especially relevant here. For details, consult your stocking.

Clay Oven

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Two cheers, then, for Google, which recently rerouted its Noe Valley shuttle-bus lines so as to cause less air pollution and other distress in the heart of a neighborhood that has become, in effect, Googleberry RFD, the nesting habitat for those countless Google employees who spend their working days in the suburban wilds of the Peninsula. The child is father to the man, and the city is now the suburb, a dangling appendage to industry but no longer itself industrial. Just recreational.

During the last dot-com boom, in the late 1990s, a rise in both quality and quantity was noted in Bay Area restaurants serving Indian food. Software engineers and other tech types of Indian heritage were drawn here for work, and they expected — and got — an improvement in Indian restaurants, which previously were scarce and abysmal. The renaissance, or naissance, first took hold in the South Bay, whose environs were and are dotted with gigantic tech installations (including Google’s, in Mountain View), but now that everyone has moved to the city, enabled by shuttle buses with wi-fi and probably whirlpools, the city is getting better Indian restaurants too. Two more cheers.

Before the recent opening of Clay Oven, Noe Valley had no Indian restaurants at all, not a one, despite the neighborhood’s profound connection to Silicon Valley. An Indian restaurant in Noe Valley was arguably overdue — and not just because of software engineers and other Googloids either, but also because many of the rest of us marginal-Luddite types happen to like Indian food and its hit parade of spices. Of course, Dosa and Aslam’s Rasoi, each within a few steps of Valencia and 22nd streets, aren’t exactly light-years from Noe Valley, but there is something cozier about Clay Oven’s setting on outer Church, amid a quieter but flourishing restaurant row and Muni’s J trains rumbling past at odd intervals: a real convenience for those lucky enough to catch one.

If you believe addresses are portents, then you might think Clay Oven’s prospects are no better than mixed. The space was occupied most recently by a California-style bistro that never quite caught on, and before that by a Chinese restaurant that never quite caught on, and before that by a Burmese-inflected spot whose owners kept an old sofa and a dead television at the back of the dingy dining room. The Burmese food was pretty good, but eating there was like having dinner in a U-Store warehouse.

All of that dimness and debris has been cleared away. The old TV and sofa are long gone, and the kitchen has been separated from the stylishly low-key dining room by a new wall. Even the building’s faded facade has been remade; it’s now clad in red granite. If you didn’t know what used to be here, you would never guess.

The food is what many of us would probably consider standard-issue in Indian restaurants these days, but it’s carefully prepared and intensely flavorful. (Clay Oven, not coincidentally, has a number of older siblings around the city, including India Clay Oven in the Richmond, as well as a namesake Clay Oven in San Mateo.) The only real disappointments for me were the pappadum ($1), the crinkly lentil wafers, which were cold and therefore a little flat, and the palak pakora ($3.50), fritters of spinach in a batter of chickpea flour — also cold, and apparently fried (well ahead of time) in rancid oil.

Other than that: satisfaction. How about tandoori chicken, which is so cliché that it transcends cliché? You would expect a place called Clay Oven to have a pretty good version, since a tandoor is a clay oven, and Clay Oven’s version ($9.95 for a half bird) is exemplary, very tender and juicy, with the requisite reddish pink color (from the seasoned yogurt marinade), presented on a sizzling iron platter with slivers of onion and quartered lemons.

But we were pleased too to find tandoori chicken meat turning up in a dish called chicken makhai ($10.95): chunks of boneless flesh swimming in a voluptuous, spicy sauce very similar to that of chicken tikka masala. The restaurant offers this latter preparation too ($11.95), the only difference being … well, we couldn’t really detect any difference. If you’re concerned about the heat factor, incidentally, you needn’t worry, since the kitchen will tune the food’s fieriness to your specification.

Vegetarian dishes, as is typical at South Asian restaurants, are more than sufficient if you are a shunner of flesh. Saag paneer ($8.95) struck us as unusually and agreeably creamy, with a heavy allotment of white cheese, while chana masala ($7.95) — chickpeas cooked in a spicy gravy — was rich in said gravy, which helped allay any sense of dryness. (Chickpeas can be chalky.) Rice, of course, is offered to help capture the sauces of all of these dishes, but the breads work just as nicely, from a simple, well-blistered naan ($1.95) to a whole-wheat chapati ($1.50) glistening with oil.

Some of the humblest of dishes were among the most memorable. A cucumber salad ($2.75) turned out not to be a yogurty raita (though raita is available) but instead a heap of peeled coins sprinkled with salt and curry powder. And mulligatawny soup ($3.50), a hearty combination of shredded chicken and rice, was Soup Nazi–worthy, though served in a dainty little bowl. Ordinarily I might have hoped for a slightly bigger serving, but the world is not ordinary in the wake of Thanksgiving. So: two cheers yet again for little bowls of soup, and a dessert menu (of such usual suspects as rice pudding and saffron ice cream) from which one can abstain with a clear conscience. *

CLAY OVEN

Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Dinner: daily, 4–10 p.m.

1689 Church, SF

(415) 826-2400

www.indiaclayoven.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The confit files

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The holiday season is to the home cook what a howling blizzard is to the captain of a fully loaded 747 approaching O’Hare Airport. It’s showtime; it’s the time you earn your keep. While pilots are dealing with bad weather, home cooks are grappling with turkey — in particular, how to make it appealing, or at least presentable. The key factors here, moistness and flavor, are interrelated, since much of the flavor in a bird is in its juices. Turkeys, despite their monstrous bioengineered breasts, are famously lean, and did I mention it isn’t just a blizzard, it’s 30 below with gusty winds, and the landing gear is stuck?

For the past few years I’ve flirted with the idea that turkey might respond to the confit treatment: slow, gentle cooking while immersed in fat. The usual confit subject is duck, which is actually a self-sustaining fat ecosystem: enough fat can be rendered from a duck to cook its meat in. Turkey, on the other hand, requires a subsidy, either duck fat reserved from earlier confit operations, or reserved duck fat with lard.

Since I don’t keep lard in the house and didn’t feel like buying and butchering a whole turkey for an experiment, I began small, with a single turkey tenderloin, the pound or so of boneless flesh that stands in so nicely for pork in so many roles. I seasoned the tenderloin, let it stand in the fridge overnight, rinsed it off, immersed it in duck fat in a small heavy pan, brought it to a simmer on the stovetop, and then put it into a 200-degree oven for about three hours.

Although I had no particular expectations about the result, the result was nonetheless startling. The meat seemed to have contracted in the fat — Seinfeld–ian shrinkage — and when I cut the tenderloin open, it had become dense, almost like chilled fudge. At the bottom of the pan lay a shallow layer of extruded juice, whose departure no doubt had contributed to the meat’s collapse. I sliced the tenderloin into pâtélike slices and served the heated juice (captured with a gravy separator) over the top as a salvage-operation sauce, but all of this fuss only partly concealed the unusual deadness of the meat.

Next time (if there is a next time): meat on the bone will have to be involved. That’s the brainstorm of the moment.

Paul Reidinger

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Le P’tit Laurent

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Although for years I have believed and maintained that you could never get good cassoulet in a restaurant, I find that I must now recant. You can get good cassoulet in at least one restaurant in this town, and that restaurant is Le P’tit Laurent, which opened a few months ago at the corner of Chenery and Diamond, in the heart of Glen Park’s utterly transformed commercial village.

The restaurant bears the name of its owner, Laurent Legendre, who was one of the partners in Clémentine, a late-’90s presence in the Inner Richmond. I never quite warmed to Clémentine, whose rather formal and correct French cooking seemed a little crimped after the exuberant whimsy of Alain Rondelli, previous holder of the Clement Street space. But no such ghost haunts Le P’tit Laurent, whose predecessor was a blues club named Red Rock. The new bistro already feels as if it’s been there since time out of mind; it has that nicely worn-in Parisian look, from the clutter of liquor bottles (and a miniature Eiffel Tower) behind the mirrored bar to the little, distinctively French signs posted all over the place, including one for cave at the mouth of the wine closet. There is also a pressed-tin ceiling and a service ethic that is French in the best sense: friendly, yes, but knowledgeable and crisp first.

Best of all is the street scene that continuously unfolds beyond the many windows. One of the drawbacks of the French bistro in America is that America isn’t France, and our street scenes don’t look French. Glen Park would never be mistaken for the Marais, even at night, but one evening, amid early darkness and the descending scent of winter, I thought I caught a whiff of the 11th arrondissement: blurred streetlamps, a metro station at the corner, pedestrians hurrying home from work up quiet side streets, though not carrying baguettes under their arms.

Of course, I was eating an excellent cassoulet at the time, and this might have affected my perception. The only flaw in Le P’tit Laurent’s cassoulet ($19) is that it can’t be ordered as part of the three-course, $19.95 prix fixe menu (available Monday to Thursday, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.). Otherwise, the dish is flawless: an earthenware crock of white beans in a sauce thickened by a long, slow simmer with duck-leg confit, chunks of pork, and oblong coins of Toulouse sausage.

The cassoulet is a meal in itself and then some, so our first course — steamed mussels in a creamy white-wine sauce ($9), with pale gold frites ($2.50 extra) — was overkill in the form of an overture. (Prekill?) The broth was excellent if conventional, and it seemed to gather a bit of extra magic when sopped up with the fries or (when they ran out, because of course they did) chunks of baguette. And it probably made more sense as a prelude to a lighter main course, such as sautéed sea bass ($16) in a Grenobloise sauce — a rather forceful concoction of melted butter spiked with herbs and capers (and possibly a dab of mustard, I thought).

One of the kitchen’s themes, in fact, seems to involve giving hearty treatments to seafood. On an earlier visit we found several chunks of monkfish ($17.95) sprawled on a bed of shredded cabbage and bacon (a combination reminiscent of the Alsatian dish choucroute). On that same visit we liked suprême de poulet ($14.95), a roasted leg and thigh of chicken on a bed of couscous and garlic confit, with a cheery sauce of citrus reduction and ginger, but were less enthusiastic about the vegetarian plate ($14.95), a pair of large, free-form ravioli stuffed with red beet slices and bathed in too much of a decent but unremarkable mushroom sauce. If you needed proof that the traditional French gastronomic ethic is unenthusiastic about vegetarianism, I give you exhibit A.

If we felt we’d drifted into an unstated conflict, we were soon mollified by dessert: to wit, profiteroles ($5.95), in fact the best profiteroles in recent memory. There was nothing too out of the ordinary about the flavors; the pastry balls were stuffed with vanilla ice cream and sauced with chocolate and caramel. But the pastry! Sublimely flaky. Profiteroles are too often tough and rubbery, like old racquetballs, but Le P’tit Laurent’s were yieldingly delicate, bits of buttery finery that surrendered themselves and were soon gone but not forgotten. They were so not forgotten, in fact, that we ordered them a second time a few evenings later, and while I was tempted to cap things off with a snifter of Armagnac, I felt no need in the end. (To paraphrase the endlessly paraphrasable Homer Simpson: my gastronomic rapacity did know satiety.)

As for Glen Park — well, these days I hardly know ye. When Chenery Park opened just a few doors up in 2000, it was a lonely outpost of upscaleness in a Sleepy Hollow sort of urban enclave that seemed little changed since the 1950s. But these first years of the new millennium have brought all sorts of newness, from the cool pizza place across the street (Gialina) to the gorgeous Canyon Market (viewable through Le P’tit Laurent’s windows as part of the faux–11th arrondissement display) to, finally, a retro-chic Parisian bistro that serves quite good food at reasonable prices and is, accordingly, packing them in. The case for cassoulet has been made.

LE P’TIT LAURENT

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–2 p.m. Dinner: daily, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

699 Chenery, SF

(415) 334-3235

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

We heart the cranberry tart

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People might grumble about holiday turkey, but even the most disenchanted grumbler will usually choke down a bite or two, just for appearances. Seldom is the same courtesy extended to the cranberry, which often reaches the table as a pretty red relish no one really wants. The cranberry is the orphan of holiday cooking and — a true measure of its lowly state — a punch line for sitcom jokes, from The Simpsons to Frasier.

To say all the neglect, abuse, and humor amount to an injustice is a considerable understatement. The cranberry is one of nature’s superfoods, for one thing, richer in antioxidants than just about everything else and, as the Indians understood, endowed with medicinal properties. (Cranberries were used to treat urinary-tract infections.)

But as food marketers have long known, "good for you" isn’t the sexiest pitch. Better to flash a little thigh — but does the cranberry have any thigh to flash? The answer is yes! Forget about the wretched relish and turn your holiday cranberries into a lovely dessert tart. (By doing this you will also rid the holiday world of at least one pumpkin pie, another deathless perennial no one seems to like.)

If you are truly ambitious, you can make a cranberry version of linzer torte using the recipe in Emily Luchetti’s Classic Stars Desserts (Chronicle, 2007). I made a rustic galette but did start with a version of her filling: basically a 12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries, rinsed, then simmered in a heavy saucepan with a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of water, and the zest of one orange until jamminess was achieved.

Pastry: a cup of all-purpose flour into the food processor, followed by six tablespoons of sweet butter (in chunks) and a pinch of salt. When it looks like cornmeal, dribble in ice water (machine still running) until a ball forms. Chill briefly, then shape into a 10-inch disk. Lay the disk on parchment paper on a baking tray. In the middle of the disk, spread three tablespoons each of sugar and flour. Spread about half of your jam over this, add five more tablespoons of sugar, and fold up the edges into a rough circle. Brush the pastry with water, sprinkle with a tablespoon of sugar, and bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes. Cool, and give thanks.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

House of Prime Rib

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Beef: it’s what’s for dinner at House of Prime Rib, and it’s pretty much all that’s for dinner. There is a lonely listing for a fish of the day in a far corner of the menu; you must ask about the details. But really, we have no cause to complain, since if ever a restaurant honored the WYSIWYG principle, that restaurant would be House of Prime Rib. If you expect braised halibut cheeks or a timale of roasted winter vegetables to be served to you at a restaurant whose very name proclaims meat, you are inattentive to some of life’s most basic clues, and we must fear for you.

HPR is probably the least grand of the city’s high-profile beef emporiums. Nearby Harris’ has a spare, high-ceilings-in-1948 elegance, while nearby (the other way) Ruth’s Chris is a haven of plush intimacy, as if it were part of a Neiman-Marcus store. Morton’s I haven’t been to, but the steak aficionado assured me that it costs about twice as much as HPR for an experience that isn’t drastically different.

The experience I was hoping to avoid was one of those immiserating episodes familiar to any holiday diner: cholesterol overload and soaring glycemic indexes. Beef is rich, and prime rib (marbled from feeding corn to the cattle) is the richest kind of beef you can have — and huge slabs of it, etcetera. Add to this the usual buttery accompaniments, and you soon picture your heavily intubated self departing on a gurney, pausing for a moment at the entryway while the valet pulls your ambulance around.

A departure by gurney might not attract all that much attention at HPR, since plying the dining room are carts that look like the sarcophagi of ancient Egyptian child-kings. Within these huge steel footballs are sides of roasted beef, and when the bell tolls for thee and thine, the cart rolls to your table and a crew starts slicing, putf8g, and distributing. The prudent will have settled on the city cut ($32.95, including all the fixin’s), a single slice of boneless meat, nicely pink and juicy, big but not massive. The more ambitious might go for the weightier House of Prime Rib cut ($34.95, and you can get it on the bone if you prefer) or the English cut ($34.95), a fan of scaloppinelike thin slices. Let us not speak of the Henry VIII cut ($37.65), other than to note that it bears the name of that fellow who had the heads chopped off of some of his more unsatisfactory wives.

By the time the meat juggernaut reaches you, you will have seen the better part of the dinner’s nonmeat componentry. There will have been a round loaf or two of warm, fragrant sourdough bread, presented with a serrated knife, like an ax in a tree stump, and a tub of good butter; there will have been the "salad bowl," a surprisingly tasty concert of iceberg lettuce, watercress, and slivers of roasted beet soaking luxuriously in French dressing.

The beef’s sidekicks include choice of potato (mashed or baked), choice of creamed vegetable (spinach or corn), a chunk of Yorkshire pudding (basically a popover or savory pastry), and an array of horseradishes in ramekins. These range from the straight stuff, which soon finds its fiery way up your nose, to leash-broken versions cut with mayonnaise or sour cream. The horseradishes are flavorful enough — and even, in one case, thrilling — but the beef does not need them. If ever you need reminding, in fact, why good beef is the chef’s best friend, an elegant food that barely needs salt and pepper and scarcely any cooking, then a visit to HPR is in order.

And if you happen to be in the company of small children who don’t like vegetables, then HPR’s vegetables will appeal. The mashed potatoes are buttery, while the baked potato is topped by a flourish of sour cream. The spinach and corn are as creamy as their names suggest. We did indeed see a number of tables featuring small children, none of whom seemed to be squalling or otherwise rejecting the food being set before them. They were under the spell of fat.

Is HPR a kiddie restaurant, then? No, though kiddies are welcome; so too are tourists from foreign lands (or people we took to be tourists, on data that included their slow, accented English and strange shoes), family groups of various ethnicities, and — that increasingly rare bird here — plain, middle-aged, middle-American folk, people for whom a nice dinner must include meat and potatoes in some recognizable form, in a handsome but not overwrought setting with the warmth of Grandmama’s dining room.

House of Prime Rib is, in this sense, one of the dwindling number of outposts of this city’s dwindling middle class. Youth and wealth — and our peculiar, much-celebrated amalgam of the two — congregate elsewhere. Beef, meanwhile, doesn’t command the audience of yesteryear; the food cognoscenti tend toward fish (for reasons of health and vanity) and often away from flesh altogether. Dinner, under the new regime, no longer must include a big slab of red meat and a blob of potatoes. In fact, it probably shouldn’t.

Still, we all have our cravings for those very foods from time to time, and for an old-time atmosphere to enjoy them in. House of Prime Rib’s pleasures might be atavistic, but they are real enough, even a form of time travel, back to an era when the youthful rich weren’t quite so much with us. 2

HOUSE OF PRIME RIB

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri., 5–10 p.m.; Sat., 4:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 4–10 p.m.

1906 Van Ness, SF

(415) 885-4605

houseofprimerib.ypguides.net

AE/MC/V

Full bar

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Marginalia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Reading a work of fiction is a little like getting into someone else’s car for a trip that someone else has planned without consulting you: it’s an act of trust. The car pulls up and you climb in. You hope that the headlights and brakes are in working order and that there is no liquor on the driver’s breath. You assume that the driver knows the route, even if you don’t; you assume the destination is a worthy one, even if you’ve never heard of it. Discreetly you fasten your seat belt. The car pulls away from the curb, perhaps smoothly, perhaps amid squeals of burning rubber.

You might soon find yourself bouncing along unpaved rural roads or roaring through hairpin curves in the mountains, wishing you’d remembered your Dramamine. Snow, rain, fog, sleet, sunshine, boring vistas of cornfields, stunning views from turnouts, all are possible — and eventually you’re there, wherever it was you were meant to be taken. You didn’t get lost, the car didn’t crash, no one was killed or maimed, the journey was memorable if not always agreeable, and this is what we call literature. If you don’t like the destination, you make a silent note to yourself and, thumb extended, wait for another car to come along.

In Philip Roth’s new novel, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 292 pages, $26), there is a good deal of perseveration about the Library of America, our pantheon of literary immortals — of greatness, that great American obsession. Roth, notably, has already been admitted to this black-jacket collection, and his alter ego in the novel, the now-aged Nathan Zuckerman, a bundle of genitourinary woes and other peeves of the sort that afflict the solitary when they find themselves tossed into the simmering kettle of metropolitan life, is keen to see his late mentor, E.I. Lonoff, similarly enshrined. But Zuckerman isn’t the only character interested in Lonoff’s legacy; there’s also Richard Kliman, a 28-year-old literary ambitionist. Kliman wants to write Lonoff’s life and believes he’s caught an exciting whiff of incest in the dead writer’s story.

Zuckerman and Kliman, needless to say, aren’t fated to be chummy, though they do meet in an impressive shower of word sparks. Google tells us that Lonoff is probably a semiportrait of Bernard Malamud, author of The Natural and a friend of Roth’s, but the particulars of Lonoff’s fictive life — a house deep in the Berkshires, a flitting shadow of sexual transgression — struck me as a mingling of details in the lives of real-lifers J.D. Salinger and Henry Roth.

The other Roth — Philip — may or may not be a great writer, whatever that means (more anon), but he is certainly a good writer. He pulls up to the curb in an unassuming rig, and within moments we are under way, the scenery gliding by, the author in complete control, with a route and destination plainly in mind. The language is effective, not showy; its pull is strong and steady. The writer of these words has obviously thought about life as he’s lived it; the experience of growing older is rendered with vivid precision and an equally vivid lack of sentimentality. The author has nothing to prove, only something to tell, and we are only too pleased to listen, as the journey ticks by and the pages turn one after the other.

"Good writer," like "friend," is possibly too temperate an expression for our intemperate times. Gore Vidal once suggested that the good is the enemy of the great — a splendid aphorism — but he seemed to understand great as gifted, with good being highly polished, self-approving, and perhaps slightly resentful ordinariness, the glittering gemstone that turns out to be zircon. That is the truth about most glittering gemstones. Yet great, in our demotic culture, carries another meaning: it means "celebrated," and celebration is often the result of telling people, intentionally or not, what they wish to hear. Good writers can do this as well as bad writers.

Being considered a great writer in this sense is a political achievement, like winning the presidency. It’s a symbiosis that has to do with the writer’s times and the writer’s relation to those times. How does the writer see the times, and how is he or she seen by them? What if the relationship is adversarial? What happens if the writer is inclined to commit the unpardonable sin of telling the truth? Does the Library of America take these factors into account?

Long ago I noticed, and I continue to notice, that the animus at the heart of most unfavorable comment about fiction is You didn’t write the book I wanted you to! I am a disappointed consumer in a land where the customer is always right! Much favorable comment merely inverts this proposition; such noise is idiotic but at least doesn’t hurt the writer’s feelings. (Imaginative writers bruise easily, like peaches.) Lost in this welter of vainglory and petulance is the patient attempt to understand what was attempted, measure what was achieved, and describe the gap between the two. Some dare call this criticism, and while criticism might lack the autoerotic thrill of anointing the great or carrying out drive-by shootings on literary misfits, it remains our only trustworthy method of separating the good from the rest.

The smell test

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Old joke: If you want to hear God laugh, make plans. (A tip of the trilby here to the Chronicle’s Jon Carroll, whose recent and perfect phrasing I borrow.) In the alternative, open a nice restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf. Fisherman’s Wharf: our very own cross between Vatican City and the Potsdamer Platz of Cold War Berlin, except with seagulls instead of barbed wire and searchlights. It is so different from the rest of the city that it feels as if it should have its own time zone and area code. It is a place where city dwellers do not tread, unless they aren’t paying attention and find they’ve ridden the cable car all the way to the end of the line.

And yet, there is a lovely, improbable restaurant in this precinct of gift shops, rental car lots, and tourist hotels. Its name is Bistro Boudin, and it can be found on the second floor of the Boudin Bakery, a handsome and fresh-from-the-ground-up building that opened about two years ago and is, against all odds, a fairly large-scale working bakery in the midst of the city.

Another tip of the trilby, then, this time to Boudin for investing in the city, and for making pretty good bread while they’re at it. Boudin, like Parisian, is one of the city’s old-guard bakeries, and building your new bakery in the heart of Touristan could certainly be seen as making a statement, or maybe just a pitch. If there are outposts of Tartine and Bay Bread in the area, they keep a low profile. But Boudin knows what it’s doing in the bread-baking department; its sourdoughs are soft, tangy-fragrant, and the loaves out for butter like the Sirens of the Rhine.

Bistro Boudin is on the second floor of the spiffy bakery. The large windows command a view of the bay and Alcatraz. The dining room seems to consist largely of glass, leather, and honey-colored wood: a traditional San Francisco look, subtly freshened. The executive chef, James Chan, was sacked from Harrow for undisclosed offenses, only to turn up in our little corner of the New World with a sophisticated menu that blends elements of New World and Old.

But can he blend locals and tourists? To find out, he will need locals, and what better way to draw them but with the smell of baking bread?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Osteria and Bacco Ristorante

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When all else fails, we go to our neighborhood Italian restaurant. And since we’re staying in the neighborhood for dinner — whatever neighborhood that might be — we can walk. This means we can drink as much as we want without tempting the after-dinner fates by getting behind the wheel, not that we would dream of doing such a thing. Also, we can pretend we’re in Italy. The Italians spend a lot of time walking through their beautiful cities, at least when not scooting about on their Vespas. They tend not to drink too much, either. Wine in Italy is food, and is to be enjoyed like other food: heartily, but not to excess.

While in recent weeks the vanguard of the food involved have settled on just-opened Spruce near Laurel Village, like pigeons descending on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, we fluttered to a threshold nearby on a mild autumn evening. It was that of Osteria, a graciously homey restaurant of a certain age where the locals go when they’re not in the mood for trends like squab. (Squab is the food-involved word for pigeon.) The interior, a drawing-room assembly of hand-painted ceramic tiles, wallpapers, striped upholstery, and carved wood columns, has a terra-cotta luminousness, while chef-owner Vahid Ghorbani’s menu consists of well-constructed old friends, including a number of veal dishes.

Since veal has been banished from our home kitchen, mostly on grounds of animal cruelty, I find myself powerfully drawn to it in restaurants. Perhaps this is hypocrisy or some other moral failing. Perhaps I should not order veal and enjoy it — but I do and I do, and then that’s enough, at least until the next time. Osteria’s veal parmesan ($18) consists of several flaps of meat slathered in a garlicky tomato sauce, with slices of cheese melted on top. The meat was tender and tasty enough, if rather beefy, and it occurred to me that if I were making this dish at home, I would use turkey scallops, and they would be just as good. Elsewhere on the plate: neat piles of quartered carrot sticks and trimmed green beans, along with a lone boiled new potato. All handsome in a faintly apologetic way. One of the Dutch masters could have done something attractive with this colorful group.

The eggplant parmesan ($13) was essentially the same dish, with virtue substituted for the veal. I will never cheer for eggplant, but if the bitter juices are salted out and the slices are bathed in a tasty sauce, I can look the other way — backward, perhaps, at the fine first courses. One, an artichoke heart ($9) filled with bay shrimp and dressed like a sundae with a basil vinaigrette, was substantial enough to serve as a light main course, even without the heart of palm flute to one side. The other, a spinach salad ($8) with roasted almonds and gorgonzola, was given a note of insinuation by a dark and handsome balsamic vinaigrette.

For dessert: mocha torte ($6), basically a slice of coffee ice cream cake. Or just watch the people come and go, young and old, in groups big and small, even a table of bears with what could be a cub. Almost like Noe Valley!

Funny you should ask. For years the best Italian restaurant in Noe Valley was Bacco Ristorante (which opened in 1993). Of course, for years the competition was thin. Lately it’s intensified, with the arrivals of Incanto, La Ciccia, Pescheria (all on outer Church), and Lupa (just around the corner.) But Bacco’s owners, Paolo Dominici and Vincenzo Cucco, haven’t been lazing on their laurels. They’ve picked up a Zagat rating, for one thing, and, for another, they’ve replaced the terra-cotta paint scheme with one of sage and butter. There’s also now a beautiful interior Old World arch.

It would be difficult to improve on the food. We inhaled the crostino ($9.95), a pair of sizable toast rounds spread with a butterlike cannellini puree, then layered with garlic-sautéed broccoli rabe and shavings of pecorino cheese. A salad of wine red roasted beets ($11.95) — interpolated with sections of pink grapefruit and daubs of goat cheese — vanished with only slightly more ceremony.

Garganelli ($17.95) — pennelike pasta, tossed with smoked sausage and porcini in a spicy tomato sauce — was a gratifying country dish. Just a bit more exotic was a plate of fregola ($19.95), a pebbly pasta (like a Sardinian version of Israeli couscous), sauced with a mix of mussels and scallops in a saffron tomato sauce. If you squinted, you could convince yourself this was a seafood risotto made with especially fat grains of rice.

Dessert: a flourless chocolate torte ($8) with crème anglaise, raspberries, and mint, the colors of the Italian flag and the pizza margherita. Crowd: mixed and younger than Osteria’s, with more overt peculiarities. Middle-aged man with much younger man in beret: Son? Boyfriend? Other thoughts?

Our server asked me if I wanted a second glass of pinot grigio, which was peculiar, since on the first round I’d ordered vermentino ($8.50). The vermentino hadn’t tasted like vermentino; it was too plump, like an oaked California chardonnay or maybe a domestic pinot grigio. I demurred on a second glass, wondering if it would be rude to ask if it was poured right from the bottle. At Bacco’s prices, which are far from low, this wouldn’t seem unreasonable. Although we weren’t at all tipsy, we walked home — one of life’s loveliest luxuries.

OSTERIA

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

3277 Sacramento, SF

(415) 771-5030

www.osteriasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Slightly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

BACCO RISTORANTE

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

737 Diamond, SF

(415) 282-4969

www.baccosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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