When Tourists Hit the Beach

Tag : Squid Rings
When I'm asked where to dine in North Beach, I mention GiordanoBros. for a quick sandwich, Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe forlunch, L'Osteria del Forno for lunch and dinner, and one of myfavorite restaurants in all of San Francisco, Da Flora, for amarvelous Italian dinner on Columbus. Off Columbus and not Italianare the Asian-fusion The House on Grant, the Brazilian/ItalianMangarosa on Stockton, the casual North Beach Lobster Shack onGreen, and the Argentine steakhouse El Raigon on Union. For afantastic modern meal where money is no object, there's DanielPatterson's Coi on Broadway. But I'm as eager to find a new placein North Beach to try as anyone — even if it's been aroundfor a while.
When friends said they'd had a good meal at Panta Rei, an Italianplace that took over the longtime triangular space of the old (andold-fashioned) U.S. restaurant at the confluence of Columbus,Green, and Stockton several years ago, we booked an early dinner.We were happy to hear our friends had especially liked the ossobuco.
The place was not at all full, but we were offered the worst tablein the house: a four-top right by the open door, subject to awicked draft on a cool night. But as soon as we declined that, wewere offered our choice, and picked a table right by the window onColumbus, near the apex of the eccentrically shaped room. We lovedmost of the '60s La Dolce Vita decor — the all-over-mosaic-tiled bar, the whitemultipendant lamp in front of the open kitchen, the chromestarburst sconces — but the faces and silhouettes painted onthe walls and the slightly grungy metal-topped tables: not so much."I know places just like this in Rome," I said, "but they've lookedlike this ever since the '60s." The big-screen TV over the bar was blessedly dark, butapparently it gets quite a workout during Italian soccer season.
It was clear where the kitchen's priorities were from theproportions allotted to the dishes on the menu: 14 antipasti, fourpizzas and one calzone, eight meat and fish entrées —and 21 homemade pastas. They were divided between two pages ofequal length, one headed Daily Specials, but it seemed from thefact that the pages were laminated that they'd been the DailySpecials for quite some time. That's odd when you consider thatPanta Rei translates, loosely, from the Greek as "everything ischanging" — a key tenet of the philosophy of Heraclitus, whonever sprang to mind while we were ensconced within the restaurantitself.
Most of our starters were rather indifferent. The pale-beigecalamari fritti ($8.95), mostly rings with a couple of tentaclesand hunks of zucchini, had been fried at too low a temperature andin consequence were not really crisp; the spicy tomato sauce servedalongside was pleasantly hot, but too thin. The arancio andfinocchio salad ($5.95) was almost insulting: warmish limp sprigsof greens in not enough dressing, with not enough orange or fennelor olives. When told the zuppa del giorno was duck with vegetables,which didn't suit her mood, one of our party was going to skip afirst course until a second query elicited the fact (which seemedto have slipped our server's mind) that minestrone ($6.50) was alsoavailable. A huge bowl appeared ("a meal in itself," its orderersaid) filled with a thin broth brimming with carrots, celery,onions, and zucchini. It was a good vegetable soup, sans pasta thattasted as if it had come from an Italian nonna's kitchen, improvedby a few flurries of standard-issue pre-grated Parmesan.
The one surprisingly excellent starter was the polenta nera($9.50), a silky-textured polenta, tinted black with squid ink,which lent a distant, pleasantly saline tang to the cornmeal. Itwas covered with a mascarpone sauce topped with a number ofsuperfluous firm pink shrimp. Again, this was a huge portion.
Three of us chose pasta, available only in whole portions pricedfrom $12.95 to $19.95, and thereby not encouraging the traditionalItalian ordering of antipasti, pasta, and secondi, especially whenthe meat and fish (and one risotto) are priced between $17.95 for aroasted half chicken and $23.95 for saffron risotto with lobsterand shrimp. Most everybody within eyesight was ordering only onedish — the massive sausage and mozzarella calzone ($10.95).