By Paul Reidinger

YOU COULD MAKE your own phyllo dough, of course, but hardly anybody does. It's lots of bother even for a skilled home chef. Not to mention buttery, since it is essentially a form of pastry. No, a dish that features phyllo is a special treat, an indulgence to be ordered at a restaurant.

Did someone say Grub? If you remember the Cuban-themed Port Café, and before that the Port Deli, you will be forgiven for having your socks knocked off at the makeover owners Robert Hemmer, Brian Brown, and Katie Solinger (who's also the chef) have given the long, windowy corner space at 16th Street and Sanchez. Gone is the searing orange paint job, replaced by an elegant cream, with punctuative red halogen lights here and there above glossy, family-style wooden tables partitioned by living topiary: actual hedges sitting in neat rows on the table, and movable, should the urge to rearrange strike.

It probably won't, if you fall into the preoccupation of phyllo, as Grub's menu richly allows you to do. You can wrap your entire meal in the stuff if you want to, opening with, say, wontons ($7) stuffed with meaty mushrooms (and I do mean meaty: the whole fungi are filled with chorizo and Parmesan cheese) and served with a dipping sauce of sour cream laced with bits of mango; moving on to mika rolls ($13), basically spring rolls, filled with garlic shrimp, coconut white rice, and batter-fried avocado (which I've never seen before), along with sides of wasabi mayonnaise and teriyaki ginger sauce; and finishing with the Beethovenesque thunderclap of the grubin' sundae ($6), vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce arrayed in a miniature amphitheater of phyllo.

That's a lot of phyllo! Luckily, for those who don't want that much or have a fear of cardiac arrest, there are plenty of other homey options. Grub lies just a block off busy Market Street, but, in its leafy neighborhood setting, it's exactly the kind of place where you'd expect to find a plate of excellent meat loaf ($12.20), with a mound of mashed potatoes (and a zucchini spear sticking out of it like one of those snowpack-measuring devices hydrologists use in the mountains) awaiting the drizzle of tarragon-infused gravy.

At lunch there are sandwiches, including an array of burgers and slightly more adventurous choices, such as a flat bread topped with ham and Gruyère cheese ($8.80) – not to mention tomatoes, onions, and asparagus spears, an ensemble that might be called clutter – and chicken-apple sausage on a baguette ($8.80), with caramelized onions and Gruyère. Sandwiches come with fries, and they are fine: crisp, golden, match-sticky, abundant.

The kitchen also shows a certain nimbleness, both of the horizontal sort (taking inspiration from a variety of cuisines) and the vertical (ingeniously recycling the bits and pieces to be found in any restaurant kitchen at the end of the day). As to the latter: beef and mushrooms are a magical combination, so why not put them in soup? A cup of pureed mushroom soup ($3.30), bulked up with strips of steak and topped off with a few croutons, is powerfully tasty and full of textural interest – as well as being fun to think about. What did you have for lunch? Steak soup!

But maybe you didn't have steak soup. Maybe your meal bore an international touch: an Asian one, perhaps, as in chicken-pasta salad tossed with orange-sesame vinaigrette. There's also a clever French-Italian mingling (the kind you might find in Nice), a brieschetta – melted cheese topped with tomatoes, garlic, parsley, and olive oil – as well as an entry from the Middle East. That would be hummus ($6.60), ready to be scooped up with pita triangles dusted with Parmesan – a nice, subtle twist.

A bold, tasty hodgepodge in cheerful surroundings, with tabletop hedges to screen off interlopers and eavesdroppers, and even a couple of leather sofas just inside the front door to take in the weary, the waiting, the drunk: this is Grub. My friend did sound a note of caution about the shrubbery – which is to say, he disliked its intrusiveness. It does create a boxed effect that will be familiar to anyone who's ever worked in a cubicle farm or remembers, from last century, transacting financial business with an actual, live bank teller. But there are those of us who like boxes and the box effect.

I, on the other hand, found myself wondering about the name. I do like the way the g is set off from the other letters by glowing red neon, since we all know what conspicuous gs mean in San Francisco (hint: Gold's gym, all those "g" stickers), and Grub is after all right smack in the heart of homo country.