By Paul Reidinger

WHEN I WAS younger, someone gave me a book of matches stamped with the exhortation "Make big money writing poems." Nice, if not quite as poetic as "Go west, young man." The matchbook went through the laundry by accident, alas – although, as Freud instructs us, there are no accidents.

Luckily, there is irony. The big I is detectable in the first formulation and perfectly absent from the second, the making of fortunes (not to mention the stentorious giving of advice) being serious business. Writers have always been big on irony as a substitute for money, unless they secretly lusted for money in the first place, in which case irony is, to say the very least, not useful. We like our literature earnest and solemn, thank you very much – and served, like the burgers and lasagna and hot-fudge sundaes we gobble down at the chain restaurants that increasingly dot our republic of interstates, in vast, knee-buckling portions.

Still, despite the commercialization and corporatization of everything, including American letters – and I don't know why I am surprised to include American letters, though I am; or perhaps "saddened" more nearly captures the sense of watching our imaginative fiction, through the gracious agency of MFA programs, become a product every bit as factory farmed as iceberg lettuce – some constants from the ancient world, circa 1994, persist. A fellow writer and I often go out in search of that old San Francisco boho aura, looking for places in which it is possible to imagine, maybe even for a moment glimpse, the city as it was before leased Porsches and excavation equipment appeared on every block.

Our wanderings often take us to Chinese restaurants, for Chinese restaurants are the impecunious writer's best friend, assuming the writer has any friends. Chinese restaurants, at least of the sort we seek out, almost always offer lunch specials, huge, dinner-obviating plates of food for a few bucks. And for some reason, having to do with a long-ago constellation of living arrangements, long since rearranged across the continent, we have often found ourselves in outer Noe Valley.

Not so many years ago Noe Valley was one of the city's great seats of boho. It had sleepy class – there were used bookstores, used Jaguars; paint peeled from big, comfortable old houses, and the coffee and talk were good in the Meat Market Café. It was the kind of place where people were not entirely concerned with their granite countertops or multiple offers or Martha Stewart's latest recipes for leftover champagne – the stuff of contemporary California lifestyle porn, in other words.

Today's Noe Valley has been pretty well overrun by the advancing armies of the money- and status-conscious. The cars are much shinier, the restaurants fancier. Bell Market sells organic produce. Every other house has been gutted. But refugees from all this fabulousness can take heart from the fact that there is still at least one place where time has stood still, and that place is China Pepper.

No, the paint isn't quite peeling off the walls. But there is an old console television sitting, inert, toward the rear of the dining room, and I must say it's refreshing to see, in a restaurant, a TV that isn't flashing and blaring the news of our insane world, sports-bar style. The food is cheap, bountiful, sometimes uneven but mostly pretty good, mainly Chinese with a few Burmese twists – samosas ($3.25), for instance, phyllo triangles stuffed with curried potato; and coconut milk as the basis of a very tasty chicken-noodle soup ($5.95). It's the kind of low-key environment in which it becomes possible to discuss subjects other than the restaurant itself – its design and designer, its chef and menu, the other patrons and what they're wearing – as some of us sometimes still wish to do.

The chief flaw in the cooking is an occasional overreliance on soy sauce. Its saltiness overwhelmed the promisingly named Szechuan beef ($5.85), an otherwise jolly jumble of onion, napa cabbage, zucchini, mushrooms, water chestnuts, and strips of meat. At lunch the Hunan spicy beef ($4.95) was similarly overwhelmed; in fact, I couldn't tell the difference between the preparations. Twice-cooked pork ($4.95), on the other hand, had been given a balancing whisper of sweetness that brought out the inherent sweetness of the meat. And it was served on a bed of noodles – a welcome variant on the exhausted standard of steamed rice.