California 101

By Paul Reidinger

IS THE INTERNATIONAL language money, or food? (Certainly we can rule out Esperanto.) If food, we're in good shape, for the typical chef in this city seems to be as fluent these days in various cuisines from around the world as your typical European teenager is in the continent's many languages.

We might call this phenomenon "applied multiculturalism," or maybe – to rinse out the taint of those 1990s academic wars – "pan-culturalism." It means, essentially, a menu like that at Picadita 288, which recently opened in the Potrero Hill space occupied the last three years by North Star, sibling to Brad Levy's long-running and successful Firefly. Once you step through the doorway – over which a distinctive iron star still hangs – you can treat yourself to maki, kabobs, a ribollita, maybe a burger. On Tuesday evenings you can build your own burrito (call ahead; this might change); on Monday evenings it's all the pasta you can eat.

There is something thrilling about this kind of variety – it's appealingly undisciplined and wild. On the other hand, it also seems thin, the equivalent of claiming to be multilingual on the basis of being able to ask, "Where is the lavatory?" but nothing else, in five languages. As always in these situations – which seem to be increasingly common, as so-called California cuisine drifts away from, or expands beyond, its Franco-Italian roots – the best dishes are the simplest ones.

A roasted tomato soup ($5), for instance, stoked up to Southwest-style speed with some cumin, garlic, and chili powder, registered on the tongue as being somewhere between salsa and barbecue sauce, with an agreeably coarse texture and plenty of fragrance. And a straightforward bowl of farfalle ($6), tossed with strips of roasted red bell pepper in a Parmesan cream sauce, had me trying to re-create the dish at home several days later. (They dared to use far more cream than I.)

A burger ($8) was decent, though the Gorgonzola cheese on top didn't add much. A tiger shrimp skewer ($6) was also decent, though I found the serrano chile sauce a bit too honeylike in its sweetness. Shrimp are sweet enough on their own; they need a contrasting note of acid or spice, not more sugar.

After one visit our polling varied: one vote for Picadita 288 as a fantastic place, another (from a more skeptical voter) to withhold judgment until more information could be gathered. But we did like the neighborhood feel, the casual comings and goings, the soft yellow paint scheme and warm wood furniture (left over from North Star days), the votive candle flickering at the center of each table.

It is a sad truth of the restaurant business that if a party of a dozen wants to take over half your tiny place, the realities of finance pretty much say that you have to let them, even if you know their gross presence will upset the restaurant's rhythms. We returned to Picadita 288 on a quiet, mild evening and found the votive candles flickering, the soft murmurs rising from scattered tables of two – and, on the other side of the room, the dread monster party, a kind of seated riot that kept the staff constantly hurrying to and from the kitchen.

We expected service on our side of the dining room to slow, and it did. What we didn't expect was the drastic degradation of the food. Yet, from the first, the signs were dire. The soup of the day ($5), bread soup, might as easily have been called salt soup, so overwhelmingly salty (saltier even than those Campbell's condensed varieties) was the chicken broth. Shreds of arugula added color but no (discernible) flavor, while three golden-crisp lumps of bread, like giant croutons, were handsome but as difficult to crack as Christmas nuts.

Calamari ($9), stuffed with a grab-bag array of smoked salmon, goat cheese, prosciutto, and spinach and served over wilted arugula, was adjudged, ominously, to be "interesting" from across the table. I agreed. I was particularly interested in the wisdom of, or lack of wisdom in, throwing together such strong flavors as salmon and goat cheese. It made me think of the footage of those head-butting rams that opens Marty Stouffer's Wild America.

Among other things, that rather reckless gamble left no flavor for the seafood pasta ($17), a nest of fettucine with mussels, prawns, and scallops in an herb-butter sauce that tasted like nothing. Only slightly better was the Argentine tilapia ($15) – a pan-seared filet of the white fish on a bed of tasty Spanish rice with a few coins of sautéed green and yellow summer squash scattered on the plate like old inner tubes in a vacant lot. A sauce – any sauce, my kingdom for a sauce – would have made all the difference.