Bigfoot

By Paul Reidinger

IT TAKES A certain amount of nerve – that is, a mysterious admixture of bravura and confidence, with a dash of recklessness and a salting of indifference – to open a new restaurant in a space long occupied by a famous, successful restaurant. People will always remember what was there before. They will be inclined to make unfavorable comparisons, to bemoan their loss, to proclaim yet another example of decline and fall. You are the rebound love affair, the stepfather, the substitute teacher: an interloper that can't last.

Judged by that rather severe standard, we'd have to say Tao Café looks pretty good, considering the shoes it's filling are Shaqlike in scale: the space in question, at 22nd and Guerrero, was throughout the 1990s the home of Flying Saucer, a seriously whimsical restaurant that food-involved people (even timid, parking-obsessed suburbanites of my acquaintance) made sure to visit despite its (initially) out-of-the-way, if glamorously seedy, Mission location. Flying Saucer was an event, and when it finally went down last year, it wouldn't have been entirely surprising if its address had been retired, like Joe Montana's number.

But such honors are virtually never conferred in the restaurant world. There is no hall of fame, and eventually, like a hermit crab, somebody moves in to an abandoned restaurant shell and opens something else. I don't know that Tao Café will ever exorcise the ghost of Flying Saucer, but the interior makeover is extensive, beautiful, distinctive. In fact, there is no Vietnamese restaurant in town I'm aware of, including that spectacular soundstage Ana Mandara and the temporarily itinerant Slanted Door, that summons up more atmospherics. The feel is (to use an inflamed word) colonial, but in the best sense – a mingling of Southeast Asian tropicality and French precision that gives Vietnamese restaurant culture its distinctiveness. Pale green walls in two tones; a wrought-bronze grill on the mezzanine; lazily spinning ceiling fans; smartly ironed table linens; Bach violin concerti playing softly on the sound system – all this contributes to a sense of rustic elegance.

Tao Café's Gallic sheen is no accident, because the owner, Thuy Nguyen, has lived in France. That influence finds its way into the food as well as the decor. Tao Café's menu, though brief, manages to include both dishes we regard as Vietnamese standards (pho, spring rolls) and preparations that in their sly way might be called fusion. One of the latter is the five-spice beef stew ($10), a boeuf bourguignon-like jumble of beef and carrot chunks in a brown sauce flavored with five-spice powder and Vietnamese basil, the whole thing ladled over a mound of rice noodles. Not a bad idea, but we found the beef to be much too dry, the sauce a bit meek.

The mound of rice noodles is a recurrent presence. It appears, submerged in tasty beef broth, in the "people's soup," or pho ($7), topped with flaps of tender steak. It's probably not the best pho you'll ever eat, but it's pretty good, and it's served in a very large bowl. Essentially the same dish, with shredded carrots substituted for the broth, reappears as the "people's salad" ($9) – the question being, what happened to the flavor? A rather sweet, sticky dressing is served on the side, but it cannot make up for the rich savoriness that vanished with the broth.

We liked the fresh rolls ($6), stuffed with shrimp, pork, and rice noodles (again!), though I found the skins almost perversely tough. Shrimp salad ($7) consisted of prawns tossed with shredded carrots and napa cabbage and dressed with a shamelessly mustardy vinaigrette I was alone in finding wonderful. And tom lui, or Hue-style grilled prawns wrapped in pork and bathed in a lemongrass marinade, was not bad, though the flavor came not from the lemongrass (which seemed to be missing in action) but from the spicy peanut sauce on the side.

If you are reading between the lines here, you have probably detected a certain disenchantment with Tao Café's cooking. Many of the dishes sound more interesting than they turn out to be; the spicing seems hesitant, and too many of the meats are dry. On the other hand, we found only one dish to be catastrophically bad: chunks of curried chicken breast ($10) in coconut-milk sauce. The meat was tough and tasteless, the sauce runny and slightly bitter, the potatoes a load of starch overkill when heaped on the accompanying steamed rice. Although Tao Café's menu is short, it can stand to lose this item.

Even with a menu so trimmed, though, the place has a long row to hoe before its food can be mentioned in the same breath as that of Slanted Door, Saigon Saigon, or even Sunflower, which serves up dazzlingly tasty Vietnamese cooking in less alluring, though still attractive, surroundings and is, really, a kind of ideal Vietnamese neighborhood restaurant. Those are the footsteps in which Tao Café really should be following.