Semolina days

By Paul Reidinger

NUTRITIONISTS WILL TELL you the perfect food is the soybean (a rare vegetable source of complete protein), but most home cooks, if asked, would probably think of a box of pasta. Did I say probably? I am guilty, once again, of circumspection. Truly, dried pasta is the rock on which many an edifice of home cooking has been raised. No, it can't match the mighty soybean for nutrition, at least not on its own, but it is cheap, keeps forever, cooks in a matter of minutes, and, with its eager elasticity, will accept practically any sauce made from practically anything – at which point it becomes most of a filling meal.

Given the shameless frequency with which I've served pasta over the years – basically every other night, plus the occasional weekend lunch and a dinner party or two – I have tended to shy away from having it in restaurants. It's too familiar, and it tends to be no better than, and often not as good as, its homemade counterparts.

Still, I was curious when I heard that Bruno's, the oft-reopened restaurant in the heart of the Mission District, was reinventing itself yet again – this time as a kind of cut-rate pasta palace along the lines of the highly successful Emmy's Spaghetti Shack. Of course, Bruno's, even in its pasta-palace drag, doesn't and can't really resemble Emmy's. For one thing, it's much, much bigger; for another, unless you were born yesterday, you are likely to remember that over the past five years Bruno's has been this and that, has opened and closed its way through dot-com fever like some kind of gasping clam, and is carrying plenty of what psychotherapists call "baggage."

With its wealth of semicircular banquettes and its dim lighting, Bruno's down-market cred is, to outward appearances, on the shaky side. You expect to be served a martini and a Caesar salad, not a plateful of spaghetti and meatballs ($8.50), which is the Sunday-night special and isn't bad but isn't great, either: I would have liked a bit more oregano and cayenne pepper in the slightly too smooth sauce. Of course, you can have that martini, too, and the Caesar ($8.50 with bits of chicken). The salad is, like the pasta, competent. Just to shake things up a bit, we also had a margherita pizza ($8.75) – tomato, basil, and mozzarella on a slightly bready crust – and it too was competent, by which I mean that we enjoyed eating it and forgot it the instant it was gone.

The paper-thin disks of fried zucchini ($4.50), on the other hand, were, as my friend put it, "addictive," even without the dish of lemon aioli on the side. And the amaretto cheesecake ($5.50) was served in a tasty pool of caramelized orange zest we briefly jousted over the last of.

Verdict: Like driving a new Cadillac to the corner store for a quart of milk; an issue of disproportion. The setting and food are incongruous, though the incongruity is far from unpleasant. There is more harmony, though no better pasta, at Paradise Pasta and Pizza, which opened earlier this spring in the Inner Sunset space occupied until January by Casa Aguila, and before that the Blue Tortilla.

The border-cantina look is gone, replaced by walls sponged the color of toasted almonds and a general sense of openness and airiness under high ceilings. The menu tilts slightly more toward pizzas than pastas, with a few salads and calzones – and a soup of the day – thrown in.

We liked the soup of the day, which on our day happened to be roasted tomato with basil ($2.75 for a cup). That might just be the perfect soup for San Francisco – a city in which summer and winter seem to coexist – combining as it does two of summer's most celebrated ingredients into a thick and sustaining liquid suitable for the most arctic late-spring evenings.

A plate of fusilli with (spicy) sausage, roasted red bell pepper, feta cheese, and garlic ($11.50) was tasty – and maybe even too tasty, if that's possible. The sauce's potent flavors were almost harsh, like a lamp fitted with a too-bright bulb.

The San Francisco Paradise pizza ($14.75 for a small, and small turned out to be just short of huge) was mellower, a gentle and healthful if slightly incoherent blend of pesto, mozzarella, tomatoes, shrimp, and zucchini. On its own it might have seemed a bit tame, but as in many a bad marriage, its very meekness made a striking contrast and stable match with the overaggressive fusilli just across the table.

Is that kind of imbalance the secret of happiness – or even paradise? I am skeptical. Yet Paradise is the sort of place to go to when you just can't face your stove and, beyond, that group of hungry mouths idling in front of the television, waiting to be served something. The place is big, they've got room, they're glad you're there, it's not too pricey (though not cheap, either), and the food is just like the stuff you'd make if you felt like it, only not quite as good. And even that's OK – a reminder of why the home cook, armed with a box of dried pasta, will never be replaced.

Bruno's. 2389 Mission (at 20th St.), S.F. (415) 648-7701. Tues.-Sun., 6-10:30 p.m. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Full bar. Intermittently noisy. Wheelchair accessible.