October 16, 2002

By Paul Reidinger

IT IS LIKELY we would agree that Olive does not in any way resemble a conventional pizzeria. For one thing, the menu ranges beyond pizza, and not merely to garlic bread and Greek salad (those staple accompaniments of urban pizza culture) but to such sophisticated treats as Tuscan-style chicken pâté and spicy baked tiger prawns. Try picking up anything like that from your favorite free-delivery-in-a-cardboard-box place.

For another, Olive doesn't look like a pizzeria. A cool tapas spot, maybe, with a bare concrete wall strung with speakers, a taupe color scheme, a huge bar, a line of smallish tables and high chairs, and two secluded, banquette-lined nooks at the front. But then tapas have proved to be social climbers; the humble little bar snacks of Spain have become chic food here. Are pizzas now bound for a similar upmarket glory?

If you like thin-crust pizza, you're going to like Olive's offerings right off. These are disks of dough rolled out toward the limit of what is physically possible, and a good hot oven leaves them cracker-crisp at the edges, though slightly droopy in the middle. But that's just a result of generous toppings.

Your choices on this last point range from the rudimentary (cheese and tomato) to a Wolfgang Puck-like combination of smoked salmon and crème fraîche ($10) – the kind of pizzafied schmear that helped make Spago famous. I found the salmon to be a bit smoky for my taste, but I liked the bianco style of the pie (no tomato sauce), and the luxuriance of the crème fraîche and a generous grating of white cheese did help buffer the fish's bite.

The goat cheese on the prawn, arugula, and goat cheese pie ($10), on the other hand, was too strong for the other ingredients. We did make out a muffled peep of sweetness from the shellfish, but the arugula was very much seen, not heard. Maybe all any of this proves is that pizza doesn't wear fancy pants with much panache; Olive's best pie is the plain old pepperoni ($9), with a spicy tomato sauce, nicely bronzed cheese, and plenty of – though not too many – rounds of good garlicky dry sausage.

Since the pizzas (at eight or so inches in diameter) aren't huge, there's plenty of reason to explore the variety of small plates at the top of the menu. The influences here are chiefly Asian and Mediterranean, with a bit of Americana thrown in – cilantro fries ($5), for instance, with a modestly spicy red-pepper mayonnaise; or a quesadilla ($8) stuffed with baked chicken, sliced into isosceles triangles each with a mezza luna base, and served with salsa and sour cream.

There is a sandwichy element – not at all unpleasant – even to many of the Asian-style dishes. Ahi tuna ($10) is stacked with wonton, wasabi aioli, and ginger slaw (a sesame-soy dipping sauce appears in an accompanying ramekin) so that it resembles a really radical new burger from Jack in the Box. Spinach sautéed Thai-style ($5) is served with bruschetta on the side. And the fabulous Tuscan chicken pâté ($9) arrives with country-bread toast points and fig jam, so some assembly is required – and is well worth the negligible trouble.

One Asian-influenced dish you don't make a sandwich out of: beef satay ($9), strips of grilled meat on skewers, served with a chunky peanut sauce and, at the center of the plate, a mound of rice noodles. "The best satay I've ever had!" averred the hyperbolist, and while I don't know that I would go so emphatically (so hyperbolically?) far, I did find the satay to be impressive.

By the time the question of dessert presents itself, Olive is likely to have heated up considerably. Despite the roughness of the surrounding neighborhood, the crowd is young, urban, affluent, and apt to gather in large, noisy clots. There is no dance floor, but perhaps there should be. There is a warm chocolate cake ($6), quite soufflé-like and, like a soufflé, needing its 20 minutes or so in the oven. The menu should but does not note this fact, and the neatly cylindrical little cake, though good, did strike me as a bit anticlimactic after all that unexpected waiting. A simpler, quicker bread pudding ($6) – cubes of bread baked in a barely sweet syrup, and yet another link to the land of leavening – was as good if not better.

Olive's icon is an olive-green O with an off-center red bull's-eye, like a shred of pimento in a real olive. It is a striking image not least because it suggests the odd, not-quite-on-point relation between the place and its surroundings. Recently I walked from Muni through the Tenderloin to Olive under one of those evening skies you see only in San Francisco at the end of a certain sort of autumn day, when the afternoon's warm baby-blue air has softened to rose and the city's grit seems impossibly trivial. I walked past skulkers and lurkers and one Vietnamese market or restaurant after another until, on the next block, the green O appeared, its red fleck glowing with welcome, like a hearth in the most postindustrial of urban caves – a place where pizza is being discovered, or rediscovered.