Udon right by me

By Paul Reidinger

YOU MAY HAVE eaten – and perhaps even enjoyed – mochi, those Japanese-style ice cream balls wrapped in pastry, like profiteroles, but without the chocolate sauce. I find them a bit gummy. So a restaurant named Mochi Mochi would not instantly send my hopes soaring. But a more mochi-friendly friend, spying a restaurant named Moshi Moshi on a once desolate stretch of Third Street in Dogpatch – and failing to note that the requisite c was in fact, and twice, an s – waxed ecstatic, as if we'd stumbled on some sort of Japanese Dairy Queen.

Our server set the record straight: moshi moshi is not ice cream but, in Japanese, a casual greeting, given perhaps with some air kisses, if such is Japanese practice. And ... there is no mochi on the menu. But there is a wealth of other choices, as befits a restaurant in a paradoxical neighborhood where restaurants are in short supply but housing – mostly live-work lofts – has been thrown up with abandon in the past few years.

When 42 Degrees opened in nearby Esprit Park at the dawn of the boom that preceded the current bust, the remoteness of the location was much discussed. The city's brightly lit towers seemed far away, nearly over the horizon, and the wealth of parking spaces in the huge lot suggested a mall in suburban Omaha. But by the turn of the millennium, the city had crept closer: new ball park, tall buildings in Mission Bay, development moving south like a speedy glacier of concrete and steel.

These days the city has arrived, in all its glaciated glory. You can look up Third and see Pac Bell Park, while nearer at hand the street is being vivisected for the installation of Muni's light-rail line, an extension of the Embarcadero service that will one day, no doubt, be carrying many a worker bee from Dogpatch digs to jobs downtown, just as soon as those jobs can be arranged.

Meantime, while we all wait for today's set of policy nostrums – endless tax cuts and perpetual war – to work their economic magic, the neighborhood must eat, and Moshi Moshi packs them in, from lunching pairs of gay men to well-spoken little fourth-grade girls weighing the attractions of California rolls to a bevy of police officers who luckily found a parking space just outside the door, next to a fire hydrant.

The restaurant's menu is a familiar mix of the cooked and the uncooked. A slight disappointment on the latter point is the bar, which for sushi lovers is so often the most desirable spot in the house. Moshi Moshi has a bar – with Mel's Diner-like stools of chrome – but no sushi chefs and flashing knives behind it; all the food preparation is done out of sight, in the kitchen.

Still, despite the lack of theatrics, the sushi satisfies, a small combo ($15.95) serving as a more than adequate dinner. The nigiri varies but might include unagi (barbecued eel), tuna, yellowtail, and salmon. Also: a vegetarian roll (avocado and cucumber), along with a California, hamachi (yellowtail), or tekka roll. Everything seemed perfectly fresh, though the presentations lacked the panache of more downtownish places.

As we move toward the cooked items, we begin to notice a marked odor of deep-frying. Soft-shell crab ($7.50) is nicely crisped and a pretty copper color, but it tastes more of frying than of crab. Breaded chicken, as in the Moshi Moshi lunch combo ($8.95), holds up better, maybe because expectations aren't as high, and also because the strips of grilled beef provide some relief from crunchy, oily breading – which promptly reappears in the heap of tempura (shrimp, broccoli florets, coins of zucchini and carrot) on the far side of the plate.

The best of the cooked dishes are not deep-fried – strips of lightly seared ahi ($6.95), say, that could easily pass for beef, or the huge bowls of broth, udon and its several close relations, in which luxuriantly bob whole meals of noodles, meats, greens. The misolike broth is in fact konbu (made from kelp), and it is the basis of ten tori za ($8.95), a steaming pond choked with spinach, shredded chicken, gyoza (Japanese pot stickers, immense like house-made ravioli at a fancy restaurant), and tempura on the side. If you had a bad cold, you would dream of a restorative dish like this.

And if you were a little kid, you'd probably be glad you'd ordered something so tasty and yet so mild, and so rich in recombinative possibilities: gyoza to push around in your own private lake, mysterious breaded items to be dunked in it, bits of green to be fished out. I found one such group of tots, overseen by a lone and gallant father, in the enclosed porch just to the right of the bar. Birthday party of some kind, it seemed to be, and was each of the little celebrants wondering about the chances of scoring some mochi?