By Paul Reidinger

IT IS SOMETHING of a mystery why the old Jackson Brewery – the formidable brick edifice that stands sentinel over the intersection of Folsom and 11th Streets – never became a brew pub. Brew pubs were très chic in our recently concluded golden age. But of course for most of the 1990s the address was the home (or at least one of the homes) of ˇWa-Ha-Ka!, an order-at-the-counter Mexican restaurant that emphasized fresh ingredients and for most of its years of occupancy attracted crowds sufficient to stave off a brew pub makeover.

I liked ˇWa-Ha-Ka!, but it always struck me as too modest in aspiration for such a splendid setting of brick and steel, mezzanines and sunshine. The Public, which opened in the space last month, is far more suitable in tone and ambition. It's not a brew pub, true, but it does look like one, with exposed-brick walls reinforced by steel cross beams, a main-floor lounge flanked by a pair of bars (one of them the old salsa station) and set with comfy chaises and chairs, a delicately hearty Cal-Med menu, and a young, attentive, and well-informed service staff.

You can get beer there, of course, but you'll probably want wine. One of the chefs, Greg Luna, has worked at Delfina, and from that experience he's clearly absorbed a vine-friendly Tuscan sensibility. It would probably be premature to say that the Public's food is as good as Delfina's, but it is competitive, and the setting is vastly more striking. And the neighborhood is more challenging: the western chunk of SoMa has been something of a boneyard for sophisticated restaurants over the years – the Acorn, Jessie's, and Eleven spring immediately to mind. But the Public could well be the best restaurant yet to have opened its doors in that part of town. Will the public take notice?

Some inducements, besides the urban-handsome decor and the superior food: easy parking and good music. I spent the better part of an evening listening to the Beatles' Abbey Road unspool, from the cheerfully savage "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" (not the beginning of the record; we must have walked in late) to "Her Majesty," the swooning snippet of a tune that concludes the album. I had not listened to all those fine songs, seriatim, at least since college – an interval I now measure in decades – and the pleasure of it (I still seemed to know all the lyrics) nearly overwhelmed the large pleasure we were all taking in the Public's food.

Food that stands up to Abbey Road is good food indeed. Straight off, we caught a Delfina note in the aquacotta ($6), a Tuscan bread soup that mingles elements of minestrone and panzanella, the bread and tomato salad that amounts to a recycling program for stale bread. Prawn crostini ($7) sounded another, with its smearings of white bean purée and basic simplicity. Papardelle ($13) – broad ribbons of pasta – was tossed with a meaty rabbit sugo. And (vegetarians, nota bene) a crispy polenta cake ($13) was stuffed with taleggio cheese and hedged with a coarse, eggplant-heavy caponata. One has always admired the wizardry Italian and Italian-influenced chefs bring to the handling of eggplant, a vegetable that in less-skilled hands can go gruesomely wrong.

Of course not all the culinary influences, and not even all the eggplant acrobatics, are Delfina-filtered Tuscanisms. An eggplant napoleon ($6) carries a French name but is really a California creation: a pair of crisp-fried eggplant disks, bonded by ricotta into a kind of sandwich and topped with a healthy daub of romesco sauce, the classic Catalan grind-up of tomatoes, peppers, almonds, onions, garlic, and olive oil. And a flank steak ($14) is served in a pool of chimichurri, the Argentinian take on salsa verde, usually redolent of vinegar and oregano but here given a strong breath of mint. To complete the New World effect, a heap of buttermilk onion rings.

Desserts, meantime, seem downright all-American, from a lovely peach cobbler ($5), fruity rather than sweet and swaddled in a crust whose flakiness suggests the touch of home cooking (the trick: making sure not to combine the butter and flour too thoroughly), to a decadent chocolate bread pudding ($5) that combines elements of mousse, cake, and brownie in its heap of warm cubes. Desserts, given their scale and quality, are best buys at $5, but I also must say I admire the stylish frugality implicit in bread puddings – and for that matter in bread salads and bread soups.