The sum of us

By Paul Reidinger

RESTAURANTS, LIKE dogs and cats, live in accelerated time – or at any rate what seems to us to be accelerated time. We tend not to be aware that they are using up their allotted days much faster than we are, until one day they are gone. If we have anticipated that day at all, we have done so by placing it in some mythic future, toward the (mythical) end of our own lives. But many of us don't anticipate it.

Unlike beloved companion animals, restaurants tend to disappear with little or no notice. A restaurant's opening might be something like the launch of an ocean liner, with brass bands and free champagne, but a closing is more like a loss at sea, unwitnessed, with only a few bits of flotsam washing ashore as evidence of what happened at some unknown point, time uncertain.

But this is too gloomy, for not all restaurants die young. The aggregate age of I Fratelli and Il Fornaio, for instance, is 40 years, the former having opened in 1979 and the latter (in San Francisco; the original is in Corte Madera) in 1987. It is not often that a restaurant writer is called upon to do sums (other than figuring tips), and probably even less often that the resultant numbers confer an honor. The honor in this case is being able to report that these two Italian oldsters, defiers of odds (numbers again!), are still vibrant after all these years.

Of the two, I Fratelli (the brothers) is doubtless the more modest, the more like the sort of trattoria one might find on one of those dark and narrow Roman lanes Americans tend to avoid for fear that they will be full of prowling murderers, as seen in Ghost. The street outside the restaurant is actually Hyde Street, a procession of leafy trees bisected by a quaint cable car line; it resembles a Roman lane not at all. Somewhere on the other side of the street is the restaurant's original, and much smaller, location, where I once ate in 1981 – a time when I Fratelli had some destination cachet despite the horrific Russian Hill parking scene.

These days the parking situation is just as horrific (it could not be more horrific, having long ago achieved the parking-horror equivalent of absolute zero), while the scene inside has settled to comfortable neighborhood status. A television mounted over the bar near the front shows sports events, and country-western music floats from somewhere in the rear. The provender is, accordingly, right in the middle of the Italian American comfort-food spectrum, and it's mostly pretty good. We especially liked a salpicon di mare ($8.95), a kind of cross between seviche and carpaccio, with calamari rings, bay scallops, and (parboiled) prawns cooked in lemon juice and served on a bed of basil and radicchio. We were slightly less taken with the pizza margherita ($11.95), whose crust was a bit too spongy and late-summer tomatoes too sweet. More basil would have helped.

Also too tomato-sweet was the papardelle ($12.90) – wide noodles tossed with basil (plenty this time) and warm goat cheese. Better was the ravioli ($12.90), of bell pepper and spinach, stuffed with an addictive paste of artichoke hearts and cheese and nested in a sautéed garden of cauliflower and broccoli florets, zucchini, and bell peppers. Better still was the service, well-timed and attentive to the distinction between attentiveness and intrusion.

The service at Il Fornaio (the oven), by comparison, was rather spotty – a glass of wine brought hopelessly late, then an apology and an assurance that it would be comped, which it wasn't – but in almost every other respect it is a far superior restaurant, from the splendid stonework in the round entryway, to the reputation-building breads – in fact the entire menu – to the open-air terrace beyond which a fountain gently burbles in Levi's Plaza.

The style (especially the fountain) is urban and Roman, and the food is comparably sophisticated without straying into fanciness. There is the classic Italian emphasis on simplicity: a soup ($3.95) of puréed asparagus and spinach with a vegetable-broth base, topped with a few shavings of Parmesan. A salad of heirloom tomatoes and cucumbers ($7.50) needed no embellishment beyond a few shreds of basil, a dash of olive oil and of vinegar, and a pinch of salt. I would have dispensed with the slivers of raw onion scattered over the top – they were too strong, but not ruinous.

In a burrito-and-quesadilla town, it makes sense to serve a salmon calzone – or tronchetto ($9.95) – sliced into easy-to-eat sections. And the salmon was surprisingly docile in the company of spinach, tomatoes, and white cheese. The fries in the middle of the plate? Good and crisp, though calorie overkill. They did tend to drift into the gathering of mixed baby greens on the far side of things, creating in effect a french-fry salad. Maybe McDonald's will pick up on this.

Soft-shell crab ($10.50) naturally attracted the attention of the soft-shell-crab freak, despite the presence of soft polenta beneath the crustacean. SSCF doesn't much like polenta, soft or any other way, and this polenta, though creamy, was underseasoned. Luckily it was trimmed on one side with a spicy tomato sauce and on the other with rather oily pesto: bringers of contrasting colors and flavors.

Less creamy than usual – in fact almost the texture of gelato – was a fine zabaglione ($6.50), flecked with vanilla, barely sweet, and ladled over summer berries. And you thought zabaglione was old news!

I Fratelli. 1896 Hyde (at Green), S.F. (415) 474-8240. Nightly, 5:30-10 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Moderately noisy. Wheelchair accessible.