Streetwise

By Paul Reidinger

AT THE RISK of being damned to restaurant writer purgatory (there to keep company with other disgraced restaurant writers, who shall remain nameless?), I admit I did not go to Butterfly in its original run. This was a conscious act of omission. The time: a few years ago, and the dot-com kettle boiling over. The setting: an old auto repair shop at the northern edge of the Mission, redone with spare elegance and concrete floors, to ensure noisiness. No piece I read about the place failed to mention, swiftly and emphatically, the din. As I hated (and still hate!) din, along with clamor, cacophony, and their many unpleasant relations, and was then well on my way to developing, in addition, a strong animus to rude, entitled – and noisy – tech brats laden with funny tech money, I demurred on Butterfly. Let this roar pass from me and so forth.

Then the reality bell tolled midnight, grand tech carriages turned back into pumpkins, an ugly elevated freeway vanished, chef Erik Hopfinger departed (he can now be found at Loft 11, in the old Twenty Tank spot), Butterfly itself followed Slanted Door to the Embarcadero last summer (though now Slanted Door is moving to the Ferry Building), and the original Butterfly site has found new life as Butterfly Mission, with a menu inspired by Vietnamese "sidewalk" food.

It would be an extraordinary sidewalk in Vietnam – or here, or anywhere – that offered food anything like what you will be routinely served at Butterfly Mission. Chef and owner Rob Lam ascribes many of the recipes to his mother, but the food is quietly sophisticated in a way not many mothers would bother with – unless they were clones of clink-bound Martha Stewart. One example springs immediately to mind: the exhilarating and unexpected juxtaposition of wild salmon and fresh strawberries in one of the rolls making up the pupu platter ($9). And the other two entrants on the oblong plate – a roll of duck confit and another of wild mushrooms – weren't too shabby either. For the record: my mother, well schooled in the culinary arts by her own mother, never attempted duck confit, gathered wild mushrooms, or would have thought to mix strawberries and salmon.

The menu lists mainly "small plates," but while they vary in size, they aren't really all that small. Our server told us, on one visit, that two plates a person is often found to be sufficient, but we deemed at least one offering – the bowl of spicy crab and shrimp dumpling noodle soup ($9) – to be nearly enough for two people if, perhaps, it were preceded by something substantial. The soup was not only spicy but generously appointed with crustaceans and plenty of rice noodles, lurking just beneath the surface of the reddish broth like a luxuriant kelp bed.

As to that first course of substance: how about a half-dozen oysters ($11) on the half shell, with quarters of lemon and lime and a fish sauce-based dipping sauce? Very elegant, very California. Or the very substantial kalua pig ($10, and nota bene the absence of the h in kalua): shredded, spiced pork served on a multilayered bed of butter lettuce for convenient cupping, with a (quickly exhausted) ramekin of hoisin-barbecue sauce on the side.

On balance the food tends toward the lighter side. A stew of lemongrass curry chicken ($7), for instance, is like a Southeast Asian version of beef bourguignon – right down to the chunks of potato and carrot and the warm sliced baguette served on the side – apart from a considerable paring away of heaviness and the strong perfuming with lemongrass. The lemongrass-curry combination recurs as a broth for clams and mussels ($9), one of those satisfyingly labor-intensive dishes that make you feel you've eaten more than you really have. And if you like the idea of kalua pig except for the part about eating pork, you will be grateful for the seared chicken with chiles and lemongrass ($9), which is otherwise virtually the same dish.

As for starches: evidently the Southeast Asian street, or sidewalk, has not yet succumbed to Atkins mania. There is rice, of course, steamed in a packet of banana leaves ($7) and served with a side of wild-mushroom ragout. The packet was a little hard to deal with, but once we got it open, it was as if we were assembling a slightly sweet mushroom risotto. More savory were the Shanghai garlic noodles ($8) – a big bowl of them, with plenty of toasted garlic folded in.

The one dish we were able to find that had absolutely no sidewalk cred – but was also rather spectacular – was a dessert: green-banana waffles ($6) with strawberries and Chantilly cream. The waffles were of an unearthly Jell-O green (one occasionally saw cubes of this hue being dispensed from the food machines on Captain Kirk's Enterprise) and stacked as in a napoleon. You could easily be served a dessert of such invention and style at Ana Mandara, though you'd surely pay more for it.

You could, in fact, pay more at a lot of places and not come away as satisfied. Butterfly Mission retains its aura of late-'90s new-economy urban chic: the barnlike vaulted roof, the subtle sleekings of glass and chrome, the flickering votive candle on each table, even some remnant of the hellish noise. But now the place is a value, and in that sense you might say the tough times of the past few years have been purgative.