Blue bayou

By Paul Reidinger

IT'S ALWAYS GOOD when someone speaks up for the little guy, and in restaurants lately the little guy is the big plate. The little plate has become Mr. Big, the dominator, the phenomenon you find on menus from bay to breakers and beyond. The charms of little plates have been well documented; they include ease of sharing, greater variety, and lower prices. But there is a place too for the hungry-man platters, those mighty, seam-splitting servings that keep you from feeling pangs well into the next day. And if they're also cheap ... all the better to stuff oneself with, my dear.

Big plates of food at small prices is the central idea of Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, which opened in the Mission three years ago as a kind of hipster alternative to Pasta Pomodoro. One was charmed, among other things, by the odd coupling of good Italian country cooking and a setting redolent of the South, perhaps of a roadside diner near New Orleans. The Southern atmospherics recur in Blue Jay Café (which bears the name of chef and Emmy's cofounder Jay Foster; Andre Larzul, owner of nearby Alamo Square, is the owner), but this time the food is also Southern – the kind of thing you can imagine Andy Griffith and Barney Fife gobbling up for lunch in Mayberry, RFD.

If Andy and Barney strolled into Blue Jay Café for lunch, they would almost certainly want to be seated at the counter, which, unlike the little slivers lined with barstools in most places, is an immense, squared-off U, smack in the middle of the dining room, whose space it occupies more than half of. Along the walls (blue, of course, above the picture rail; cream below) are booths for the furtive types, but the booths (and for that matter furtive types) seem both physically and metaphysically marginal. The tone, then, is one of openness and even expansiveness; Blue Jay Café seems bigger than it is.

The plates of food, on the other hand, are as big as they seem, if not bigger. A bowl of good, spicy gumbo ($3.25), laden with rice, shrimp, and rounds of andouille, would, with a baguette – or perhaps a square or two of the house-baked cornbread – make a good lunch. But I misjudged and found myself, a few well-filled minutes later, confronting a plate of red beans and rice ($6.25), with more andouille (this time in split lengths). It was delicious yeoman food that would also and easily have done for two. As it happened, I was with someone, but he was grappling with a catfish po'boy ($6.75) – a crisply breaded, sautéed filet on a softly billowing bun slathered with good rémoulade (mayonnaise spiked with cornichons, capers, anchovies, and a splash of Tabasco or some similar red pepper sauce from the bayou). We did finish it all but, in an almost unprecedented maneuver, passed on dessert.

It matters whether a breaded item ends up being sautéed or deep-fried, as Blue Jay's dinner menu (on which all the main dishes are $9.95) amply displays. The latter technique tends to result in great swells of bronze. Deep-fried catfish, for example – a stack of monumental, Stonehenge-like pieces – bore no resemblance to the delicate filet in the lunchtime po'boy. Of course the fish was tasty and moist, once one hacked one's way through to the actual flesh – but that involved a fair amount of hacking. Just as hack-intensive was the fried chicken, a good-sized half bird.

Flank steak generally takes well to marinades, and Blue Jay's bath is a pungent mix of red-wine vinegar, garlic, and scallions, but we found the meat to be rather tough. It could have used a good pounding, and either way it would have been easier to deal with if it had been cut into thin slices instead of being served in a single slab. The meat loaf, on the other hand, was an unqualified success, rich and moist (with enough veal to provide that distinctive tenderness) and dressed with honest sage gravy.

Dinners come with a choice of biscuit or cornbread (the latter sweetened with a dusting of confectioners' sugar and perfumed with cinnamon) and of a side dish. These tend to be classically Southern – black-eyed peas, perhaps (tasty but a bit watery), or collard greens (tasty but a bit droopy). Desserts, on the other hand, are classically all-American (and, at $3.75, cheap), among them a remarkably dense fudge cake and an immense brownie drizzled with chocolate sauce and topped with whipped cream and a couple of scoops of vanilla ice cream.

The brownie, placed in the middle of our table of five, was immediately set upon from all sides, as if it were some luckless wildebeest on the African savanna that had been taken down by a pride of hungry lions. And at the end there was nothing left but a plate with a few dribblings of chocolate sauce: nothing to indicate that there a noble brownie had once unassailably reposed. We were sated and happy, but a little blue too, for we had been reminded that sometimes even the mighty can, and do, fall.