Secrets of the middle sea

By Paul Reidinger

ALONG THE QUAYS of most Mediterranean port cities you will find, most mornings, a fish market, a veritable carnival of colorful, weirdly shaped creatures from the deep, arrayed on beds of ice as if trawled from some Day-Glo nightmare. Northern California has its own maritime glories, of course – king salmon, petrale sole, Dungeness crab, halibut, oysters (cultivated and of Japanese provenance) – but they are far fewer in number and far less spectacularly variegated, far less weird, than the haul from the shallower, warmer, calmer, and more nook-rich mare nostrum.

Since the Mediterranean seafood cook must deal with considerably more than steaks or filets of firm, white-fleshed fish, the means and methods of preparation are necessarily wider. We like our petrale sole breaded and sautéed, for instance, our crab steamed (and served cracked, with melted butter), our salmon grilled, our oysters raw; we tend to the simple and straightforward, relying on the inherent appeal of the ingredients. These are the sorts of things you will find at the typical California seafood grill – Sam's, say, at the corner of Bush Street and Belden Place. But stroll north along Belden and you will pass Plouf (seafood with French twists) en route to Brindisi Cucina di Mare, a new place (in a much-flipped space) that offers a tutorial in the witty invention Italian chefs can bring to the bounty of the sea.

There's no need to hurry: Belden, an alley lined from end to end with restaurants each of which has a large al fresco operation on the pavement (I would like to believe there are cobblestones, but that is just my romantic imagination), is like a slice of some gracious European city fitted into our very own Financial District. It rewards dawdling, though you do have to fend off the hawkings of hosts who will shamelessly spirit you into their places if you aren't careful. But eventually you will look across Pine Street and see the Bank of America tower, as dark and menacing as Sauron's Barad-dûr, and you will know it is time to turn right, into the haven of Brindisi (accented, counterintuitively, on the first syllable).

Inside: warmth. Terra-cotta floors, an exposed brick wall, a finely striped fabric on the banquettes. Long ago (circa 1996) this was a restaurant called Fizz, and it had a huge, chilly enclosed courtyard. The courtyard, which resembled an empty swimming pool, seems to have disappeared; the chill too. Stepping into Brindisi is like warming your hands over a campfire on a cool spring evening.

The highest praise I can offer to chef Fabrizio Protopapa is that I came away from eating his food filled with ideas for my own kitchen. He is big on simple salads and terrines – preparations that (apart from their appeal to home chefs who face some resistance in serving seafood) are naturally suited to today's omnipresent small-plate format and to sharing. His octopus terrine ($9) isn't quite a conventional terrine – a layering – but it is an attractive mishmash of chopped squid tossed with black olives and frisée in plenty of olive oil. A more traditional terrine is the terrina di verdure ($5), with its bedrock layer of roasted red pepper overlaid with sedimentary strips of breaded eggplant and zipped up with capers and balsamic vinegar.

A variant on the octopus terrine is the insalata di mare ($9.50), which brings (shelled) prawns and chunks of cuttlefish into the mix. Insalata di sgombro ($11), meanwhile, makes short work of the pesky, oily mackerel by grilling the fish, mashing it with lemon and olive oil into something like tuna salad, and plating it on a bed of peppery wild arugula, whose bite (along with the lemon's acid) help tame the mackerel's tendency to be overassertively fishy.

Many excellent dishes have no connection with the sea at all. There is a Salento-style lentil soup ($4) – more a stew than a soup, really, with a liberal squirt of extra-virgin olive oil on top – and a most improbable pasta course of taglierini ($6) tossed with chickpeas and topped with little stubs of crisp noodles. The dish looked as bland as it sounded – a wash of off-white and beige, like laundry waiting in the hamper for a rendezvous with bleach – but it turned out to be a picnic of textures and developed a subtly nutty flavor we could not get enough of.

Less subtle but just as good was a plate of house-made orecchiete ($7), the pasta shells ("little ears," literally) soft like gnocchi and tossed with a lively mix of rapini, garlic, and anchovies, with bread crumbs sprinkled over the top for that gratin effect. And while there is no pasta all'arabbiata on the menu, there is a reasonable facsimile in the zuppetta di vongole ($10), in which steamed manila clams are served in a smoky-spicy broth of white wine, pureed tomato, and chilis. The mollusks disappeared in short order, but we kept after the broth with chunks of bread until the bowl was dry.

Brindisi has grappa ($7 for a delightfully fruity moscato distillation), which I am tempted to say is all you need to know about the dessert menu. It was certainly all I needed to know. But there is also a fine panna cotta ($7); it is served in a large square topped with strawberry sauce and has a pleasant tartness I associate with Delfina's buttermilk version. You might say that for lively panna cotta, buttermilk is the key, if not the quay.