By Paul Reidinger

DOES GERALD HIRIGOYEN have a show on the Food Network yet? If so, I haven't seen it – but then I couldn't have, because I don't watch the Food Network. On those rare occasions when I glancingly channel-surf through, the screen fills with Emeril, and I cover my ears and surf on. Yet if Hirigoyen were there, I would stop and watch, and not just because he bears some resemblance to his fellow Frenchman Jacques Pépin. No, I would watch because I would be glad to see that some TV executive had finally figured out the need for Spanish cuisine to find its media icon – the familiar figure who introduces, explains, cajoles, and soothes.

We have had such figures in French and Italian cooking over the years: the late Julia Child and Pierre Franey spring immediately to mind, as do Marcella Hazan and Mary Anne Esposito. But Spain under Franco was isolated for the better part of four decades, and while the political frost melted a generation ago and urban America is quite familiar with tapas, paella, and jamón serrano (and ibérico), there has been no widely known spreader of Spanish-food gospel to the American pop-cult masses.

Hirigoyen, of course, could be disqualified as a candidate for this as-yet-unfilled post on the threshold ground that he isn't even Spanish. But because he grew up in the Basque town of Bayonne, he has enjoyed a kind of backdoor entrée into the cuisines of the peninsular, and insular, land beyond the Pyrenees. His restaurants in San Francisco (Fringale and Piperade, which began life in the mid-1990s as Pastis) have always had Basque inflections even when, as in the case of Fringale, the basic motif was French. But his new restaurant, Bocadillos ("Sandwiches," with a connotation of petiteness), which recently opened in the shadow of the Transamerica Building, is a real crossing of the border into Spain, not by the back door but the front.

Bocadillos serves bocadillos, of course. They are prepared with what look like little hamburger buns, come two to an order, divide into realms of grilled and ungrilled, and make a good Financial District lunch, especially with a cup of soup. (A pair of bocadillos costs $7.50; a pair with soup costs $11.) The ungrilled bocadillos strike unmistakably Spanish poses: there is chorizo (in slices of prosciutto-like thinness) buffered with walnut spread and parsley; there is garlicky, Spam-like Catalan sausage festooned with arugula and shaved manchego cheese; there is a classic Mediterranean array of roasted vegetables – eggplant, zucchini, and mushroom. The grilled bocadillos seem more American, in the main – ham and cheese; turkey, brie, and cranberry – though a "double cheese" edition (of cheddar and Jack) adds tomato and basil for an Italian gloss.

While the bocadillos are the restaurant's marquee items, they are not the stars of the menu. These emerge in the evening, when the menu tilts toward tapas. Hirigoyen is not exactly trendsetting in this respect, small plates having become pervasive to the point of cliché, but his kitchen executes its Iberian repertoire with precision and panache. There is even the occasional startling flourish, such as the moscatel-chile vinaigrette that accompanies the breaded and fried sardines ($8); it is orange-thick and sweet-hot, like a gooey sauce in a Chinese restaurant.

No tapas menu with pretensions to authenticity would be complete without boquerones, the famous white anchovies of Spain. Bocadillos uses the filets ($3) almost like prosciutto, wrapping them around skewers of olive, button mushroom, and artichoke heart. These are tasty but fairly slight (as befits their designation as "pinxtos"), so if you can contrive to have your order of patatas bravas ($5) – crusty halves of roasted fingerling potatoes, served with a peppery romesco sauce – reach the table at the same time, you will have achieved an enviable balance.

The plates vary considerably in size, and it is not always possible to judge by price what might be hefty and what not. Tuna carpaccio ($10), for instance – garnished with piment d'espelette and tomato confit and wreathed with arugula – vanished with dismaying haste, but a salad of garbanzo beans and corn ($5) lasted us all the way to dessert. We found that combination to be slightly too sweet, incidentally, despite a wealth of minced cilantro; a better savory balance turned up in a salad of roasted red peppers ($8) with cabrales (a peppery Spanish blue cheese) and slivers of toasted almond.

The restaurant occupies the ground floor of a beautiful old Gold Coast building (home of the original Black Cat), and the interior makeover reflects the European urban sensibility of juxtaposing the ancient with the ultramodern, of installing Benetton shops in 14th-century palazzos. The basic tone is loft meets restaurant; the space is open and angular, the color scheme an early-autumn blend of sage, tangerine, and aubergine, and the furnishings a familiar, high-chic industrial mix of steel and wood. It is all very beautiful and artfully muted, but I found it to be a little short on warmth and intimacy and a little heavy on self-conscious style.

On the other hand, it might make an appealing set for a TV show in which Spanish food finally takes on a popular face and the citizenry of cableland finally learns how to pronounce bocadillo and perhaps even make one.

Bocadillos. 710 Montgomery (at Washington), S.F. (415) 982-2622. Mon.-Fri., 7 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat., 5-11 p.m. Wine and beer. MasterCard, Visa. Noisy. Wheelchair accessible.