By Paul Reidinger

A MEMORY: taking my parents to dinner at the Slow Club, January 1996. The street scene is dark and very Jack the Ripper, the mercury glow of street lamps blurred by cold, sinister ground fog. Across the street is the Muni bus barn, with trolleys rolling in for the night like circus animals retiring to their hay-lined stalls after the three-ring show. We step inside (the restaurant, not the bus barn) to a blast of noise, an emulsion of music and alcohol-slicked voices, rising and falling and rising again, with the basic trend line upward, like the NASDAQ's. The long bar at the rear is lined with darkly intense people: dot-commers, most likely, though that term does not quite exist yet. It is tapas night, and that is my mistake. My father doesn't like little bits of food. He does like Rosa's tamale, though (we order one, then several more after the first passes muster), and the different kinds of beer. Impressions (mine): the place is misnamed; there is nothing slow about it. On the other hand, it is clubby in a glamorously furtive way.

More recent memory: dinner at the Slow Club on a Saturday evening, early. No parents this time, no fog and the dining room as yet largely unfilled – the mood calm, perhaps even slow – though a candle still flickers on each table and a formidable array of barflies still loiter at the rear. Could it be like Cheers and no one ever leaves? We know they aren't there waiting for their reserved tables to open up, because the Slow Club doesn't take reservations. It has always been so.

And yet the fingers of change do touch even the hip. The Slow Club certainly thrived in its position at the epicenter of the dot-com revolution, but its own journey has been one of – if the theocrats among us will permit me a moment of heresy – evolution. It still looks much the same as it did nine years ago; the kitchen is still a tiny, drama-filled space just inside the front door (there is also a back door – really a side door, quite convenient for barflies), and the cross of steel girders that reinforce the long Hampshire Street wall are both a flourish of industrial style and a reminder that when the restaurant opened in 1991 the Loma Prieta earthquake was still fresh in the collective memory.

Although chef Sante Salvoni's brief menu card (a scroll of textured paper pinned to a petite clipboard, like a specimen from a butterfly collection) evokes the tapas spirit of yesteryear by not distinguishing between starters and main dishes, in fact there is such a distinction, discernible in the prices. First courses, such as a cold but sensual beet-mâche salad ($7.50), with goat cheese and walnuts, hover below $10, while the big plates are nearer to $20. In fact a flatiron steak, grilled medium rare and served with grilled matsukake mushrooms and roasted root vegetables (fingerling potatoes, turnips, and carrots) in a red wine reduction, was exactly $20. And only slightly less (at $18) was an ahi steak grilled rare, dabbed with peach-colored pimenton aioli, and plated atop grilled fennel and escarole. In keeping with our theme of evolution, there are also transitional items in the gastronomic record, among them a quite fabulous flat bread (a.k.a. pizza, $10) topped with marinated prawns, garlic, montasio cheese (mild and white, made from cow's milk in the Italian Alps), and melted leeks.

While many restaurants have abandoned their lunch service in recent years, the Slow Club positively throbs with life at midday. Do the crowds flock because the food is so good, or is the food so good because the crowds flock? The answer, surely, must be both; that is symbiosis. I was particularly infatuated with the french fries that were served with a well-seasoned, nicely browned turkey burger ($8.50); they seemed to have been given a coating – a light batter of some sort? – that not only lent them a slight knobbiness but enhanced the crisp-tender dynamic. They were so good that they nearly overshadowed the worthy turkey burger. The bad turkey burger is pretty much a given in life, like Planck's constant, which makes finding a good one all the more delightful. I was also unable to find a fault in the penne ($9), pasta quills served in a shallow bowl with shreds of grilled chicken breast, arugula, minced garlic, chili flakes, lemon zest, and grana padano (a close, less rarefied, relation of Parmesan cheese). One big reason chefs love pasta as much as eaters do is because it accepts improvisations like this one – which has no name and doesn't need one – so smoothly and naturally.

For a brief moment – an instant, a flash – I thought I found a flaw in the dark chocolate mousse cake ($6.50), a beaky slice served with a small globe of hazelnut ice cream. The cake's first impression was one of chalkiness, as if it had just been wheeled from the pastry morgue. But then, like good cognac, the cake's flavor opened and deepened, sounding a mystic chord of memory, though I had no memory of having eaten it before.

Slow Club. 2501 Mariposa (at Hampshire), S.F. (415) 241-9390. Pastries and coffee: Mon.-Fri., 7-11 a.m. Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.-Thurs., 6:30-10 p.m.; Fri., 6:30-11 p.m.; Sat., 6-11 p.m. Brunch: Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Full bar. MasterCard, Visa. Noisy. Wheelchair accessible.