By Paul Reidinger

THE BAY AREA , for all its charms, is one of those places where worst-case scenarios – earthquakes, mudslides, fires – do have a way of playing out. Years ago, mindful of these contingencies, we laid in some bottled water and some canned food; we made sure we had Band-Aids and fresh batteries for the flashlights. Time passed, dust gathered on the water bottles until I finally emptied them into the birdbath and recycled the plastic cylinders, the flashlight batteries were conscripted for other purposes, disaster did not strike.

Yet even as our sky-is-falling emergency planning unraveled per the remorseless laws of entropy and denial, other woes arrived we hadn't even thought to plan for. Last year our neighborhood Chinese restaurant closed. I had never heard of such a thing. Not only did it close, but the building was totally, utterly gutted. It was as if the place had never been, and my memories of popping in and always being welcomed and almost always having hot-and-sour soup and orange beef with a Tsing-Tao beer dimmed immediately, like a dream slipping away as one awakes.

It is bad, of course, to have your memories dimmed, but it is a crisis to lose your neighborhood Chinese restaurant. For what will you do when the desire for Chinese food strikes, as sooner or later it must? You will become a vagabond, a hermit crab seeking shelter in some other neighborhood's Chinese restaurant. Luckily our town is full of neighborhoods and Chinese restaurants; it is also full of public transit options. And when you align these various stars, you might very well find yourself standing at the threshold of Lucky Time, a Chinese – and Vietnamese – spot just steps from Muni's mighty convergence at Market and Church.

About the only public transit option missing at this intersection is BART. But there is a Muni underground station, the J Church line (which surfaces just behind the Safeway across the street and stops at 14th Street), the N Judah line (ditto, though it stops at Fillmore and Duboce, a few moments' walk), and the F Market streetcar line. Also various buses, which I have trouble keeping track of. As an added incentive, parking in the area is a miserable proposition; hence the valets at nearby Home, strutting like the palace guard.

Lucky Time (which has been there a while but passed to new ownership late last year) isn't really a valet sort of place, but it's nicer inside – with long horizontal mirrors and a whiff of art deco style – than the rather blah street face implies. As at many Chinese places, take-out activity is noticeable and continual, with staff hoofing large brown-paper bags from the kitchen to the host's station and people popping in for them. But table service does not suffer; the staff's sense of timing is good, neither rushed nor laggardly, and the food arrives at comfortable intervals.

The menu divides pretty cleanly between Chinese and Vietnamese choices, with a slight preponderance of the former. (The menu, in fact, is more cleanly divided than are China and Vietnam, whose long and often unfriendly dance is a principal theme of Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake, probably the single most revealing book about the last futile war we launched in a place we had no clue about.) The main twist is the offering of dim sum, the little steamed buns (usually filled with pork or seafood) that make a lovely weekend brunch or a shared starter for a weekday lunch but at Lucky Time are always available. Steamed dumplings filled with barbecue pork ($2.80 for three) powerfully reminded me of the Japanese bao we obsessively ate late every night as college freshmen, though those were sealed into perfect hemispheres while Lucky Time's are split open on top, like flower buds beginning to bloom, with the faintly sweet-sauced meat inside visible to the naked eye.

Pork is a principal ingredient of Chinese cooking (owing no doubt to the comparative ease of raising pigs: they are non-fussy eaters and wildly prolific), which means, for the non-pork eater, that considerable swaths of Lucky Time's menu are verboten. But there are consolations, such as the almost jerkylike strips of tea-smoked chicken in a salad accompanying shrimp in lobster sauce ($13). The main dish wasn't bad, either: shelled shrimp swimming in a thick, peppery sauce of (in addition to lobster) fermented black beans, onions, and green bell pepper.

Seafood sizzling rice soup ($6.50) is prepared tableside, the three hot rice wafers hissing as they are plunged into a broth thick with bok choy, mushrooms, and florets of broccoli and cauliflower. We liked the enactment of the little drama, of course, but even more we liked the made-to-order freshness, since one of the blights of Chinese food in this country has become the steam tray.

Kung pao chicken ($7.50): pretty ordinary, but even ordinary kung pao chicken is good, and the serving size is immense, including a generous handful of peanuts. Just as big (from the Vietnamese lunch menu) are a pair of rice-noodle bowls, of grilled pork and grilled shrimp, each $5.50 and including bonus lengths of deep-fried egg roll nested at the rim of each bowl and a seasoning palette of mint and nuoc cham – the ponzu-like blend of fish sauce (for salt), sugar, lemon juice, garlic, and chiles. If you can finish all that in one sitting, you would have to consider yourself – in every sense of the word – lucky.

Lucky Time Restaurant. 708 14th St. (at Church), S.F. (415) 861-2682. Sun.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible.