By Paul Reidinger

WE KNOW THAT restaurants can be too big – Exhibit A: Entros, the futuristic, drafty barn from dot-com days – but can they also be too small? This question might first have crossed my mind in the early 1990s while we were having dinner at Gravity Spot, a place next to Saigon Saigon on Valencia that seemed to be about the size of a walk-in broom closet and was set with two or three tables for two. The menu was brief and fixed, and the chef cooked everything up for you in his little open kitchen a few steps away. It was as if he had personally invited you to dinner. The food was excellent, the experience one of surpassing intimacy, but I left wondering how he could ever make a go of it.

He didn't – of course, sadly. Gravity Spot imploded, and the place briefly morphed into the Pour House before becoming Ponte Vecchio, whose somewhat longer run surely had much to do with the foot traffic that by the late 1990s had grown heavy along suddenly restaurant-rich Valencia from 16th to 24th Streets. The current entrant in the Gravity Spot space opened earlier this year as Bistro Annex, a name that suggests both the ancillary nature of the setting and the restaurant's link to Watercress a few doors away. But not withstanding an ownership connection, Bistro Annex is not an extension of Watercress; the latter serves fairly conservative East-West fusion-ish food (with emphasis on West) in surroundings of muted bourgeois style, while the former serves quite traditional Franco-Cal-Ital dishes in romantically tight quarters worthy of one's favorite boîte in the Marais.

One lesson that plainly has been learned from the Gravity Spot experience is that if you are a San Francisco restaurant with hopes of surviving more than a few days, you will have to have more than two tables. Bistro Annex will never be described as spacious, but enough seats have been stuffed in the narrow dining area – with room for at least a dozen patrons, I would guess – to make it feel like a real restaurant. I wonder, on the other hand, about the reddish-orange paint scheme, which, though warm, calls attention to itself in a way that emphasizes the corridor-like narrowness of the room.

Cramped or cozy, people pour in, drawn quite likely by the prices. Most of the dinnertime main courses are under $10, and you could have a proper three-course French dinner for about $20, plus tax and tip. Among the most expensive items on the menu is a seafood paella ($10.95). Its virtues include coins of sausage (for a bit of extra punch) and a simmering in seafood broth, though the rice simmered in that broth was a long-grain variety (hence not quite authentic), and there was a conspicuous dearth of saffron, which left the rice deathly white. A better buy for the $10.95 would be the gnocchi with prawns in romesco sauce, a gleamingly thick concoction (original to Tarragona, Spain) of tomatoes, garlic, pulverized nuts, chilies, vinegar, and stale bread.

Better yet would be the herb-roasted chicken ($9.95), a half bird with skin the color of weathered brass and intensely flavorful meat whose juiciness we found to be not at all greasy. You will not turn up a better roasted chicken in the city, and I suspect that is because Bistro Annex slow-roasts its birds. A plus, for me at least, is that the chicken is served without potatoes, bread salad, or any of the other traditional starches – just a mound of sautéed asparagus, broccoli, and julienne red bell pepper.

There are dishes that could use some work. A classic Italian summer salad of tomato slices, mozzarella, and basil leaves ($6) probably shouldn't even be offered until summer, given the anemia of out-of-season tomatoes – but if one is determined to serve such tomatoes, at least sprinkle them with a little salt so they don't seem quite so moribund. A little salt wouldn't hurt the French onion soup ($5.95), either; in its unsalted state it was almost cloyingly sweet and seemed, in addition, to have been made with chicken rather than beef stock, which left it a little light in the loafers.

It is not against the law to use canned tuna in salade Niçoise, but $9.95 seems steep for such a pedestrian approach. (The other players on the plate – Yukon gold potatoes, black olives, and mixed lettuces – aren't exactly bank busters.) And cassoulet ($10.95), while tasty, is really not worthy of the name, having been thrown together from kidney – not white – beans, some slices of sausage, a few hunks of roast pork, and a rust-colored sauce. One could not help noticing a distinct similarity to Van Kamp's canned pork and beans.

Luckily even the worst of these dishes aren't horrendous, just undistinguished. And they are redeemed by intermittent outbursts of simple French finery: a plate of charcuterie ($6.50), say, with black-pepper country pâté, truffle mousse, and duck-and-pork rillette; or a fabulous, not-too-sweet crème brûlée ($4.50) scented with orange. That kind of unaffected cooking always hits the spot.

Bistro Annex. 1136 Valencia (at 23rd St.), S.F. (415) 648-9020. Dinner: nightly, 5:30-9:30 p.m. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Noisy. Wheelchair accessible.