By Paul Reidinger

JUST IN TIME for summer: Winterland, which is not very wintry. The name is, instead, an homage to the music hall that once stood at the site, on Steiner between Post and Sutter; Winterland was the abandoned ice-skating rink (at last, a reason for the name) to which the music promoter Bill Graham moved his operations after closing Fillmore West in 1971.

That building met the wrecking ball more than 20 years ago, and in its place rose a shingled apartment block with a restaurant space (at the corner of Sutter) that has carried quite a few names in the past 10 years. For a brief time in the mid-1990s it was Nightshade before becoming a more spacious venue for Laghi, which swept in from the Outer Richmond. Laghi gave way to Julia McClaskey's Julia in 2002, but despite the chef's high profile (she had cooked at Universal Café and then Dine) and the splashiness of the opening, that restaurant closed in the spring of 2003.

I note this history because it suggests a pattern, unusual until the Bush seizure of power, of failing upward. The typical arc at troubled restaurant locations is downward, and a good example is the corner of Guerrero and 22nd Streets, where the spaces that once housed Flying Saucer and Le Trou are now occupied by credible, but by no means comparable, Vietnamese and Indian restaurants. But, like George Tenet receiving the Medal of Freedom for fouling up intelligence about Iraq, the tenants at Sutter and Steiner have grown fancier with each flop, and foam-wreathed Winterland (which opened in late March) must be considered an apotheosis.

Foam could be the trend, or obsession, that breaks the imaginative hold small plates have had on local kitchens for the past several years. It is a supple and unexpected garnish that usually adds more than it distracts, though it does sometimes look as if it has been scooped from the washing machine. One suspects that Winterland's chef, Vernon Morales, acquired much of his foam-mindedness from his stint at El Bulli, the world-renowned, and presumably sudsy, venue in Gerona, Spain. His basic culinary instincts seem to be international; a friend and I sat at dinner recently, trying and failing to pin a label on a cuisine that ranges from a cup of salmon roe buried under a snowdrift of tofu foam spritzed with caramel-soy sauce (as if a dog had been taking a stroll in a blizzard) to red snapper ($25) covered with rounds of chorizo and cooked "a la plancha."

The first dish was an amuse-bouche, the second a main course. In between we moved among a selection of first-rate first courses that were sizable enough to split and in their stylish variety lent themselves to a DIY tasting menu. We noted a discreet but definite tilt toward Asiatic accents, such as a ginger sauce atop sautéed skate wing ($12), with roasted kumquats on the side. Morales's kitchen is also adept at bringing into high relief unusual ingredients such as ramps; these were wild leeks, quite small and bulbous, and they appeared in two guises – pickled then split, and pureed into a bright green sauce – in support of seared scallops ($15), which also enjoyed reinforcement from white asparagus and black trumpet mushrooms.

One of the most involved of the first courses must be the Dungeness crab risotto ($16), atop which is nested a tempura zucchini blossom in a blanket of rust-colored, brinish sea-urchin foam. The risotto itself (made, we suspected with carnaroli rather than arborio rice, judging by the slightly svelte grains) was amply weighted with crab meat and greened up with dots that turned out to be spring peas. And one of the least involved is probably the octopus carpaccio ($14), neat rows of paper-thin, perfectly tender flesh squares scattered with caviar and mango dice.

The carpaccio suggests that the kitchen, for all its elaborative instincts, is just as at home with the straightforward – and if that's your preference, the bar menu will be to your liking. Although these dishes too speak in an Asian-inflected idiom, the directness mixed with a few homey favorites tells us we're still in California after all. Macaroni and cheese ($10), capped with a golden gratiné of bread crumbs, is just like Mom's, only better. Shrimp a la plancha ($8) are served with their heads on and in the tart company of pickled sweet-pepper strips. Fresh chickpeas ($5) are steamed and served in their husks, edamame-style. Even the little bar nibblables – black-pepper pappadum ($1), popcorn ($1), roasted almonds ($3) – are fabulously tasty and, as they are practically being given away, must be considered great deals.

The place doesn't look much different from its Julia days. (The big structural change occurred ahead of Julia's opening, when the convivially long open kitchen vanished behind a blank wall.) The rattan and billowing mocha fabric have been replaced by a color scheme of claret and gray (along with an odd screen of leather strips) that suggests a cross between Santa's corporate offices and an S-M club. And whatever the character of earlier crowds, the Winterland clientele – young, assured, dressed in lots of black – could just as well be at Circolo or Foreign Cinema. There is a whiff not only of SoMa but of SoMa before the great Nasdaq crash of March 2000, a SoMa where money grew on trees. I saw no money trees blooming in the vicinity of Winterland, though plenty of the regular kind were richly greening at the advent of (what else?) summer.

Winterland. 2101 Sutter (at Steiner), S.F. (415) 563-5025. Mon.-Thurs., 5:30-10:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11 p.m. Full bar. American Express, Carte Blanche, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Moderately noisy. Wheelchair accessible.