Requiem

By Paul Reidinger

RESTAURANTS ARE LIKE ships in this sense: They tend to be launched with great fanfare, with parties and press releases and champagne, and to disappear with none. Yes, the occasional restaurant does shuffle off the mortal coil of business with a graceful ceremony or ceremonial interval – Joyce Goldstein's celebrated Square One made one such stylish exit, in 1996, after a 12-year run – but more often the end is ignominious and vague, like the sinking of a transoceanic liner in midpassage whose unexpected exit leaves behind some bobbing flotsam and a haze of rumor and bewilderment.

Restaurant writers contribute to, and, more to the point, are largely trapped by, the imbalance of this dynamic. We pounce on and perseverate about the new and, to a lesser extent, the renewed, while making the occasional foray to long-running establishments, in token acknowledgment that newness is not all. But for places that go under, it's as if they never existed in the first place; they are airbrushed out of our awareness, like those members of Stalin's Politburo who fell into disgrace and found their images removed from official photographs and their actual persons removed to gulags, if not machine-gunned in the night. The eulogy is a highly underrepresented form in restaurant writing, and perhaps this is as it should be, since restaurant patrons are overwhelmingly interested in what is and what might be – the life to come – rather than what was. And yet ...

By the time these words are published, an excellent little restaurant called Essence of India will have closed, or be about to close, its license being transferred this week to a new owner who will open a Moroccan restaurant called Zagora in the distinguished space. (Previous tenants include Le Trou, Moa Room, and NeO.) Essence of India co-owner-chef Mostafa Syed is planning to move to Dallas or "someplace cheaper," he told me, where he can afford to raise his three children. (Co-owner Anja Paudel will remain here, she said, and "look for a job.") Restaurant patrons will adjust, as they always do, since to them carnage and upheaval among the city's eating establishments are as unremarkable as car-bombed body parts in the street are to today's Baghdadis. Restaurant writers will modify their lists, adding a place and striking another they might have meant to get to but didn't reach before the ship sailed, or foundered.

I had been aware of Essence of India for at least a year, since the corner of Guerrero and 22nd is an important junction on the highways and byways of my life, and I had even been reassured by a south-Asian-food-savvy friend that its cooking was unusually good. But I made a blithe assumption: that time was not an issue, that an Indian – or indeed any so-called ethnic – restaurant was bound to be more durable than a place that catered to yuppies, post-dot-commers, trendoids, and other populations subject to boredom, restlessness, and attention deficit disorder. So Essence of India was on my list, but other entrants, for a variety of reasons, made greater claims on my attention, and I did not finally get around to going there until a warm weekend evening toward the end of September, and we were so hungry that I took no notice of the application-for-ownership-change sign hung in the front window.

Inside, the basic layout was little changed from the Le Trou days – rows of tables marching front to back along either wall, with the middle of the room left largely open – but the upholstery had been freshened with a fabric of claret and gold, and the once stark-white walls had been painted with sunrise ripples of yellow, tangerine, and blue. A splendid fragrance of spice filled the air, and we were quickly seated.

As much as I love Indian food, I can't say I know a great deal about it, but I know enough to be wary of using the word "Indian" to describe the many cuisines of a sprawling and populous subcontinent. It would be going too far to say that Essence of India's menu constituted a true education in the foods of India, but whoever wrote it did bother to include some basic and useful information, such as that vindaloo dishes (spicy!) originated in the onetime Portuguese colony of Goa, that "bhuna" dishes are made with stir-fried spices moistened with water, and that sagwalas, like their near relation saag paneer ($7.95), bring together spiced, chopped spinach with some kind of protein – cheese in saag paneer; chicken, lamb, or prawn ($8.95-$10.95) in the sagwalas.

We wandered happily among these and other courses, pausing from time to time to sample an old friend, such as chana masala ($6.95), well-seasoned garbanzo beans, before moving on to such revelations as chicken makhanwala ($12.95), shreds of boneless tandoori-roasted chicken finished in a creamy sauce of tomato and butter that surely would have sent Chicken Tikka Masala Man into transports of pleasure. The dal ($5.95) was studded with cilantro and ginger, the pakoras ($3.95) – vegetable fritters – were crisp and plainly just out of the fryer. Among the many reasons to mourn Essence of India's passing is, not least, the fact that everything seems to have been made to order – no slinging preprepared stuff out of steam trays, even if that means people have endure a longer wait for their food than the experience of all-you-can-eat Indian buffets might have conditioned them for.

An excellent frustration-killer in such situations is Taj Mahal beer, which comes in a colossal bottle (and a smaller one too, for patient sorts). As for this impatient sort, he left the restaurant impressed, sated, slightly buzzed, and – I want to say happy but must make do with wistful, and for good.

Essence of India. 1007 Guerrero (at 22nd St.), SF. (415) 282-6444. Sun.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible.