By Paul Reidinger

IT WOULD TAKE a heart of stone to read travelers' accounts of modern Vietnam and not feel, somehow, a pulse of hope. Around the lakes of central Hanoi (where a young John McCain was dunked after his warplane was shot from the skies in the late 1960s), people now jog and eat lunch amid handsome landscaping; there and elsewhere in the land, tourism thrives, and coffee is grown for export. This last, I must say, gives a slight shiver, for Vietnam, as a neighbor and longtime adjunct of China, is tea country. Coffee, like bread, seems French, and while Vietnam had more than a century's colonial experience of the French and is surely one of the most Frenchified nations in Asia, one would not care to go there and find the hotels serving brioche and café au lait, though I suppose many do.

The absence or presence of bread is, in fact, one of the more conspicuous lines of demarcation between Asian and European restaurants in this city. If you pop into any French or Italian place, any German or Polish or Hungarian place, any American place, you will almost certainly find yourself peering into a basket of complimentary bread in short order. Most high-end Chinese and Vietnamese and Thai places, by contrast, don't have bread to bring you even if you ask for it.

Among the chief exceptions to this rule is the Vietnamese sandwich, which is basically a split baguette laden with Vietnamese-style meat (lemongrass beef, et cetera), along with shredded carrot, fine rice noodles, nuoc nam, and other such accents typical of Indochina. Vietnamese sandwiches have been a vogue item hereabouts for several years (in part, no doubt, because of their modest cost), and while they can be had at all sorts of places around town, there is probably no better place to sample them than New Loi's, a combination sandwich shop, pho house, and family-style Vietnamese restaurant at the confluence of the Taraval Street restaurant row and 19th Avenue, that ever-flowing river of automotive traffic between the peninsula and the Golden Gate Bridge.

New Loi's represents no challenge to such spots as Dragonfly or the Slanted Door. It has no pretensions to "contemporary" or "California-Vietnamese" cooking, yet the food is fresh and vibrant, the look handsome in its simple way, and the spirit of the place unmistakably festive. And your options, if not exactly upscale, are broad enough to make satisfaction likely, even if you are part of an opinionatedly heterogeneous group.

We (a small group of varied opinionatedness) opened dinner with a set of sandwiches – five-spice chicken and barbecue pork ($2.50 each, and how cheap is that?) – in part from curiosity but mainly because we were ravenous. And they did not disappoint; for that kind of money I suspected they might turn out to be dainty, fingery little things, like the cucumber sandwiches at an English tea, but they turned out to be Subway-size, with tender, well-seasoned meats and – even better – creamy-soft fresh French bread. As with so many other sublime foods, fresh bread's season is brief, often lasting only a few hours. After that, you are looking at panzanella or bread crumbs, but if you hit the window, you will be transported. New Loi's is careful about keeping this window open. (There is also a barbecue beef sandwich, also good but mysteriously costing, at $2.75, an extra quarter. The pork is better anyway.)

The rest of the evening menu is one of those classic Asian-restaurant multipage potpourris that, like cable TV and Baskin-Robbins, offer so many choices as to induce headache. Luckily we found several set menus, including one for two people ($19.95) that ran to five courses. The first was a round of imperial rolls, deep-fried but worth the calorie penalty. Then: soup. We were promised a minced-seafood variety but were served what seemed to be an egg-drop soup with flecks of shiitake mushroom. No matter.

My companion did not care for the main dish, a salmon filet bathed in a slightly sweet-acrid sauce of garlic and chili. It would have helped if the large plate of garlic noodles had come with the salmon or at least followed not long after; instead, because of the swelling crowd, the noodles came limping along about 10 minutes late, which made them, essentially, the starch course despite their tastiness. By the end of that, we were relieved that dessert consisted perfunctorily of banana ice cream, served in little glass cups like dwarf champagne coupes.

All around us: a potpourri of table-seekers (plenty of families with small children) and a potpourri of dishes flying from the kitchen. I did not see anyone enjoying the papaya-beef salad ($6.25) – shreds of papaya and carrot overlain by flaps of grilled meat – and I could not be sure whether any of the soup tureens contained the chicken noodle ($5.25), a wallop of intense broth, strips of grilled boneless bird, bamboo shoots, fresh mint, and a thick carpet of vermicelli, that puts to shame the canned Campbell's concoction with which it shares a name. It's the kind of soup whose last drops you like to mop up with bread, if you have any. Tip: Save some of that sandwich! New Loi's Vietnamese Restaurant. 890 Taraval (at 19th Ave.), SF. (415) 566-2985. Daily, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Noisy if full. Wheelchair accessible.