Dream Thai

By Paul Reidinger

JUST AS DREAMS have a way of evaporating in the warm sunlight of wakefulness, so too does one's sense of old buildings – of a neighborhood's topography – have a way vanishing under the onslaught of new construction. It is a rare trip through the Mission District these days that does not have me marveling at some bundle of lofts that seems to have popped up overnight, like wildflowers after a spring rainfall, while at the same time struggling to recall what had stood on the spot before.

Rare does not mean never, of course, and I did remember, as we walked toward Baku de Thai on a warm October evening, the dreary housing project that had long stood across the street from the restaurant, at the corner of Valencia and 15th Street: a block's worth of prisony-looking buildings ("Valencia Gardens" was the surreal name) that cast a certain pall over the vicinity. That complex is gone now, replaced by some other massive project (low-cost housing?) still framed by scaffolding but not quite as ominous as its predecessor. And though we cannot know for certain that Baku de Thai owes its birth to the excision of a nearby eyesore, it is pretty obvious that the stretch of Valencia between 16th Street and the new freeway overpass is getting a makeover of some intensity.

One clue: shiny new cars parked all over the place on a Saturday evening. Another: snazzier restaurants. The Window has reopened a half-block away, and the corner's longtime, and comfortably shabby, Thai restaurant whose name escapes me became Mi Lindo Yucatán (practicing "the art of Mayan cuisine") a few years ago; there is now a sibling MLY on 24th Street in Noe Valley. If we consider Baku de Thai as that closed Thai place's successor in interest, we have a clear idea of which way the socioeconomic life of the neighborhood is going. Baku is way designed, from the poured-concrete host's podium just inside the front door (I've never seen anything quite like it), flanked by a large bust of the Buddha, to the firmament of halogen spot-lighting overhead and the thumpy music that plays day and night, as at the ritzier sort of health club. There are unmistakable elements of nightclub and lounge at work here, and the overall aesthetic reminds me of that of the onetime Butterfly Lounge, now Levende, which is just a few blocks away, at Mission and Duboce.

The food – Thai-French fusion, per the description on the Web site – also suggests an upscalish tendency and further reminds us that Thailand, like Vietnam, once belonged to French Indochina. But the name "Baku" threw me; isn't Baku the capital of distant, and oil-rich, Azerbaijan? It is, but it is also a mythical creature of the Far East that is said to eat people's bad dreams. Put me down! And then let's have a nibble or two, starting with, say, beef salad ($6.95), which distinguishes itself from many others around town by virtue of its exquisitely smoky, tender, just-off-the-grill flaps of meat. We noted quarters of tomato too, and chunks of cucumber, and, of course, the tangy Thai vinaigrette (of rice vinegar and fish sauce, among other components) was fabulous – but all the more so for absorbing the smoky scent of the meat.

Traditionalists need not panic: The kitchen offers an abundance of Thai standards, among them a well-seasoned, and sizable, seafood pad see eew ($7.95) – wide and slightly sticky rice noodles with prawns and mussels; no broccoli, though – and Thai spicy noodles ($6.95), a close relation, with the same wide noodles, along with chunks of chicken and tofu.

At the same time, there are such distinctly un-Thai offerings as butternut squash soup piped with crème fraîche, which for us was served at the outset of a remarkably high-value fixed-price dinner menu of four courses for $12.95. The catch here is that you have to pay your visit between 5 and 7:30 in the evening – not an issue for theatergoers or Florida pensioners, perhaps a bit more complicated for other denizens of the Mission. But for those of us who like and cannot resist the prix fixe, this has to be one of the best deals in town, even with the narrow time window.

Soup is a brilliant opening in these kinds of scenarios because it isn't made to order and will last and linger while subsequent courses are made to order, as is the case at Baku. Both salmon rolls (cigars of salmon meat and spinach in crisp phyllo wrappers) and veggie egg rolls (stuffed with silver noodles and shreds of carrot, cabbage, and daikon) were delicately crisp and still radiated a faint glow of heat from the deep frier, and there was a pleasant lull (pleasantly mediated by Phuket Thai beer) before the main dishes arrived: a heap of tender lamb cubes in a red-curry coconut sauce, with saffron jasmine rice and a chutney of fuji apples; and pad Thai, with eggs, ground peanuts, bean cake, chicken, and shrimp.

Desserts are far above average for local Thai restaurants and indeed can hold their own with many a California-cuisine place. A ginger crème brûlee tasted tinglingly of fresh ginger, and chocolate brownies (with coffee crème anglaise) seemed to have been laced with irregular chunks of chocolate and left us both exclaiming. Pretty dreamy.

Baku de Thai. 400 Valencia (at 15th St.), SF. (415) 437-4788. Daily, 11 p.m.-2 a.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Moderately noisy. Wheelchair accessible.