dine

By Paul Reidinger

AS A HOSTILE connoisseur of noise, I am helplessly quick in taking the measure – in taking soundings, we might say – of new restaurant environments. Far too often this is a grim procedure. Are we dealing with din, roar, cacophony? Is there music, offensively thumpy, too loud, quite unnecessary? Do hard surfaces amplify the problem, as it were?

Hush, incidentally, is not an ideal, at least not for restaurants, at least not for me. Hush is lovely for reading, or for finding in the garden early on a warm Sunday morning in autumn, paper and a cup of coffee in hand. But no one wants to have dinner at a funeral parlor, nor amid some group of wan high-school seniors taking their SATs for the second time under the stern gaze of proctors. The hum of human conviviality, of friendly and attentive bustle, is one of the enduring attractions of going out to eat; we are warmed by the presence and the sounds of others.

At the risk of sounding like a crank, I will say that music in any dining room is inappropriate and invasive – quite as bad, in its way, as a blaring television. The only music this diner really wants to hear is that of the voices elsewhere at the table, with muted choruses rising from other tables, punctuated by euphonies of sizzle and clatter flowing from the kitchen offstage. Properly to listen to music requires our full attention; hence all the venues built for this very purpose. If we want to hear Carly Simon, we will make the arrangements, taking care perhaps to eat beforehand at a place near the relevant auditorium; we do not need to hear her wailing from overtaxed speakers mounted high on the walls of some restaurant while we try to enjoy our veal saltimbocca.

One notices, at the born-again Gold Mirror, a persistent effervescence of sound that has to do with the restaurant's persistent busyness and not with wall-mounted speakers, of which there are none. It is an old-line Italian place – refurbished and reopened over the summer after a 2004 mishap sent an out-of-control truck flying into the building – and its clientele is largely an old-line, west-of-Twin-Peaks clientele, a living vision of San Francisco as it was before becoming the preferred urban suburb of socially maladaptive tech moguls: a tech company town. Often one suspects restaurants of playing loud music to distract attention from the fact that no one is in them, but as lack of patronage is not an issue at the Gold Mirror, there is no need for filler music, and there is none. People make do with talking to each other, and this seems to work out well, the art of conversation being not yet entirely lost.

Not everyone eating at Gold Mirror is of a certain age: There are children from tots to teens, of course, but also tablesful of young adults who perhaps have fled to the Sunset from more economically vertiginous quarters of the city. Their presence speaks of renewal, as does the intergenerational partnership of founder and chef Giuseppe DiGrande and his son Domenico, also a chef. At the same time, there is a style of Italian cooking whose timeless appeal transcends the generations, and this is the sort of cooking, served by men in black tie, you find at Gold Mirror.

We are talking antipasto ($16), to start: an immense platter of mortadella and salami slices, thin sheets of provolone, heaps of black olives, pepperoncini, and roasted red pepper – and, a slight novelty, lengths of marinated baby celery that are a little tough but tasty. The menu describes the antipasto platter as serving two, but it will easily do for three or four, particularly since the staff keep bringing basketsful of warm Italian bread and pats of chilled butter. I liked, too, a salad ($9) of perfectly ripe avocado, halved, sliced, and stuffed to overflowing with bay shrimp doused in Thousand Island dressing, though it seemed more Californian than Italian.

Anyone who has eaten in Italy is likely to have noticed that the Italians like their meat. Yes, they do marvelous things with vegetables, and there is many a fine meatless pasta or risotto, but Italian cooking would be a shadow of itself without veal and lamb. Gold Mirror's veal saltimbocca ($20), roulade-like, prosciutto-wrapped rings of veal cutlet, each with a core of melted fontina cheese and sauced with a sage-infused brandy concoction, does honor to this tradition; so does, somewhat less elaborately, the roasted rack of lamb ($26), which consists of about eight meaty chops simply presented in a bewitching mint jus. In this weighty company, chicken rather surprisingly holds its own; prepared sec ($16), the bone-in pieces are pan-roasted in a brandy-mushroom butter sauce that smells richly of autumn, of wild, windy nights and rain-slicked pavement. It must be said that accompaniments to the main courses do drift toward the prosaic: some chopped, braised Swiss chard, some rice pilaf, a baked potato with sour cream, all of which to the American eye are disappointingly plain but are consistent with the Italian emphasis on courses rather than on a single huge course with several interesting constituents. (For those who wish to follow the Italian practice, Gold Mirror offers a wealth of pastas, traditionally the first course of Italian meals.)

It was irritating to show up exactly on time, almost down to the second, for a reservation – how often does that actually happen in real life? – and be told that there would be a 10-minute wait. But this annoyance was allayed by a modest corkage fee of $11, and further soothed by a $7 glass of velvety port, passed to and fro like a flask of whiskey around a campfire on a chilly night whose only music is the murmuring of the wind.

Gold Mirror. 800 Taraval (at 18th Ave.), SF. (415) 564-0401. Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Dinner: Mon.-Sat., 5-11 p.m., Sun., 4-10:30 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Diners Club, MasterCard, Visa. Pleasantly noisy. Wheelchair accessible.