By Paul Reidinger

AT MALACCA ONE fine evening, a dish we'd ordered – actually just one of several, but let us grind one ax at a time – needed salt. A server happened by, we explained our plight, she brought a salt shaker. As the restaurant was intensely busy, with service staff hurrying to and fro, we could not help but notice that she did not scurry off on some other errand but seemed, instead, to be hovering over us, watching as we administered life-giving jolts of salt, like TV medics bringing people back from the brink of death with those electric heart paddles. Then, with the patient showing a regular pulse, she seized the salt shaker and rushed away with it. Is that the only salt shaker they have? I wondered. Must she spend the evening darting from emergency to emergency? No. She took the shaker back to a little station near the kitchen and set it down, where it would wait for about five minutes, until we were served our next undersalted dish and had to ask for it again.

Malacca is new – it was opened earlier this fall by Suchitra Hutachinda – so certain Marx brothers, hello-I-must-be-going moments in the mostly smooth and attentive service are to be expected. Undersalted, as opposed to unsalted, food isn't fatal either and in fact might be preferable to oversalted food, which is a rarity at Malacca, though not unknown. Once the salt is in, you can't get it out, only disguise it. So reticence on the kitchen's part here is wise, since undersalted food can easily be brought into tune with a shake or two to taste by the diner. Completely unsalted food is another matter altogether, like dealing with a sixth-grader who's never been read to or taken to the library; there are treatments, but these are meliorative rather than curative in nature, and the prognosis can be no better than guarded.

Such diagnostic thoughts tend to fade out of mind, anyway, under Malacca's aesthetic spell. The space once belonged to Hot'n'Hunky, but the ghosts of that more modest past have been utterly cast out in favor of a sleek, clean design that also manages to be warm and inviting: The storefront space is now lined with curvaceous walls of bamboo paneling and strung with clusters of teardrop halogen lights, like some exotic fruit at harvest time, while at the rear of the dining room rises an elaborate glass-front wine-chilling system that almost – but not quite – drives thoughts of beer from the field of possibility. Beer is on one's mind because Malacca (as the name suggests) serves the foods found in the area of the Malacca Strait, the busy (and pirate-infested) commercial channel that divides the Indonesian island of Sumatra from the Malay Peninsula, at the tip of which we find the sophisticated city-state of Singapore. As at Straits Café, the cooking is a cosmopolitan mélange of influences, mainly southeast Asian and Indian, with hints of Portuguese. Given all this lively spicing, one inclines to beer, though there is a good selection of Alsatian- and German-style white wines too.

It was the Portuguese noodles ($10), in fact – a nest of bucatini-fat (though not hollow) threads tossed with a likable, if not discernibly Iberian, mix of basil, garlic, ginger, and tomato slices – that caused us to ask for the return of the holy salt shaker, which had been seized after we'd used it to revive a creamy Indian spinach soup ($3). The soup had a lovely texture and color, and a good salting did bring up the spinach flavor, but I caught an unmistakable whiff of canned curry powder.

On the other side of the great salt divide lay the "holy basil" chicken ($10), a larb-like heap of minced meat seasoned with basil and green peppercorns (a subtle and unusual touch) and served with a handsome pyramid of basmati rice. The chicken teetered on the edge of being oversalted but was pulled back from the precipice by the soothingly mild rice.

Appetizers can be slightly deep-fry-happy – Malacca shiitake rolls ($5) with sweet chili sauce, ribbons of coconut-crusted calamari ($8) – but there are also less oily choices, among them a Balinese-style chicken saté ($8) with skewer-grilled flaps of meat and a spicy peanut sauce, and dim sum-like shrimp and scallop dumplings ($6), softly steamed instead of fried.

There is at least one sleeper among the big dishes, and that is the beef rendang ($15), a rich but even-tempered Thai-style curry with fabulously tender shreds of meat. Both the duck-leg roulade ($15) and the pork tenderloin vindaloo ($16), by contrast, though appealingly smoky from the grill and served in neat slices, were overshadowed by the outsized orange mountains of sweet-potato purée on whose slopes they were plopped.

We did not come to blows on the question of the flan in ginger broth (all desserts are $6), but the division of opinion was sharp nonetheless. My companions agreed that the presentation, in a martini glass, was striking, but they found the ginger broth to be watery and not very sweet. This was true, certainly in comparison to caramel (as in crème caramel), and the first nibble or two did not convince. But the power of the ginger was backloaded (like certain kinds of chili heat) and grew with each spoonful. It is not a dessert for everyone – as, say the mango cheesecake or five-spice chocolate mousse might be – but it is also unforgettable, as those more familiar (more salt-of-the-earth?) preparations never will be.

Malacca. 4039 18th St. (at Hartford), SF. (415) 863-0679, www.malaccasf.com. Sun.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Moderately noisy. Wheelchair accessible.