Love's labor's found

By Paul Reidinger

THE GREAT DANGER facing little Zoya, Johannes Kim and Tracey Ballard-Kim's new restaurant, is that no one will be able to find it. The corner of Grove and Gough would seem to be a prime, high-visibility Civic Center location, with the big performance venues just a few blocks away – at least if you're looking at MapQuest. If you're actually standing there, you will find that you're looking at a Days Inn, a slightly decrepit motor lodge, and a relic from a past that once included the Central Freeway. That unloved construct has been cleared away, but the Days Inn, with its courtyard parking lot so reminiscent of '60s-vintage motels, remains, and if you look carefully, you will note an odd, two-story, turret-shaped appendage. That is where you will find Zoya.

The space, despite its peculiarities, has been the home of several commendable restaurants in recent years: It was a pretty good Italian place before being transformed into Midori Mushi, a hip sushi redoubt. So precedent is not entirely discouraging. On the other hand, the faux turret is oddly bifurcated; on the ground floor is a handsome bar and a few tables, but the main dining room is upstairs, which can only be reached by scaling a Days Inn staircase clothed in that green nylon Astroturfy carpeting favored by, and characteristic of, motels, especially those with outdoor swimming pools. If the Days Inn has a pool, we did not notice it, and it isn't likely we would have been welcome there even if we had felt an inclination to jump in. Dinner guests are not welcome to use the parking lot, let alone the pool, if there is one.

At the end of this long and winding road of oddities and small rebuffs lies a lovely little restaurant: a labor of love if ever there was one. Once you step through the curtain into the second-floor dining room – a sanctuary of rich wood, white linens, and cream walls – you will feel a pleasant remove from the city. The windows are filled with floating treetops, while the curve of the outer wall and the snugness of the quarters suggest a private dining room on a cruise ship. There is a romance here no rectangular, street-level restaurant can match.

The menu is classic California, with immaculate, tenderly handled ingredients, simple preparation, and careful but not fussy presentations. There are a good many salads on offer, including a big Caesar ($11.50 with a wealth of grilled, boneless chicken strips) whose romaine spears seemed to our eyes still to be carrying a faint sheen of morning dew from the fields. The dressing provided a good garlic kick, and there was no lack of Parmesan shavings – but where were the croutons? Forgotten, omitted? A Caesar without croutons is a lesser Caesar, no matter if the lettuce was picked that morning.

The salad cornucopia suggests, more broadly, an attentiveness to vegetarian concerns, and many of the best dishes are indeed, and naturally, meatless. The kitchen gives bruschetta ($4) a nice twist by substituting arugula for the more typical basil, while roasting the Roma tomatoes softens them and deepens their flavor – important at the end of the long season. Portobello mushrooms do yeoman's work, serving as the core of an excellent sandwich ($9) on fresh ciabatta, with mozzarella, romaine, red onion, and rouille, and in the grilled artichoke and portobello stack ($10), as a kind of pizza crust, topped with goat cheese, wilted spinach, heirloom tomatoes, and a garlicky balsamic vinaigrette. (The out-of-season artichoke, I am obliged to note, halved and filled with goat cheese and the same vinaigrette, was definitely the less impressive of the pair.) As to the vegetarian bona fides of the corn tortilla soup ($5), a spicy, smoky, lava-red puree flecked with cilantro leaves: I wondered about the possibility of chicken broth. But it was terrific all the same.

Carnivores need not despair. The bruschetta can be enhanced with rib eye for an extra $2, and, if that won't suffice, there is also a hefty plate of braised Black Angus short ribs ($18), the meat on the bone disintegrating into a rich, smoky tomato sauce atop a bed of skin-on garlic mashed potatoes you know you shouldn't polish off but polish off anyway because who could resist? (It was, in retrospect, an error in one's starch-overload calculations to have preceded this dish with the Pugliese bread [$4], a whole loaf sliced, dotted with shreds of braised leek, and doused in garlic-basil butter, especially since the complimentary basket included slices of a dusky, pillow-soft olive bread.)

Overstarching, however pleasurable, does not necessarily whet one's appetite for dessert. Yet it would be a pity to miss the bananas Foster ($7), a New Orleans standard and kind of a grown-up banana split, with a sauce of butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and rum and enriched here with chocolate (instead of the usual vanilla) ice cream, that sufficed for two of us. You might feel uneasy about the calories if your earlier courses hadn't been so virtuous: soups, salads, fresh breads, plenty of vegetables. If, on the other hand, you gave in and had the short ribs – and gobbled up all those fabulous potatoes – you might come away thinking: Oy!

Zoya. 465 Grove (at Gough), SF. (415) 626-9692. Lunch: Tues.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Dinner: Tues.-Wed., 5-9 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., 5-10 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Ground floor wheelchair accessible.