Cook's night out

By Paul Reidinger

'TWAS THE NIGHT before Thanksgiving, and the chef – cook, maybe, is the better, the pomp-free term – was in no condition to do any cooking, though he was not yet drunk. The previous several days had been filled with unglamorous prep work, from planning and provisioning to roasting, peeling, chopping, and pureeing (with interludes of knife-sharpening), and the morrow promised, after a few hours' false peace in the morning, to be the usual unnerving experience of trying to make sure everything turned out right, at the right time, while keeping the guests amused and regaled. Champagne, of course, helps in all these respects. It is to a party what WD-40 is to squeaky household devices; applied liberally and not too discriminately, it helps troubles go away, or at least pipe down for a while.

But ... the night before. The refrigerator is engorged and nonnavigable, and the cook has earned a moment of respite: of being served food made by somebody else, without having to think about it. It would be the greatest kindness if those fated to cook holiday meals for large groups were themselves cooked for, the night before or the night after (or maybe not the night after, since that is the hour of contrition and leftovers) by other cooks graced by fate to be guests at some holiday shindig or other. Sometimes this must happen. But it has never happened to me, which means we go to Plan B: a restaurant.

(Intermezzo: Why is there no restaurant called Plan B?)

It is a fact that sometimes we go to restaurants not to marvel at the ambience or the presentation, not to assess the buzz, or the chicness of the shoes fitted to the other patrons, but just to eat. In these situations, we wish to be coddled, not wowed; we want to be seated without fuss, be served decent food in a timely manner, and be presented with a bill we can think about later while still falling happily asleep. It is a fact, too, that this city, like all cities, is full of unpretentious restaurants that satisfy these criteria, and this is the story of a few of them and the indispensable role they play as safe havens in the holiday season, a hectic romp of parties and outings and commitments in which plans tend to snap like twigs in a windy winter storm and alternative plans are made up on the spot.

  

Thanh Tam II, an unassuming Vietnamese-Chinese place, can be found on the magical block of Valencia between 16th and 17th Streets, home now to the much-expanded and grandified Limon as well as to a new new-Mission spot we popped into the night before Thanksgiving and found half empty – usually not the worst scenario for last-minute, spur-of-the-moment, without-reservations types, since, if all else fails, you can generally set up at the bar. But not this time; there would be a wait, said the host, blah blah blah. There was no wait at all at Thanh Tham, where we were swiftly being seated about a minute after walking out of the fancier place and were being brought plates of food not too many minutes after that.

When the items on a menu are numbered and the numbers run well into the triple digits, you can be fairly certain that the kitchen's ethos is workmanlike rather than whimsical, and so it is, pretty much, at Thanh Tam. Which is not to say there isn't an interesting wrinkle here and there, such as the brief deep-frying given the more typically pan-fried pot stickers ($4.50 for six) – the dip in the deep fryer lending them a pastrylike flakiness – or the mixed seafood and stalks of baby bok choy added to keep the wontons company in the seafood wonton noodle soup ($5.95): a meal in itself, really, and surprisingly so, if wonton soup makes you think of lumpy consommé, a sheet of golden broth with a few dumplings floating in it like refuse.

But most of the pitches are right down the middle. Spicy chicken with lemongrass noodles ($5.95) was a gigantic bowl of the advertised ingredients layered with plenty of shredded iceberg lettuce and served with nuoc mam on the side, while eggplant with spicy basil sauce ($5.50) featured a deep, rich hoisin-based sauce that stirred fond memories of mu shu pork from meatier days of yore.

Service: attentive, fast but not rushed. Water glasses regularly refilled. Alcohol not pushed. Decor: modest but fresh, and the noise level low enough for easy conversation. Bill: well under $50 for two people, including tax, tip, and a giant beer hogged by one of said people. (Guess which.) We left renewed and happy, and the Thanksgiving dinner turned out all right, which in the circumstances is the highest praise I can give.

  

Señor Peppers sounds like a network TV show about a well-meaning high-school basketball coach in an East LA barrio: a White Shadow who speaks Spanish. And maybe there is such a show; we would have to watch network TV to find out. But the phrase has also been bestowed on a newish Mexican restaurant in the Civic Center, which opened over the summer in a rather vast space previously occupied by International Noodle House and, before that, by Lyons, a slightly less famous version of Denny's.

The corporate feel at Señor Peppers is still strong, as we noticed on a recent noontime pop-in. Apart from a few cosmetic tinkerings, the look hasn't changed much from previous occupancies. There are still lots of booths trimmed in Naugahyde, menus embossed in plastic, cheap desserts, and a cheerful presence to greet you at the door.

The food, on the other hand, having leaped from Main Street, USA (during the Lyons regime), to various points in Asia (during the INH run), has now returned to North America. It is Mexican, but it is Main Street, USA, Mexican, Mexican for gringo mall rats – and this means, mainly, a light hand indeed on the spicing. Despite the saucy name, Señor Peppers serves it up pretty mild, and while you're not likely to come away from eating there with a tremendous sense of excitement, neither will you have a stomachache from putting away one too many pickled jalapeños.

Lunch specials ($6.25) include plenty of ballast in the form of Spanish rice, refried beans, and lettuce, plus a choice from among such familiar faces as tamales, tostadas, burritos, and quesadillas (most of which offer a further choice of meat). The kitchen, at least for lunch, turns stuff out fast; we had barely dug into the decent guacamole ($4.95) from the decent basket of chips when the main courses arrived. Señor Peppers might be a little short on spice, but he's got plenty of speed – good wheels, as coaches like to say.

  

Seafood buffet time at Bay Fung Tong Seafood Tea House, most of whose plain tables seat at least a dozen people. We arrived at dusk on a Sunday evening to find the just-opened dining room cold as a meat locker. Hot tea soon arrived; a nice touch. Parking enforcement showed up soon after, sending several agitated people out the door to plug their meters. Then came the food, beginning with a milky soup we could not identify, proceeding to small, bony sturgeon steaks in ginger sauce, some kind of steamed chicken with repulsive, morgue-white skin though a not-bad sour flavor, wide belts of batter-fried pork that would have sent Homer Simpson into transports, a decent noodle dish, with Chinese sausage, in need only of some soy sauce, a plate of stir-fried Chinese broccoli, a passel of overcooked, head-on prawns we could scarcely shuck because the flesh had turned gluey, and a few other things that got lost in all the arrivals and blended into other things. It was like being at baggage claim 15 minutes after several 747s had disgorged their transoceanic passengers on the same concourse.

I had it on good authority that this place was special, and indeed it was packed with what appeared to be Chinese families, speaking with the servers in what I took to be dialects of Chinese as well as English. Yet I have seldom eaten worse – or been served more – food. Maybe this was a blessing of the perverse sort; if the food had been better, I would have eaten more of it and possibly not survived – or been able to dart to the meter if parking enforcement, moved by the holiday spirit, had decided to strike again.

Thanh Tam II. 577 Valencia (at 17th St.), SF. (415) 252-1190. Nightly, 6-11 p.m. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible. Señor Peppers. 690 Van Ness (at Turk), SF. (415) 567-2288. Mon.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat., noon-11 p.m.; Sun., noon-10 p.m. Full bar. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible. Bay Fung Tong Seafood Tea House. 1916 Franklin (at 19th St.), Oakl. (510) 832-3298. Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 5 p.m.-9:30 p.m. Beer. MasterCard, Visa. Noisy. Wheelchair accessible.