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Other voices, other tables By Paul Reidingerpaulr@sfbg.com Is La Folie a destination restaurant or a neighborhood spot? Life teaches that the answer to this sort of "either/or" question is almost always "both," and so it seems to be with La Folie, though there is then the matter of degree to consider. Certainly, in passing the bar just inside the entryway, one senses the presence of people who live close at hand, who enjoy the luxury of being able to stroll to the place instead of having to drive (and, having driven, to contend for a parking space in an environment of Darwinian scarcity), who go there often enough to have established a casual rapport with the staff. But there is a wealth of destinationers too. These are the people who are, perhaps, a little more dressed up, a little edgy from having to see about the car (the valet service is not an insane choice here if you have better things to do than try to outpounce the drivers of all those Mercedes-Benzes prowling the steep side streets of Russian Hill), a bit more struck by and attentive to the muffled splendor of the place. La Folie isn't big — the front dining room seats a few dozen people at most — but it does soaringly manage to seem more spacious than it is. The high floor-to-ceiling drapes at the back of the dining room help, as does, on a side wall, a vertical striping scheme of ribbons of mirror alternating with lengths of mocha-colored fabric, as if Christo had decided to experiment in a giant flag motif. This look is a new look, installed just about a year ago to freshen the restaurant as it approaches its 20th anniversary, in 2008. The nicest touch of all, for a noted noisephobe like me, is the dark-chocolate carpeting underfoot, which soaks up sound like a sponge and keeps the voices from other tables well out of the sphere of one's own conversation without stifling them completely. It is a discreet masterpiece in the art of sound management. But because my first-ever visit to La Folie occurred just a few weeks ago, I cannot say whether the carpet is a holdover or part of the redo. I can say that chef-owner Roland Passot's cooking deserves its long run of accolades and its national reputation. (On the restaurant's Web site is a photograph of Passot in the embrace of noted gourmand Bill Clinton; no sign of Mick Jagger.) The La Folie style is very much that of nouvelle cuisine, rich in baby vegetables and tiny versions of things, in architectural assemblages and dramatic deconstructions, but care is taken to let the first-quality ingredients speak in their own idiom — an important check on the tendency of haute cuisine to turn fussy. Navigating the menu is straightforward business: You choose three, four, or five courses ($65, $75, $85), or a four-course vegetarian menu for $65. Vegetarian cooking in French restaurants tends to be psychologically fascinating, since the French are, as a rule, much less squeamish and conflicted about eating animals, heads and all, than we are, and at the same time they are loving masters of the vegetable kingdom — people who have designed forks and platters exclusively for the eating of asparagus. Passot's menu jardinière, alive with a variety of textures, colors, and flavors, would easily appease many an unwary omnivore. As with all great vegetarian cooking, its animating spirits are those of innovation, inclusion, and celebration, not of compromise and exclusion and desperate deployments of tofu and seitan. I did think the roasted butternut squash soup, poured from a single-serve copper pot around a trio of sage gnocchi, could have used some salting to balance the pottage's sweetness, but the rest of the dishes were beautifully balanced, from a millefeuille of roasted red beets and goat cheese brightened with a sherry vinaigrette, to a tripartite main dish of polenta "lasagne" layered with eggplant and zucchini, three pan-crisped cannelloni filled with potato, leek, and mushroom, and a roasted Vidalia onion stuffed with raisiny curry couscous. Across the white linen tablecloth, lobster was, shockingly, shockingly, the first order of business. A pair of fat strips of lobster meat were splayed atop jiggling extrusions of Meyer lemon gelée (clear but intense!) and plated beside seared kampachi (a firm, white-fleshed fish from Hawaiian waters) on a bed of pickled cucumbers, wheels of tiny radish, and fennel. A goat-cheese tatin, with alternate layers of artichoke hearts and mushrooms, was a close relation of the millefeuille; and gnocchi, this time stuffed with truffles, recurred as the bed for a small filet of pan-crisped branzino. The main course, squab and quail stuffed with mushrooms, then fitted into potato baskets and roasted with truffles, achieved a gratifying winter meatiness, squab in particular having much of beef's ruddy richness. We did abandon the potato baskets as underseasoned; potato is a vegetable that simply will not tolerate undersalting. Fortunately, it was not a bad thing to end up with a little extra space to fill, since dessert was on the way. La Folie's desserts are heavy-duty, and we found none to be more so than a dense chocolate-caramel mousse encased in a snowball-sized globe of bittersweet chocolate — like an oversized chocolate truffle. A simple-sounding banana panna cotta, meanwhile, was presented as a set of variations on a theme, with the plate including a halved, fried banana, a pat of banana gelato flecked with vanilla bean, a square of banana bread pudding, and the quivering obelisk of custard itself, slightly sour, as if made from green bananas. Folly, you say, or inspiration? Both? *
Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m. 2316 Polk, SF (415) 776-5577 www.lafolie.com Full bar AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V Not noisy Wheelchair accessible
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