Serenity now

By Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

The modern city has no need for walls, since we have traffic — rivers of it, pulsing along multilane thoroughfares to create boundaries as forbidding as barbed wire or moats. Confession: I would love a moat, particularly one stocked with alligators and fitted with a single drawbridge that led to a castle with five-foot-thick walls, within whose stony embrace I would be content. Failing such a writerly arrangement, I wouldn't mind living in the little wedge of city bounded by Fell, Stanyan, Fulton, and Masonic, four of the most horrifyingly auto-choked streets in town but also enclosing, like the eye of some terrible storm, a serene village little touched by the ravages of dot-com-ification and yuppification and richification that have turned many of the city's other neighborhoods into wastelands of lofts that cost $750,000 and have no soul but plenty of garage parking for leased German cars.

It is possible that there are leased German cars in the peaceful wedge behind Saint Mary's Hospital, I even suppose it is inevitable — certainly there are countless such vehicles speeding down the streets along the frontiers — but mainly there is a sleepy-small-town-in-middle-of-crazed-city feel like that of Paris's Ile Saint-Louis, a village on an island in the middle of the Seine with its own little commercial corners (one of which includes the famous ice-cream shop Berthillon) and a cordial arm's-length relationship with the rest of the metropolis. Does this dreamy precinct across the sea and in the middle of an urban river also have a restaurant like our Abacus, a lovely little California-Chinese place opened in November by partners Allan Kwong and Jonathan Wong, with Daniel Yang (a Café Akimbo alumnus) in the kitchen? I do not know, but the French do eat Chinese food on occasion, and if there were a restaurant like Abacus in Paris, it would likely be found on the Ile Saint-Louis, under the shadows of Notre-Dame (which sits just across a short bridge, on the Ile de la Cité), as Abacus sits under the shadow of Saint Ignatius Cathedral on the University of San Francisco campus.

The "California" angle in Chinese cooking strikes me as having to do largely with freshness — of ingredients and preparation, and of setting. You know you have happened upon one of these places when you find yourself in a nicely architectural setting rather than a graveyard of linoleum, when there are no steam tables or dry, lifeless rice, when your order of vegetable egg rolls is rushed to your table still warm and tender-crisp — proof that the rolls have just been plucked from the deep-fryer instead of having been lolling too long under a heat lamp.

Abacus's vegetarian egg rolls ($5 for four), served with a sweetish red sauce, answer to this description, and the pot stickers ($6 for six) are not only full of nose-clearing ginger — and pork: These are not vegetarian — but also are bundled in pretty green wrappers of spinach. This is a wrinkle you'd more likely come across at a swank, millennial, Niman-Ranch-beef taquería than during a stroll up Grant Street in Chinatown. Elsewhere, zucchini coins proliferate in a Thai-ish chicken with chili-basil sauce ($7), a lunch plate that also includes a perfectly shaped mound of steamed rice and a little heap of well-dressed baby mixed greens whose California-cuisine provenance is unmistakable. And mushroom medley soup ($5) is an intensely earthy roundup of local fungi at the peak of their season.

All this Californication does not conceal — is not meant to conceal — the basic familiarity of the menu. Kung pao chicken ($9) is a shower of peanuts, bell peppers, and boneless chunks of meat in a spicy brown sauce of the sort most of us have seen before. The seafood medley ($13) assembles prawns and scallops in a sweet chili sauce thickened with bits of tree ear mushroom; the seafood is not served fajita-style on a sizzling iron skillet, as is done at many other places around town, and the sauce is a little odd, but it is a comfortable preparation all the same: Order it and you'll have a pretty good idea of what you're getting.

The only dish on the menu whose description baffled me was ma po tofu with ground pork ($7). I had a sense of the latter, of course, but what of the former: a kind of tofu? It turns out that "ma po" refers to a grandmotherly archetype, and according to legend, it was an old Szechuan woman who came up with the recipe for tofu cubes and soy-sauce-marinated ground pork cooked in a spicy black-bean sauce. Abacus's version is, for a Szechuan dish, notably mild mannered, but it is tasty enough and is served in a handsome crock for visual interest.

The visual interest in the restaurant as a whole has to do with the blonde-wood paneling that reaches about halfway to the high ceiling in the storefront space. On a ledge at the rear wall repose some glass balls reminiscent of those at Alice's, another neighborhood Chinese-modern place (in outer Noe Valley). Above the tree line, the mood is frankly industrial, with exposed pipes and ducts lending a certain steely chill. At lower elevations the chill can persist; on our first visit, we were seated next to a space heater and were glad. But that was an evening at the end of January, blackest hole of winter. Soon spring will come, the zucchini will blossom, and we will once again count our blessings in hope of finding serenity among them. *

ABACUS

Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

2078 Hayes, SF

(415) 387-2828

www.abacussf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible