Be my Valentina

By Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

The idea that eating at a certain sort of Italian restaurant makes you part of the family — whatever that might mean — has become a cliché of such howling intensity as to turn up as the basis for the Olive Garden chain restaurants' television ad campaign. Yet clichés, like myths, their distant relations, do generally bear some murky relation to reality. Eating at an Italian restaurant might not make you part of the restaurateur's family, certainly not if the restaurant is an Olive Garden, but many Italian restaurants do have a family feel and do practice family ownership, and such places do tend to radiate a welcoming warmth from their modest settings.

The word that struck me on stepping into three-year-old Valentina one recent chilly evening was homey. The Bernal Heights space, long the home of the Hungarian Sausage Factory, has a cottagelike closeness; as a physical specimen, it's like a smaller version of Goat Hill Pizza, an eclectic mix of twists, turns, nooks, kitsch, and oil-on-canvas, expressionistic paintings on the walls — gallery-worthy and done, we were told, "by a friend of Valentina's." So Valentina is a real person of some taste in art as well as in food, and reports of the death of bohemian San Francisco may have been exaggerated, or at any rate premature.

Valentina's menu, unlike Goat Hill's, ranges far beyond pizza to other classic Italian delights, and while there is pizza, the selection is brief and the pies not available by the slice, dim-sum style, as at Goat Hill's Monday-night stuff-your-face extravaganza. I do not mean any of this as criticism, for although I like Goat Hill's festive mood, I like Valentina's thin crusts and artisanal, one-off, we-don't-make-it-until-you-order-it method better. We did find the tomato sauce on the pizza margherita ($9.50) to be slightly undersalted, but the (house-made?) mozzarella was snow-white with freshness and the basil cut into a neat chiffonade to aid the release of its distinctive pepper-green perfume.

The menu consists largely of standards, with occasional punctuation by an unusual dish — venison in pomegranate juice, perhaps, or soppressata di polpo ($9.50), delicately thin (hence tender) rounds of octopus drizzled, carpaccio style, with lemon juice, olive oil, and capers and arranged around a central mound of chopped arugula for a bit of cleansing nip. Interesting little variants turn up in more traditional-sounding dishes too, such as strips of eggplant and dottings of black olive in a shallow bowl of penne all'arabbiata ($12). It is common in Italian cooking for red chili flakes to be sprinkled into cooking oil for a faint whisper, but overt chili heat is relatively rare. A large exception is arabbiata sauce (the name means "enraged"), a simple preparation of tomatoes, garlic, and chili flakes in which the last are dominant. The Valentina edition honors this trope; I felt the heat steadily rising in my head as I plowed through the pasta tubes. I did not catch fire, however: a sign of the kitchen's mastery.

One of Valentina's best dishes must be its gnocchi ($13.50), available with a choice of sauce: tomato, Bolognese, pesto, or Gorgonzola and fontina. The potato pillows themselves are exquisitely soft, and the two-cheese sauce, at least, has a silken richness that mutes the bite of the Gorgonzola without wiping it out altogether. The combination, in its discreet way, is sublime. Tagliatelle al ragu ($12.50), long pasta strands with a manly sauce of chopped free-range beef, green olives, and Parmesan, is more hearty than sublime — though quite gratifyingly hearty — while tortelloni with lobster ($16.50), gnocchi-like pasta half-moons stuffed with crustacean meat and bathed in a sherry cream sauce, very much reflects the old-time San Francisco spirit one can still find in Italian restaurants west of Twin Peaks.

For a testimonial to the power of Italian simplicity, you need look no further than to a mushroom soup ($6) of puréed criminis speckled with garlic croutons. The earthy vividness of the soup belied the modesty of the ingredients; crimini (or cremini) mushrooms are, after all, nothing more than a variant of common button mushrooms: a little bigger, a little browner, usually a little more expensive.

In the dessert sweepstakes, Valentina enters a version of panna cotta ($6), streaked with strawberry and lime reductions. (The color palette of white, red, and green is the same as that of the Italian flag.) I cannot say that Valentina's panna cotta is better than Delfina's or La Folie's, but it isn't worse, either — and isn't very expensive. We also liked, on a subsequent visit, a slice of strawberry torta ($6), a reminder of spring and of the strawberry's perplexing underrepresentation in the annals of baking.

As befits the snug space, the wine list is brisk but interesting, with a mix of Italian and California bottlings and a decent by-the-glass selection, including a lovely fruit-and-stone vermentino ($7) from Sardinia and a Pugliese blend of malvasia and negroamaro ($6) called salice salentino, one of those rustic Mediterranean reds molten with hot, dry sunshine and laced with hints of cherry, blackberry, and pepper. Irresistible, for those of us who can't resist that sort of thing.

Service, too, is quietly marvelous, with bread and water refreshed at regular intervals, first courses quick out of the kitchen, and the overall pace neither rushed nor laggardly. The servers themselves are remarkably cheerful and beaming with smiles; more families should be so pleasant. *

VALENTINA RISTORANTE

Dinner: 6–10:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

419 Cortland, SF

(415) 285-6000

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible