March 27, 2018

In restaurant real estate, people often talk about cursed locations. You know, where one day it’s New American, the next it’s Thai, two weeks later you walk by and it’s an always-empty spaghetti house. Is it bad food or just bad juju? You don’t actually know because you never even gave it a chance. Expectations are lower for cursed locations.

But then there are blessed locations. Rare gems that consistently house beloved restaurants that eventually shutter or expand elsewhere, leaving behind their good bones and even better vibes. Expectations are higher for blessed locations.

The window-walled space at Octavia and Bush has long been the latter. And as soon as I punctured Melissa Perello’s divine “deviled egg” — showered in dried marash pepper and a chile fresno relish that unleashed a scent so invigorating it could be the new Red Bull — I knew the latest incarnation of this corner lived up to, if not surpassed, its lineage.

Long gone was the New England stuffiness of the Meeting House, a place I was never old enough, or paid enough, to try (but apparently Joanna Karlinsky’s biscuits were so adored she continued baking them for customers until last year); gone was the genteel white linen and wainscoting of the original Quince; the dark-wood, golf-clubhouse air of Baker and Baker. Now, at this rarified 19th-century address, we have Octavia, open since 2015.

Spare yet warm, with wide-planked distressed floors, black Shaker-style chairs, and servers clad in long denim aprons, you could call Octavia’s look upscale Amish. An airy Pac Heights barn packed nightly with blazers and silver hair, yes, but also short dresses and long locks, new boyfriends, old friends, Frances fans making the cross-Market trek. Everyone swooning over dinner out as it used to be: unadulterated. Before hovering became the standard and mixologists became a must, before tightly crammed communal tables and fast-casual counters and drawn-out tasting menus.

Oh, Octavia has one, if you wish. A tasting menu. And we wished one weeknight. Though, unlike most, it wasn’t a big to-do, or, at $75 per person, a boggling bill. It just allowed us to sample anywhere from nine to 12 dishes in four courses — and catch up, without having to agonize over the brief but beguiling menu.

Like we did on ensuing visits:

Should we get the meaty Pt. Reyes lingcod in a lightly creamy nori beurre blanc scattered with perfect fingerling potatoes, sweet onions, and pearls of Manila clams? (We should.) What about the wild nettle tagliatelle in a tangle of bacon, egg yolk, peppercorns, and pangrattato? (Most definitely.) The ricotta malfatti stuffed with chanterelles, cauliflower, and French sorrel? (Dry and dull; that’s the one entree we should’ve skipped.)

What about the tomatoes? “Nah, a tomato is a tomato,” my friend declared, arguing that he could slice and drizzle olive oil over the same fruit at home. But the firm, sweet, multihued heirloom hunks, sprinkled with sea salt and sprigs of basil, won him over. Proving that when a restaurant like Octavia offers you tomatoes on a warm September eve, you bite.

A $14 avocado, however? You’re welcome to balk. “It’s a Brokaw avocado,” the server explained, seemingly as unsure as we were what exactly that meant. Clearly it was code for pricey avocado, albeit one that was as smooth and creamy as a savory pot de creme. Covered with broccolini and crisp quinoa, however, it looked more like a Chia Pet.

Any moments of mediocrity were fleeting: Chalky chickpea poppyseed sable crackers overpowered otherwise delightful pickled anchovies on one night, plump mussels with smoked pimenton another. But at least both were only a one-bite, six-buck disappointment. A palm-sized bowl of chilled squid-ink noodles with bottarga and fennel, in a pungent lemon agrumato, appeared to be a nightly staple, but unfortunately tasted more like next-day Bento box leftovers pulled from the fridge. After giving them a second chance on my second visit, I guiltlessly snubbed them on my third.

But that allowed for an encore order of the delicata squash — brawny, beautiful, donut-sized rings coated in a thin, crisp, tempura batter accompanied by a puddle of citrusy aioli and dash of chile.

On one night our petit filet begged for an extra pinch of salt. But that was okay, because lo and behold! There were actually mini ramekins of salt on every table. Fitting, as Octavia is not a place that emanates ego.

Rather, it exudes intentionality. From the open kitchen framed like a painting to each piece of earth-toned pottery by Berkeley’s Sarah Kersten to Perello’s fostering of female chefs, like executive pastry chef Sarah Bonar, who also does the desserts for Frances, and now chef de cuisine Sara Hauman, a 2015 Eater Young Gun, who came on in April off a stint as sous chef at Mister Jiu’s, by way of Huxley and Bar Agricole before that. (She actually got her start cooking at health spas in San Diego; she’s obviously back on butter — and for that my lingcod and I were grateful.)

Our only complaint about Octavia was that every starter we ordered arrived at once — also intentionally so. Receiving that dreamy deviled egg at the same time as the chickpea crackers, at the same time as the delicata squash, at the same time as Bonar’s purple barley levain, which is baked daily downstairs? Too much. The egg deserved our undivided attention! Then, fine, let the other dishes follow.

Desserts, on the other hand: bring ’em on. The more of Bonar’s creations the merrier. Our spoons dove eagerly back and forth between subtle treats that were acutely seasonal. And not in a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice way.

The Eton Mess was a visual mess, but an edible miracle: a mound of meringue mixed with poached quince, gooey butterscotch, and cinnamon ice cream. The toasted angel food cake was firm and moist (as much as we all hate that word, that’s what it was, and it was delicious). With a crackling creme brulee-like crust, it was unlike any of the you-call-this-cake? angel food cakes I recalled as a kid. Especially since it came with a scoop of squash ice cream. (Also delicious.)

That’s the thing about Octavia: It’s the kind of place where you feel like an adult, without even being a tiny bit bummed to be one.

Looking around the dimly lit, 55-seat room, at locals from all decades drinking wine and digging in, the scene was soothing but not serious, fun but not frenetic. For a moment, it felt like something was missing, and I couldn’t put my finger on what. Until I noticed: there was no bar, not even a little one. Unlike so many new San Francisco restaurants these days, Octavia bore none of the trendy moneymaking trappings of the moment. The kind that perhaps a less-blessed location — and chefs blessed with less talent — might rely on.

What I loved most about Octavia, I realized, was that it was there. And will be, I hope, for a long, long time.

It was August in the Outer Sunset and so of course there were puffy coats and wool beanies and beards. And flip-flops.

Everyone out here wears flip-flops, no matter what the weather. It’s the only appropriate footwear for Ocean Beach. And, really, the only appropriate footwear for fish tacos.

As dudes in wetsuits strutted by still dripping, I wondered, what about bare, sandy feet? “It happens,” says Christian Morabito, co-owner of San Francisco’s newest seafood spot. “People try and bring in their dogs, though, and I’m like, no. This is a food facility!”

Friday night at Hook Fish isn’t like Friday night anywhere else in the city. Many of those who cut through Karl the Fog to get here do so on foot. Two blocks from the water, on a mostly residential stretch of Irving Street, there are no double-parked Ubers or eager Elite Yelpers or underdressed tourists, just a bunch of close-knit locals sitting on reclaimed pier pilings, putting back cold Pacificos, and slurping plump West Marin Miyagis, stoked to see each other — and stoked to have a new homegrown restaurant in the ’hood.

It’s a restaurant that feels more like the main cabin of a beautiful wooden sailboat — with hand-built, honey-hued everything: the counter, the benches, the one big table, the ceiling, the wall lamps, even the cash drawer is a log that’s been salvaged and sawed. All elements are the handiwork of resident woodworker Jay Nelson, the sustainability-minded talent behind Outerlands, a restaurant that pioneered the transformation of the nearby 4000 block of Judah.

You could call Hook Fish a “seafood shack,” and I’m sure by next summer, all the food and travel magazines rounding up their lists of “best seafood shacks” will. With just 15 seats inside, it’s the size of one. But that makes it sound rickety and salty and slippery, or like one of those sprawling waterfront traps trying to seem authentic.

Hook Fish is neither. It just is authentic. I don’t mean the food, per se — I mean the people and purpose behind it.

Co-owner Morabito is a 28-year-old lifelong surfer who quit his job delivering boxes of produce for the Fruit Guys to bike 1,600 miles down to Cabo with his brother. They rigged up a bike trailer big enough to lug their boards, camping gear, a bunch of water, and their fishing rods and Hawaiian slings. For three glorious nomadic months, they sustained themselves on spear-caught rockfish, halibut hooked on a fly, clams dug at low tide.

Back home in San Francisco, nostalgic for Baja, he started buying a whole albacore every now and then off the dock in Half Moon Bay. He and a few friends — friends who knew more about cooking than he did — would turn it into poke or ceviche, buy a bunch of beer and chips, and invite everyone over. Soon, that morphed into catering gigs for companies like Patagonia that cared, like him, where their fish comes from.

For a second, Morabito admits, he thought about starting a dog food business that used quality, local ingredients.

I’m so glad he didn’t. Instead, in June, having scored a decent rent from the former owners of Cajun Pacific, he opened a seafood business that uses quality, local ingredients. San Francisco’s 120,000 dogs may balk, but I think Hook Fish is a better boon for the city.

The goal was ambitious, and admirable: to open an “accessible place” to eat (and buy) seafood caught off the California coast, a place that connects “our fisherpeople” to all people while cutting out the many hands that typically touch a slab of salmon before it gets to the consumer.

The city’s most respected chefs, of course, do this already on their nightly changing, more elaborate menus. But Morabito just wanted to serve restorative food and really good fish at prices fair to those both catching it and eating it. And, magically, somehow — even in San Francisco — he did.

That’s a lot of backstory, I realize, but it’s important to understand what Hook Fish is and why it’s worth a long-ass Muni ride.

Morabito and his business partner, Beau Caillouette, hired fellow surfer Luke Johnson, a former in-house chef for Couchsurfing, to do the cooking. Together, they honed the brief menu that hits all the familiar beachside staples — made with your pick of the four of five catches of the day. They are all listed along with the vessel they were caught on and the method used to hook them (i.e.,Halibut, Port: Half Moon Bay, Method: rod and reel, Vessel: Krabmandu, Price: 33.95/lb).

Honestly? It’s all good. Could I really tell the difference between the lingcod and the halibut and the rockfish tacos, when each came cloaked in the same combo: pico de gallo, fresh avocado, a splatter-paint of spicy aioli, and a lively cumin- and coriander-spiked curtido, aka pickled cabbage slaw? Nope. They add a little too much pickled cabbage slaw, but on heavy, handmade corn tortillas, I loved them all anyway. I didn’t want to even bother trying the fried avocado tacos, but I was pleasantly surprised. They were meaty and creamy, and I barely missed the flesh of fish.

Other standouts: the blackened fish sandwich, which I had with halibut. It was firm and flavorful and smeared with tangy house-made tartar sauce, more of that slaw, and pepperoncinis on a not-too-bready roll. With a few dabs of the house-made carrot-habanero, it was even better. The only letdown about the burrito was the same letdown about any burrito: too much rice. When you’re paying 16 bucks for one stuffed with lingcod, you kind of want to be able to taste the fish.

If I lived two doors down, like pretty much everyone behind the counter, I’d come in daily at lunchtime for the house-smoked trout salad, served on a tin tray of seasonal greens doused in creamy creme fraiche, slivers of red onion, sunflower seeds, and these hidden “everything” nut clusters that added such a delightful crunch, I started seeking them out to ensure I got one with every bite.

Drawbacks to Hook Fish? The Fisherman’s stew tasted more like a mild minestrone. (Even on a cold night, I’d skip it.) And despite requesting they pace your over-order, it’ll arrive all at once — and always, impressively, within minutes.

The thing is, though, Hook Fish is the kind of place where you want to, you know, chill. If it took 25 minutes for my tacos, and I had to order another beer, I wouldn’t mind. My only fear is that as the weather warms this fall, and the word spreads, I may get my wish.

But for now, sitting outside on a bench made of cribbing timber, bundled up beneath a hammock of electrical wires sharing fish and chips with friends, Hook Fish still feels like a secret. Maybe the masses will stay away. After all, this is not a place to eat overpriced seafood overlooking the ocean with a sunset view. It’s better than that.

It’s a place to eat reasonably priced seafood with the Outer Sunset crew, ironically the warmest community in this ever-frenetic city. A true outside land, where people prefer to spend time together, surfing waves, not the web.

Dinner at Duna involves very few decisions, and for this we should be grateful. We’ve got enough to think about as we scroll endlessly, depressingly, through our Trump-strewn newsfeeds all day. Come dinnertime, it’s comforting to walk into a restaurant that’s homey and hearty and Hungarian — with a menu about as brief as a tweet.

It’s a little less comforting to have to stand in line and order at the counter while listening to people ask questions like “How’s the riesling?” and “How many dips should we order?” (My answer, after trying all five: all five.) Then survey the room for an open table. Then carry over your own glasses and carafe. And then have everything you ordered — especially when you ordered just about everything — come in rapid succession, like a blitzkrieg, mere seconds after your wine arrives.

If not before, as our chilled yogurt soup did one night. A peeve. Even the training manual at Pizzeria Uno, where I once worked, dictated that drinks be delivered within four minutes of a customer’s order.

It wasn’t like my soup was going to get cold or anything. So I ignored my pretty antique floral-patterned bowl of garlicky, house-made yogurt mixed with cultured kefir cream and brimming with bits of cool, garden-fresh cucumber, crumbled pecans, and a whole lot of dill, while I waited, for quite some time, for my glass of orange-hued rebula. (Both were ultimately delicious.)

Maybe delayed wine and DIY water are just what it takes to get a decently priced dinner in this town these days.

Due to the astronomical costs of running a restaurant in San Francisco, “fast-casual” spots keep proliferating — eateries with solid food and suitable ambiences that forgo welcoming hosts and doting servers and busting-their-asses bussers in favor of affordability. It’s a format that’s proving successful for the Little Gems and RT Rotisseries of the city, where people know what to expect.

But Duna — which debuted in June in the former Herbivore space, following chef-owners Nick Balla and Cortney Burns’s fleeting pop-up, Motze — is a bit of a different beast. It bills itself as “fine-casual.”

And fine it is. If fine means food that’s soulful, creative, and cooked with care, using local, organic — or as they put it, “noble” — ingredients. Accompanied by candlelight.

It’s the “casual” part of Duna I found confusing. It’s a compliment, really: Balla and Burns’s modern Central European fare deserves full service. Or at least some service.

After three visits, I’m not convinced this kind of quickie, truncated experience works for Duna. Perhaps it works for the owners — and that certainly counts for something — but from the customer perspective it’s uneven, almost awkward (especially when you go to punch a tip on the iPad at evening’s end. Philosophical question: Is 20 percent still fair?).

But nice only goes so far when you want, say, another slab of doughy, warm smoked potato flatbread, and are told, as we were on our first visit: “Sorry, you’ll have to get back in line.” (They’ve since rectified the issue by providing a phone number for already-seated diners to “text for re-orders.”)

And you will want more flatbread. We got seconds every time, as the dips — creamy, vibrant — routinely outlasted it. Standouts include roasted pumpkin seed doused with hot green chile and grapeseed oil; sweet preserved eggplant scattered with preserved kumquats and sprigs of mint; a spicy Liptauer paprika cheese thick with onion, garlic, and toasted sesame seeds that was reminiscent, in the very best way, of Trader Joe’s jalapeno pub cheese. When the last tear of bread was gone, rather than bother ordering another, we scraped the rest with our spoons.

The chopped salads — served family style, like every dish at Duna — are supposed to be eaten with spoons, too. I used my fork for the Sofia, which was essentially just a Greek salad named after the capital of Bulgaria. Nothing special, nothing more. But the Budapest was a bowl of beauty. A brightly colored jumble of bold flavors: juicy red tomatoes (cherry, Early Girl, andheirlooms), fiery electric-green padrons, and soft cubes of Point Reyes’s toma tossed with slices of smoky sausage, rings of piquant peppers, button mushrooms, and finished with plenty of paprika. The dressing — the vegetables’ natural juices soaked in red vinegar with garlic and marjoram — was simple and soupy and indeed worth slurping.

Balla and Burns have tried, yet again, to transform the formerly dull Herbivore space into something warm and woodsy, with bark and branches, woolly art and leafy plants. Intended to resemble the banks of the Danube River — for which Duna was named, perhaps? — it works well enough, but that drab gray institutional tiled floor will remain a thorn in Duna’s decor until they decide to do a real redesign.

Admittedly, no one but the critic seemed to care. Everyone in the long, narrow room clustered around votive-topped tables, as cozy and content as if they were in their own dining rooms (which is possible, as Duna does deliver).

If I squinted past the startup logo-emblazoned hoodies and the latest $300 clogs, it was almost as if 21st-century Valencia Street had time-traveled to 19th-century Budapest. But no, it was just the San Francisco elite digging into Duna’s “peasant” food.

As I slurped my fisherman’s stew, I wondered if the Old World ate this well. I doubted it. I also wondered if the Old World had teeth, as almost every entree had the same texture. That is: none, really. It was like a mushy, madly flavorful meal a sophisticated baby could love.

A duo of cabbage rolls stuffed with chicken and pork snuggling beside slippery house-made sauerkraut, slices of smoked sausage and pork belly, meaty roasted mushrooms, and dried apples was at once delicate and hardy. The chicken paprikas, in a thick, pungent gravy poured over eggy, soft spatzle was just as satisfying. Only the lentil croquettes were a disappointment. A beloved holdover from Balla and Burns’s Bar Tartine days, but made over at Duna, they were dense and dry. Luckily they were surrounded by a gorgeous assembly of roasted spinach, turmeric-tinged cauliflower, and chile-infused yogurt — all of which we devoured.

But we abandoned our croquettes. Like the staff did our otherwise empty dishes, which cluttered our table throughout the entire meal — until eventually I had to text someone to take them away.

“Sunday suppers” at Duna are ticketed, intended to be a more civilized, supposedly slower affair, with cultural themes like “Road Trip to Southern Bulgaria” and “Paprika and Onion.” We’d reserved two seats on the “Boat Trip to Belgrade” (which must have been a speedboat, because somehow our $170 meal was over within 52 minutes). We relished our lively yogurt soup; mild lamb tartare peppered with raisins and parsley; and spicy, rich rock-cod stew nonetheless.

But nothing was as good as Duna’s dips. Especially not dessert: a tasteless frozen custard coated in a parched black-sesame crumble that left me wishing for its doppelganger — Carvel’s crunchies — instead. The “peanut-butter and jelly truffle balls” were the kind of finale only a diehard gluten-free diner could love.