Pizza Diavola

I wasn’t planning to eat out tonight, but events coincided so that it happened. I was going to have bread and fruit for dinner, because there’s nothing to cook in my pantry, but I had to meet someone at my new flat to sell my mattress, so I couldn’t stop by the bakery after work; after meeting the would be mattress purchaser, I put my bed frame together and set up my furniture, so it was late by the time I left my new flat to get home to corporate housing; I was dizzy with hunger on account of lunch being a soup that was oversalted and thus barely palatable; and so at 8:25 I found myself on the way home, thinking of stopping by Takara for a quick dinner of sushi. But then I thought of Heung Bu Nae, a Korean restaurant where I’d had lunch with a friend on Saturday. It’s fairly cheap, close to my temporary flat, and the food is really, really good. So I went there instead of Takara. A summary of events:

8:30 Enter restaurant, get seated, get a pot of barley tea, place order. Restaurant is about 1/3 full, not bad for a Monday night in Western Addition (Western Addition is not the most happening or interesting part of town. If I weren’t living here, I probably wouldn’t ever have ventured here during the entirety of my stay in SF.).

8:45 Banchan (Korean side dishes) and bowl of rice arrive.

9:00 Yukgaejang (spicy beef soup with green onions) arrives. Ask waitress for another pot of tea. Waitress picks up tea pot and says, “Hot tea?” I say, “Yes,” and she says, “okay.”

9:10 Flag a different waitress and ask again for a pot of tea.

9:20 Finish dinner, put chopsticks and spoon in soup bowl to signal that I’m done, pull out Sense and Sensibility, read, and wait for check.

9:35 Waitress asks if I’m done, brings dessert and the check, apologizes for taking so long.

9:36 Pay at the register and leave. Hell if I’m going to wait for one of the waitresses to come around again.

Saturday was similar: my friend and I came in about 1 P.M., there were only three other parties there, and it took half an hour for our food to show up. I had to ask for another pot of tea then, too. Both times, the food was really good (I had kimchijigae the first time, and my friend had aljigae), but the service was terrible. Banchan should show up immediately after you’ve placed your order, not with the entree or between ordering and the arrival of the entree. The food shouldn’t take thirty minutes to arrive even if it’s being made from scratch, especially if the restaurant is mostly empty, and the food probably isn’t being made from scratch. The tea should be refilled at some point. Hell, I’ve had better service at restaurants in Athens! What makes the long wait time more ridiculous is that even after half an hour, whoever was in the kitchen forgot to put noodles in the yukgaejang. When the soup finally came, I was poking through it to see how they made yukgaejang and wondered where the noodles were, but thought that maybe they were buried under the vegetables. A few minutes later, one of the waitresses brought over a plate of raw noodles and slid them into the yukgaejang, saying that the kitchen had forgotten to put it in.

Overall, I was surprised–service at Korean restaurants in Korea is extremely brusque and efficient. You seat yourself, the menu’s written on the wall, and you place your order. After that, if you want anything, you yell it at a server as s/he passes by. Service at the Korean restaurants that I’ve been to in the U.S. is less brusque but still efficient and they tend to turn tables over quickly. I have never encountered service this slow, and this bad, in any restaurant I’ve been to except in Athens, where all the restaurants were slow, and at Die Weisse in Salzburg, where the servers forgot we existed, ignored attempts to flag them down, forgot our apfelstrudel, and after 35 minutes of waiting for our dessert and trying to flag a server, brought us our check, with the apfelstrudel on it. If the service had been bad just once, I would have ignored it: people have bad days, maybe the staff is new, maybe something went wrong in the kitchen, maybe the restaurant’s busy, it happens. But the restaurant wasn’t busy, either time, and the waitresses were different on Saturday afternoon and Monday evening, and it happened both when I was by myself and when I was with a friend.

Argh. Happy thoughts: the food was good, both times. The yukgaejang wasn’t like how my mom makes it: they put in beef; green onions; probably some chili peppers, although I didn’t see any flakes; jalapenos; onions; eggs; and eventually, noodles, while my mom only puts in beef, chili pepper flakes, green onions, a bit of sesame oil, salt, and black pepper. This yukgaejang had a meatier flavor and I liked the egg. The myeolchi (anchovies) in the banchan were good, and the kimchi was crunchy and tangy. On Saturday, the kimchijigae (kimchi stew) was almost perfect! It was spicy, a little sweet, and the kimchi and samgyeopsal (pork belly) were both very good. The broth was rich and tasted of pig, yum. It wasn’t sour, which means that they used fresh kimchi instead of kimchi that was beginning to go off, which is more traditional, but it was good nonetheless. My friend’s aljigae (fish egg stew) was also very good. They seem to get the soups right, which is surprising because soups are the most difficult to do, IMO. They’re simple, which means there’s nothing to hide a screwup, and everyone’s mum makes them differently, so what you get at restaurants is never quite what you think of as kimchijigae or yukgaejang. The fact that Heung Bu Nae’s kimchijigae and yukgaejang were good, although they weren’t made the way my mum makes them, was impressive. There was also a steady trickle of people in and out this evening, so that while the restaurant was never more than a third full, it’s evidently popular. It’s also reasonably cheap (yukgaejang, kimchijigae, and aljigae all $8.95, meat dishes $12-$14) and the inside is clean and the lines of the interior design are neat.

I can’t get past the awful service, though. While I was waiting for the yukgaejang tonight, I was thinking of coming back sometime and ordering ddeokguk (rice cake soup), to see if the wait for that would be any shorter. Ddeokguk takes all of seven minutes to make, and most of those minutes are spent waiting for the broth to boil. Sometime between waiting for the yukgaejang and waiting for the tea and waiting for the check, though, I lost patience and decided that I wasn’t ever coming back here. If I want good Korean food, I can take the Caltrain down to San Jose and go to Myeong Dong Sundubu, where the food is just as good and I won’t grow old waiting for it. I’d go here again only if I really wanted Korean food and knew that I wanted it a good hour in advance of being hungry, so that being hungry would coincide with the arrival of the food. It’s the kind of place to go to with a bunch of friends when no one’s hungry yet, you want somewhere cheap, and it’s more about hanging out and chilling with friends than it is about the food, although the food itself is quite good. At least they won’t kick you out or rush you out here.

NB: This isn’t a galbi (Korean barbeque) place. The tables aren’t designed for it; they might bring out portable grills for orders of two or more (i inbun+), but there aren’t hoods above the tables and I didn’t see anyone doing it.

Heung Bu Nae, corner of Geary St. and Fillmore St. in Western Addition. Coming from downtown, take the 38 bus west, get off at Fillmore, and cross the street.

I was going to write about Pazzia, but I was too amused by what I saw when I opened gmail this morning, so I thought I’d post excerpts from that instead. It’s still about a restaurant, if not so coherent and thought out. Lots of enthusiasm, though. See, I went out with a friend, her client, her friends, and her coworkers last night and got pretty drunk. Now that I’m living on the West Coast, I have no one to drunk dial because the time differences all go the wrong way. So instead, I drunk emailed a friend from college. I woke up this morning, remembered that I’d emailed the friend, and groaned, because so far our relationship has revolved around mutual respect and appreciation for the finer things in life: good food, art, Classical music, books, and opera. Drunk dials and drunk emails and touchy feely personal things (other than how we feel about work) and TMI stuff haven’t entered into it at all. So I opened my email with trepidation. The only bit of it that I could remember writing was that I’d gone out with a friend and a crowd of her associates, gotten drunk, and then taken the friend back to her place before going home myself, so as to make sure that she was not going to pass out and die or get run over between the bar and her flat. It turns out that this is what I write about when I’m drunk, enthusiastic, bubbly, and uninhibited:

Dinner was actually really good, although it was my second dinner and
I was only planning to have a glass of wine and maybe steal some of
ann’s food (I didn’t think [friend] would want to go out, so after I got
home from work, I ate my lunch leftovers. I was about to cut up a
pear for dessert when she called asking if I wanted to go out for
dinner.). A16 is a southern Italian place – Campanian – in Marina,
and it’s pretty good. It’s on the loud side, but we got there at 730
and didn’t have any trouble getting seated, even though we didn’t have
reservations, and the bread and olive oil were good. We had pork
liver pate on crostini, tri-tip steak ([friend]), squid ink tonnarelli alla
gamberetti (me), and cannellini con oregano e rosemarino (both). The
tonnarelli was made with squid ink mixed into the pasta dough and it
had a fresh, briny taste reminiscent of Japanese cuisine. The shrimp
were tender and succulent. The liver was surprisingly light, not
overwhelmingly heavy. We also had fabulous wine – a white wine while
we were waiting at the bar, Clelia something or other, and then a
carafe of a 2005 sangiovese from Marche with dinner. Both of the
wines were very good – the white had a surprising flavor that hit
right before the finish, and the red was light and had a lot of heat
at the end. The red was balanced, though, and felt lighter and cooler
than most reds, not so overwhelmingly bold. [friend] works crazy
traditional banking hours and so I only see her once or twice a week,
on Fridays or Saturdays, but when we do meet up, we go out for good
dinners, which is fun. It makes me a lot more fond of SF, to meet up
with a friend and enjoy a nice dinner together.

Also, this:

i have to be at an open house in seven hours, so good night! my most
recent letters should have arrived in berlin by now – the
apartment-hunting situation has not changed since i wrote them, except
that i am even more frustrated than i was last week. the rental
market here is crazy.

Well, that certainly covers what’s been on my mind lately: apartment hunting and food. On a more organized and sober note, a16 was awesome. I forgot to ask for the tonnarelli (a long, thin noodle like spaghetti, but thicker, hollow in the center, and typically chewier) al dente, but it was perfectly chewy, with enough bounce and resistance to add texture to the act of eating. It’s handmade on the premises with squid ink mixed into the dough and I assume that the rest of the pasta is fresh (handmade on the premises each day) as well. The menu: a few appetizers, five or six salume selections, four or five pizzas, four or five pasta, and a dessert list that’s not as simple as I would like, but not overwhelmingly rich, either. I prefer my desserts to be light, cleanse the palate, and wake me up at the end of dinner, not send me into a food coma. It should be a bright, fresh note at the end of the meal, not a mass of rich pastry, cream, and chocolate that takes a Herculean effort to get through. If anyone knows an Italian restaurant in the States that serves a nice granita di caffe for dessert, drop me a line, please! The a16 desserts were not that simple, but were along the lines of crostata, scoops of gelato, etc. Other notes: the pastas are available as half servings, too, which are more than enough if you’re also getting an appetizer, or if you’re not a heavy eater. The pizza is southern in style, which means that it’s thick, not the thin-crust Roman or Northern kind. A friend once said that in Italy, the pizza crust gets thicker the further south you go. I’m curious about how it tastes, so I might go back sometime. A16 is loud and energetic and I like places that are quieter and more low key, so although dinner was excellent all around, I wouldn’t go there regularly. I think of it more as a place to drop in on once in a while, rather than a comfortable place to unwind.

Addendum: the white was Clelia Romana, Colli di Lapio, Fiano di Avellino 2004. The excellent red was a Sangiovese, Selvagrossa, Trimplin,Marche 2005
Price: appetizers for 8-11, pizzas for 11-15, pastas for 8-10 (half orders) and 17-22 (full orders), secondi for 19-25. 375 mL carafes of wine for 20-35.

A16: 2355 Chestnut St., www.a16sf.com, 415-771-2216, lunch W-F 1130-230, dinner Su-Th 5-10, dinner F-Sa 5-11. On the weekend, go before 730 or make reservations.