Bear with me; it's not really that big a stretch.
San Francisco is a great restaurant town not because of its handful of uber-luxe, four-star establishments, but because just about every neighborhood in the city has two or three — or a dozen — serious and seriously good local eateries: chef-owned and -operated joints that consistently turn out damn fine food at a price affordable to mere mortals.
We don't have much of that in our little corner of paradise. But we do have Cafe Pastis.
For seven years this unassuming little restaurant in a cheesy strip mall on Red Road has been dishing up the kind of honest, soulful, deeply flavorful food that to San Francisco diners is as much a part of their daily lives as the fog rolling in over the Bay, and summers cold enough to freeze the mukluks off an Eskimo.
Cafe Pastis does all this with a simplicity and lack of artifice that's reflected in the restaurant itself. There are broom closets larger than its minuscule dining room, and postage stamps bigger than its laughably tiny kitchen. Squeezing in among the crush of bodies jammed into the wooden banquettes that run the length of the narrow dining room is as close as most us will ever get to lap dancing; bathrooms are accessible only by scurrying past the hot, steamy dishwashing station.
None of it matters. It's the food that counts.
Even a simple spinach salad is special — a huge mound of fluffy, crispy greens, chunks of pungent Roquefort cheese, and thick slices of sweetly caramelized pears, all tied together by a tangy Xeres vinegar dressing. The house-made pâté is a restaurant signature, coarsely textured but with a livery unctuousness, served in substantial portion with miniature croutons, cornichons, tapenade, and a small salad of baby greens that the kitchen actually dressed with a lively balsamic vinaigrette, instead of just grabbing them out of the bag and dumping them on the plate.
It's hard for me to get past two traditional bistro entrees: bouillabaisse and steak-frites. Cafe Pastis' bouillabaisse is a thing of culinary beauty, a birdbath-size bowl brimming with a richly savory, saffron-burnished broth in which swim plump mussels, shrimp and crawfish, plus big chunks of fish and translucent shards of fennel. Of course, it also comes with a piquant rouille and a supply of pesto-streaked croutons.
Steak-frites is equally straightforward and satisfying — thin New York steak, grilled a precise medium-rare, gilded with a suave green peppercorn sauce and accompanied by a tangle of greaseless (but something less than totally crispy) fries.
Something less too is Pastis's wine list, which, though adequate, doesn't really do justice to its food. The 2005 Drouhin La Forêt Bourgogne Pinot Noir was a decent enough pour, but a few more interesting choices — small-producer Burgundies, Oregon and Washington pinot noirs, Bordeaux blends from France and California — would have been much appreciated.
But there was plenty to appreciate about the café's cookbook-perfect crme brùlée — the light, silken custard, kissed with vanilla and hiding a few ripe raspberries; the thick, glasslike caramelized sugar crust; the portion size easily satisfying two. And the fact that this superlative little neighborhood restaurant isn't in foggy, frigid San Francisco, but right here in our own back yard.
If only we had a few dozen more like it.
7310 Red Rd, South Miami; 305-665-3322. Open Monday through Friday 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Saturday 12:00 to 2:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., Friday through Saturday 6:00 to 11:00 p.m.
