side a Mission District

The name tells you something. side a. There's a DJ up front, the staff are wearing vintage concert tees, and the room is in a residential pocket of the Mission near Potrero Hill that doesn't feel like anywhere tourists end up. It's a Monday night and the place is full anyway.

San Francisco does something that very few cities manage. The great neighborhoods here produce a specific kind of restaurant, and if you know them you know what I mean. Not a concept, not a brand exercise. Just a room full of people who live nearby eating food that a chef cares about. The city has been doing this for a long time and side a is a current example of why that reputation holds.

The kitchen is open and head chef Parker Brown is right there in it, which in a room this size means you're aware of the cooking without it being theatrical. The waiter and I had a good conversation about the menu. He knew the food well, had a clear sense of what would work for what I was in the mood for, and steered me right.

I had the house red. A blend, light, the kind of wine that doesn't announce itself. The red leaf salad had whipped chèvre with a serious amount of black pepper in it, a vinaigrette that coated the leaves without drowning them, thin red onion, pistachios. I ate it slowly because I didn't want it to be over.

The salmon was locally caught, over butter beans with green onion. The char was the thing. This was not a piece of fish that had been treated gently. The skin was thin and crisp, the fish had a depth that salmon earns when someone actually cooks it rather than warming it through, and the beans were substantial enough to hold their own. I made sure every bite had both.

There were other things on the menu I thought about ordering. The mussels with sausage in a Miller High Life broth. The shrimp. The cheeseburger. A different night I would have ordered differently.

The room had a good spread of people. Different ages, different configurations of who came with whom. The kind of clientele that happens when a neighborhood shows up. It made you want to live around the corner.