The Slanted Door is a must.
A must in the same way that washing your armpits with soap is a must. Or tipping the lady who rubs the callouses from your feet during a pedicure. Or paying for a girl’s dinner before you lamely attempt to kiss her.
At least this is what I had been told. The name “Slanted Door”, therefore, already existed as a picture in my mind. I saw rich reds and yellows. I heard hushed tones, intimate whispers and the subtlety of a veteran spy.
So I made a reservation. For two. I generally make reservations for two, because there is someone I like to go to dinner with, someone who knows about food. There is another reason. Open Table does not legislate for those who dine alone. Or at least, it does in a practical sense. But, emotionally, how embarrassing would it be to make an Open Table reservation for just one person? Tables for one are the lepers of the modern world, shunned for the disease they carry and the unease they project.
The Slanted Door is a Vietnamese(ish) restaurant in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. Which did not prevent me from expecting something intimate. I am naive. Especially when I think I’m not.
We opened the door to be greeted by a noise not dissimilar to a bus station in a very large South African city. It was as if everyone was desperate to be heard, rather than fed. Was this a restaurant? Or was this the British Parliament?
I believe this may have been the cellophane noodles.
To the right of the front door, a door that was curiously straight rather than slanted, was a lady who seemed to have been transplanted from Eastern Europe. Not because of her nationality, but because she seemed to be in charge of the coat check. The coat check is a fundamental and irritating part of Eastern European cuisine, so I was surprised to find it being transplanted to a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco.
It seems, however, that this lady doubled as the hostess. And, who knows, perhaps the bookie too.
She was as friendly as a December wind in Warsaw. Still, while we waited in a holding area that reminded one of thirty different Marriotts worldwide, I was busy picking up the scales that had fallen from my eyes to the floor.
This was not an intimate restaurant. This was a bright teeming hall with large windows, a long bar and quite a few people whose body language suggested they were desperate for some kind of intimacy, even if they had to pay for it.
We were led to a table by a window. These windows, close up, are as large as an emperor’s sarcophagus. The tables, however, are small and as close together as the vertebrae of a dwarf.
Then there was the food. I had expectations. Perhaps these were unreasonable expectations. But they were expectations engendered by so many written words and so many spoken hallelujahs.
We ordered enough dishes to feed Barney Frank. There were spare ribs, a salad, spring rolls. There was also crab with cellophane noodles, supposedly a signature dish. If this was a signature dish, then it is the signature of a medical professional. Undistinguished and indistinguishable.
In fact, now that I think about it, this food could have come straight from a truck at the side of the road. It doesn’t mean it was bad. It just means that I felt I was sitting in a loud, characterless office building at lunch. And all of the employees had rushed out to buy some food from the local hawker centers. Yes, we were in Singapore. Except for the fact that in Singapore each of these office lunches would have cost less than $5 a head, rather than the $75 that I was bound to pay.
The service was remarkably efficient. Also like Singapore. But if this is one of the most distinguished restaurants in San Francisco, nay, the United States, then I am Thomas Keller, porn star.
Please, don’t take my words and treat them as disdainful. Should you want to take several of your friends to the Slanted Door in order to get very drunk on Riesling (yes, I think there were more than two thousand of them on the wine list. We ordered one. It had all the sweetness of a jilted divorcee) and eat something that you might have bought on your way home from getting drunk on several quarts of real ale in Manchester, England, then please make a reservation.
However, if you expected grace, subtlety, sophistication and low lights, I fear the local bordello might offer a competitively priced alternative.
Strangely, the coat check lady was very friendly when we were leaving. What did she know? And when did she know it?
A Side of Pretentious 