This was my first visit to the esteemed Vietnamese restaurant Slanted Door in its new �" and third �" location in San Francisco. I’ve eaten at both the original spot on Valencia Street in the Mission and the temporary location on Embarcadero Street that opened while the current venue in the renovated Ferry Building was being finished. While the latest incarnation in the Ferry Building is spacious and affords an incredible view of the Bay Bridge and ocean, the sleek and modern interior is impersonal. My sister likened the place to an airport hangar. The new space must be four times the size of the original restaurant. More hungry stomachs, more business. But opening the glass and steel doors to the trendoids resulted in a loss of warmth and camaraderie that I fondly remembered from the original Slanted Door. It’s true that the first location in the Mission district was a little ghetto, what with its dark wood furniture evoking an opium denim and the crack dealers who were wheeling and dealing a couple of blocks away. But my Friday night dinner party �" with the Lioness, Hippie Dude and La Francaise -- made up for Slanted Door’s sterility. We feasted on green papaya salad, shaking beef cooked medium rare in a scallion swirl, catfish in a clay pot and and a cookie ladder set gingerly atop a bowl of sweet porridge of yellow beans and tapioca, among other delicacies that I picked from the tradition-inflected menu. The bottle of riesling (Schloss Gopelsburg from Austria) was a nice touch. My after-dinner tea, dubbed Hong Kong milk tea, wasn’t traditional at all. But I liked how the chef modified the recipe for Vietnamese iced coffee, which is made with a slow drip of chicory-roasted coffee and sweeten condensed milk, by mixing black tea with the gooey milk substance.
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