Aatxe Opens in the Swedish-American Hall 

While there are any number of tapas restaurants in San Francisco, and an infinite cosmos of small plates out there, proper Basque food is surprisingly hard to come by. Txoko only lasted a year-and-a-half, and apart from Piperade, the cuisine tends to get folded into more generalized Spanish restaurants. (It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, a restaurant row called "Basquetown" separated Chinatown from North Beach, and there was even a Basque restaurant inside Cafe du Nord, but it closed in the early '90s.)

But one has returned, and in a renovated building at that. I had tried to write about Aatxe a few weeks ago, but the restaurant suffered a small kitchen fire — minor enough that no one was hurt and diners were able to keep chowing down, but major enough that it closed for a couple of days. Having finally gone, I can say that Chef Ryan Pollnow knows what he's doing in that battle-scarred kitchen — even if some of the dishes are indisputably Spanish. (It's not for me to adjudicate Aatxe's purity vis-à-vis the motherland, though. Just as Wallace Shawn says in The Princess Bride to "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," no good can come of wading into cultural disputes where nationalist sentiments run high. Let's just eat.)

For a city that wants to sample and document little tastes of everything, Basque food is already kind of the ultimate — no more so than when combined with $43 cocktails that serve four, tiki-style. I got a plain old Sickle for one (a mixture of Campo de Encanto Pisco, Ancho Reyes, raspberry, Hidalgo Pedro Ximenez sherry, citrusy Licor 43 and lime, $12). With its overflowing ice cubes dusted in pimentón, and served in a slender whalebone glass, the drink was easily 10 inches tall, excluding the straw; a statement cocktail, if you will. There is also an entirely separate gin-and-tonic menu, grouped by category ("big," "herbal," "soft and fruity," etc.), if you feel like playing it safe.

While we had tried to sit at the coveted chef's counter to ogle the prep work, it was to be a lowly table for us. That's probably fine in retrospect, owing to my tendency to order enough food to feed five. And in spite of being prime dinner hour, dishes emerged at exactly the right intervals, starting with the five-piece pinxto flight ($15). Presented almost like savory petit-fours, it was a beautiful array of salty delights, from the gilda (anchovy, guindilla peppers, and manzanilla olives) to the chorizo deviled egg to the buñuelo that was like a salmon funnel cake.

The only disappointment was the octopus salad ($12), and not because the taste was off. It was bright and tangy, but overdressed as if to conceal the comically tiny shavings of pulpo. Other things were just damn impressive, though. The potatoes in the patatas bravas ($8.50) weren't simply twice-cooked. They were thrice-cooked: steamed, then fried twice at different temperatures. Doing so kept them from getting mushy under the salsa, which was a slow-burner in its own right. And the trumpet mushrooms a la plancha ($14.50) were exquisite even if the individual ingredients (apart from the squash slices on top) were tricky to tease out. At a glance, the mushrooms looked so bland and white, smothered in sauce that was almost like a gravy, but flavor was complex, the ramps were perfectly pickled, and the overall texture was incredible, with little breaded bits. That one was definitely a stunner.

The Spanish fried rice (chorizo, sofrito, and a salt cod tortilla, $14) was good, pleasantly similar to Mission Chinese Food's salt cod fried rice, and the four stacked balls of pork trotter ($11) were even better, with a surprisingly appealing sweetness. Owing to the carrots and raisins, the morcilla chickpeas ($24) were sweet as well — and rich and thick, too, almost like a tagine. I wanted to make 500 pounds of it and not leave the house until climate change gets rid of the fog forever. With the lamb albóndigas ($26), it was a bit strange to love the favas more than the meatballs themselves, but sometimes in the spring you just get that sweet spot where beans are the greatest things you could ever eat.

For dessert, the cow-sheep-goat cheese plate ($15) was generous with the cubes of membrillo, like little cubes of concentrated quince essence; is there a more civilized way to end a meal? (Technically, we closed out with flan, rich and topped with berries.) If there was one major drawback to Aatxe, it's the sound level. This is a tough thing to bemoan without sounding like Grandpa-Pete-Forgot-His-Ear-Trumpet-Again, but I've been to Noise Pop shows downstairs in Cafe du Nord that were less noisy, and it is just objectively unpleasant to raise your voice across a two-top for an hour-plus.

Still, this was a wonderful meal almost without exception. I'm coming back to bond with some buds over pintxos and a cocktail for four, but since sitting four-in-a-row at the chef's counter is probably not advisable, I guess that just means I'm coming back twice.