Falling in Love, Slowly 

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My mother was disappointed when our server returned from the kitchen to tell her the restaurant was out of the buttermilk panna cotta she'd chosen, but she enjoyed the apricot and blueberry cobbler she got instead. The only problem I found with the wedge of fresh cherry crostata (with house-made pistachio ice cream) was that it was too small. The quince paste on the carefully selected plate of three cheeses (with an extraordinarily good creamy Taleggio) was the first appearance in two visits of the place's namesake. ("It's not in season," a friend said, but "It was on my first visit!" I replied.)

As with the pork, Quince still hadn't snapped into focus for me. When I said as much to Jenny, she replied, "But it's our favorite new restaurant!" and immediately invited me to join her family there for a dinner already booked for Sunday, a couple of days hence. I thought with a sigh of the big Memorial weekend barbecue I'd have to forgo, with its promise of many different kinds of barbecued ribs, but felt I needed to understand Tusk's cooking. I already knew I liked charcoal-grilled ribs.

It was the right call. I got to the restaurant first, and while waiting espied a couple eating thin pasta that even from many feet away I could see glistening with butter; it's called tajarin, a server told me. When I perused the menu, every pasta among the eight listed (two more than I'd seen before) looked tempting, and I decided I'd have a pasta dinner, starting with the tajarin. While Greil enjoyed a salad of sliced raw porcini, fennel, and parmigiano reggiano; and Jenny pressed tastes of her sparkling anchovy and mussel salad on me; and Emily exclaimed over her beautiful plate of rosy seared tuna with a salad of radish, cucumber, and green olive; I fell in love with my exquisite pasta. The portion I had thought was a half turned out to be the whole thing -- a tiny, tangled haystack of the thinnest, most fragile tagliatelle imaginable, sauced simply with butter and a bit of fresh sage, a banal preparation turned genius. I was reminded of the server's response when M.F.K. Fisher, told that a sauce she'd savored was chives, butter, and cream, said, "So simple?": "So simple, Madame! But, you know, with a master ...." This was the pasta of a master.

As was the little gift we received from the kitchen, a few bright green spinach ravioli filled with fonduta, meltingly creamy fontina. As was my main course, house-made garganelli, a pennelike pasta sauced with prosciutto, English peas, slivers of white asparagus, and cream. As was Greil's plate of tagliatelle in a creamy Bolognese -- he looked up from it to say, "This is perfect." I was having a conversion experience, like the one I happily watched my friend Mary have at a lovely lunch upstairs at Chez Panisse, where I took her after she'd revealed that she just didn't get the place. I also remembered what Robert had told me about his strategy at Oliveto: "We just order all the pastas that we can." (My own strategy there: I order all the charcuterie that I can. Whatever.) I liked the braised duck with fingerling potatoes, sweet translucent turnips, and cherries, and the crispy snapper with braised artichokes. But the pastas were thrilling. The pastas were the best.

I had the same feeling about the dessert menu that I'd had about the pasta menu: I wanted to order every one. But I forwent the cherry galette, the peach ice cream, and the apricot sorbet with blackberries (ah, the bounty of spring) for the astonishingly light, multilayer coconut cake with strawberries and whipped cream and a taste of bittersweet chocolate mousse. I impulsively got a panna cotta to go and drove it directly to my mother: It was hauntingly scented with peach leaves, like the most elusive flavor of almonds, and beautifully shaky.

By the time of my last visit, with Peter, who'd enjoyed a dinner there a few weeks earlier (especially a starter of oxtail terrine), I felt happy and confident. And we had another superb meal, starting with ivory spears of asparagus alla Fiorentina, which I thought meant with spinach but which turned out to be topped with pancetta and shards of pecorino, and a daringly bitter sformato made with wild arugula, softer and puffier than the nettle version and perfect with a thin white wine from the Alto Adige region. (From the first, I was impressed with Quince's wine list, which features an ample number of wines under $30; after trying several previously unfamiliar Italian bottles, I found it as assured and confident in its choices as the pasta preparations.) We continued with fat fettuccine, mottled green with nettles, in a pool of pungent olive oil, and gnocchi, simply sauced with butter and peas. Peter, a dumpling fancier, said, "These gnocchi are ethereal." If they are on the menu (which, I'm told, changes by as much as 70 percent from day to day) the next time I go, I will not be able to resist them.

We shared a plate of tender roast leg of pork with long-cooked green beans and scarlet turnips. And then Peter had a wedge of nectarine crostata with toasted almond ice cream; I had three scoops of Spring Lady peach ice cream with a dab of softly whipped cream and a few toasted almonds; and we floated out into the spring night. I remembered, driving home, how many other restaurants, including both Chez Panisse and Oliveto, had worked their way into my affections over time -- and now I can't envision the Bay Area scene without them. Michael Tusk is a worthy successor to his mentors. The dreamy restaurant he and Lindsay have created features a cuisine that's all his own.