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Golden Flower – Wandering around Chinatown looking for something…I don’t know, something that “grabs” my palate…I spy this Vietnamese spot and think the contrast with the more elegant, fusiony cuisine at The Slanted Door would be instructive. It’s not so much a dive as a casual neighborhood restaurant wedged into one of the many crowded streets of Chinatown so that it has the exterior aspect of a dive, but it’s close enough to the North Beach/Financial District intersection that it gets a healthy mix of Vietnamese immigrants and European-descended interlopers in its quiet, somewhat dark interior. Whatever their origin, most are gathered together to enjoy steaming bowls of pho and its variants.

I’m not in the mood for soup, so I go for the Vietnamese spring rolls (much more conventional in comparison with the Slanted Door interpretation; tighter, more fried, and definitely more of a flavor mélange than the fresh and distinctly-flavored SD version, yet still quite tasty…followed by an intensely spicy lemongrass beef dish that sets me to glugging one of those gelatinous tea-like beverages from a can, just to kill the peppers. And yet, it’s a very well-executed dish. A good place, and for the laughably insignificant price a place worth a return visit. (4/05)