January 7, 2003

By Paul Reidinger

WHEN STARS FIRST opened, almost 20 years ago, it instantly acquired a patina of glamour that tended to obscure the quality of the food. Politicos and their molls fastened upon the place, and the chef-proprietor, Jeremiah Tower, did not exactly shun the limelight. But Tower was a serious chef; he had cooked at Chez Panisse in the 1970s and had deeply inhaled the by-now familiar wisdom of emphasizing local produce in season.

Time passed. Tower attempted to build a Stars empire without much success, and along with everyone else, he seemed to lose interest in the original restaurant, despite its outsized splendor – its long bar and high ceilings – and its proximity to City Hall and the performing fora just across Van Ness Avenue. Toward the end of the 1990s he abandoned ship, selling the restaurant to investors and moving to New York.

Stars might have died right then and there, but it didn't. Instead the place struggled: without the stamp of Tower's ego and charm, what was it? For a time, it seemed to be just another restaurant, inheritor of a golden name (and not much else) from another era. Then into the kitchen came Amaryll Schwertner, a disciple of – what else? – the seasonal and the local, and the circle closed. All is as it was, as the Guardian of Forever assures a mournful Captain Kirk at the end of the episode "City on the Edge of Forever."

Well, maybe not entirely as it was, for Stars no longer seems to be quite at the top of the list of see-and-be-seen places. That cannot be a bad thing, for those who are busy seeing and being seen often don't bother to notice what's on their plates, and the food that Schwertner is putting on plates is, in the main, marvelous.

The holiday season might be the best time to visit a restaurant like Stars. For one thing, dropping some cash seems to be less painful in December than at other times of the year; and for another, the foods of early winter have an almost romantic heartiness: they are warm and filling, and we have not yet wearied of the short, raw days.

So: Schwertner's rich vegetable soup ($7) begins with the familiar butternut squash, adds some cauliflower and parsnip to make a puree the color of peach sherbet, and finishes with a toss of toasted almond slices for texture. Hungarian stuffed cabbage ($16), meanwhile, turns out to be a choucroute-like dish of cabbage leaves, pork farce, cumin-scented sauerkraut braised with bacon, and house-made sour cream. For some (farcical?) reason the menu describes this deeply sustaining dish as "light." Perhaps the reference is to its cost.

We found a few old-line Stars-style dishes here and there. The fabulously plump mussels ($15) are sauced only with a bit of brown butter – an act of restraint that lets the shellfish's mild, slightly sweet meatiness lead the dish. The mussels make a good match with the frites ($4.50) and their cumin mayonnaise, though be warned that the stack of potato strings is easily enough for four people. There were only two of us, but luckily we were game, and one of us had ordered a lamb burger ($11), an eastern-Mediterranean twist on the classic Stars burger. Why do people think lamb is lighter than beef? It isn't, but maybe the accompanying sauces, of yogurt and roasted red pepper, foster some illusion of reduced calories and richness.

The menu is littered with references to "Niman Ranch." Even the hot dog ($8) – an immense grilled wurst resembling a kielbasa in its girth – was so branded. It was good, but not as good as the accompanying sauerkraut and the chimney-smoked potato chips. These made a subtle contrast with the parsnip and potato chips served beside a roasted chicken salad sandwich ($14) rolled up in lavash with mustard and (noncumin) mayonnaise.

Desserts continue the theme of seasonality punctuated with little jolts of memory. A chocolate pot de créme ($6) was served with a pair of the familiar star-shaped chocolate cookies. Rice pudding ($6), meantime, was topped with a warm fruit compote that made liberal use of candied quince and its mystique of Christmas time in the Mediterranean. And a fragrant chocolate gingerbread cake ($7.50), napped with chocolate sauce and accompanied by a pat of chestnut ice cream, was redolent of Yule in the chilly north.

The restaurant itself, despite its spaciousness, is far from chilly, but it can be a bit dark. We had trouble making out the menus at midday; they'd been printed up on poinsettia-red paper, and because it was a wet, gloomy noontime, we were reduced to holding the tables' votive candles in our hands while poring over the text like monks in a dank medieval monastery translating some formidable religious document.

The stormy weather caused further chaos: the host's station was overwhelmed, the coat check was overwhelmed. Still, things settled down in the end, for 'tis (or 'twas) the season to be forbearant, if not actually jolly.