Review: Pres a Vi

This generation needs an Eisenhower, someone to sound the alarm about the growing threat of the small-plates/wine-bar complex. You know the scam: $13 dollar "large bites" and $8 glasses of wine, prices justified not by size of portion but by words per menu description. When a single salad is "blended," "layered" and "finished," it's time to stand up and speak truth to power.

Which brings us to Pres a Vi, a new place tucked into one corner of the Lucas Empire in the Presidio that seemed as good a lunch destination as any after a long walk at Crissy Field. The menu at first was inviting. Nothing over $15, with several dishes (including burgers and sausage sandwiches) arrayed together in what seemed a reasonably priced entree division. Turned out it was all small plates. "And what about the burgers? Are they like this?" I asked the waiter, making my fingers into a circle the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.

"No, the burgers are full size," he replied.

So, confusion right off the bat. That made me go down the list and ask, "What about this? And this?"

We started with potato wedges ("roasted," "fried" and "tossed") that were dry and mealy on the inside. More annoyingly, they had a name, "Jo-Jos." We also split an order of grilled asparagus named "Delta Grass" that tasted amazingly like grilled asparagus.

The next round were the non-entree entrees: tuna tatiki, Korean BBQ-style beef, and rock shrimp risotto. The tuna was raw but a bit chewy, not supple, with a lot of fussy stuff on top. The other two dishes were fine but damn small for their prices.

We ended with a beet salad named "Roasted Beet Salad," easy enough to figure out, but surprises lurked within. The description included "onion ring," which I thought was rings of raw or perhaps pickled onion. In fact it was an Onion Ring, a rather large one: breaded, deep-fried, and topped with the aforementioned beets. I did not expect and did not want a deep-fried onion ring with my beet salad. It was not cheeky or post-modern or retro; it was wrong.

So was the bill: $80 for three people, with only one of us (me) drinking alcohol (a $6 Anchor Steam draft). And the service: weird. Overly attentive, as they tried to clean the table of crumbs after each round and kept asking us how we were "doing," but in that California spacey way. And the feng shui: the room sucked all the energy out of the space, for some strange reason. Fanch pointed out the window sills were just slightly above eye level, making it difficult to look out at the nice view of the Palace of Fine Arts.