Dining

I had to wait all summer, so almost the very minute I found myself in a month whose name contained the letter "R" (Sept. 2, at the unseemly hour of 10:30 a.m., to be exact) I high-tailed it over to Swan Oyster Depot, San Francisco's top temple to briny comestibles for almost a century.

Anthony Pidgeon

Nobody's crabby at Swan Oyster Depot, one of the town's great hangouts.

Details

1517 Polk (at Sacramento), 673-1101. Open Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (counter service ends at 5:20 p.m.). Reservations not accepted. No credit cards. Parking: manageable. Muni: 1, 19, California Street cable car. Noise level: friendly

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• French Quarter
• Joseph Schmidt
• Olympia
• Seafood
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Longtime conventional wisdom has it that the three great American cities in which to eat are New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco. Each is blessed with a lively harbor heritage, a rich multicultural tradition, and a long-standing aversion to the status quo, key ingredients in any good culinary stew. Perhaps the cities' primary common element, however, is the stuff that feeds the harbor -- seafood -- and the places that serve it up -- oyster bars.

My three favorite oyster bars share certain immutable characteristics: fleet-fingered shuckers and marble-topped counters where you can watch the pros in action; really good "bowls" (gumbo here, oyster stew there, clam chowder everywhere); and, most important, impeccably fresh bivalves and other piscatorial delights served up with understated flourish. But unlike the French Quarter's noisy, neoned Acme or Manhattan's darkly elegant Grand Central, Swan is a sunny sort of place where you can slurp your oysters in an atmosphere of familial bonhomie.

Swan is located on a terrific stretch of Polk Street that also includes Bob's Donuts, Piccadilly Fish and Chips, a Double Rainbow outlet, and See's Candies. It has the jaunty, open countenance of the oyster bars that flourished across urban America a century ago. The venue's big front window frames a dazzling still life of mussels, clams, crabs, lobsters, prawns, scallops, salmon, sand dabs, brook trout, and whitefish, aesthetically arranged over crushed ice. Half of the deep, narrow inside space is the countermen's enclave, where shells are opened and fish are filleted with hypnotic dexterity. The other half contains a long and well-used marble countertop at which you sit on a rickety old stool and eat.

And, one might add, eat well. Swan's devotion to freshness is so complete I envision a frozen-fish salesman -- a tool of some Gorton's subsidiary -- getting halfway through his spiel about the beauties of flash-frozen grouper with a Swan counterman and finding himself thrown bodily into the street under a barrage of W.C. Fieldisms: "Ungulate! Cro-Magnon! Begone, Lucifer!"

We began, of course, with oysters. I love the little bivalves, whether they're baked into Oysters Bingo at the Buckeye, purchased at Johnson's Oyster Farm and grilled over driftwood on Point Reyes, or slurped raw from the shell in concert with cocktail sauce, horseradish, and a squirt of lemon. We ordered a couple of dozen -- salty malpeques from Prince Edward Island, spicy mi yagis from British Columbia, and, best of all, supple Hood Canals ($13.50/dozen) from Washington state.

More conventional wisdom maintains that the classic San Francisco feast is made up of sourdough, chardonnay, a simple salad, and plenty of cracked Dungeness crab. The latter item is a Swan specialty: lots of silky-sweet meat emerging from its highly crackable shells, ready for dipping in drawn butter, Louis dressing, or mayo, as you choose ($12.95). If you don't want to go to the trouble of cracking and digging, the Swanmen have already done it for you when you order a seafood salad ($13.75), a big pile of sweet, moist seafood with a few shreds of green stuff for bedding. The staff will whip up a vinaigrette for you if you'd like, but it's more fun to do it yourself with the olive oil and the vinegar (a heady brew concocted on the premises) always within reach, right next to the bowls of quartered lemons, horseradish, cocktail sauce, and oyster crackers. (Other salads feature shrimp, prawns, lobster, or a combination of these plus crab.)

Swan's seafood cocktails are bountiful things, especially the combination ($6.75), a huge goblet of shrimp, prawns, crab meat, lobster, and two kinds of oyster (East Coast and Olympia), dressed with the establishment's sweet-tangy red sauce. The Boston clam chowder ($2.25/cup) is another delight, a rich concoction of butter, cream, and lots and lots of clams, with none of the potato-soup thickening that renders so many chowders dense and undistinguished.

One of the venue's few other hot dishes, soft-shell crab ($11.90), isn't quite as successful, however. There's nothing I like more than crunchy, briny soft-shell crab (it pokes its way out of my favorite sushi), but although the crustacean is perfectly fried here, it's drowned in a garlicky green sauce that overwhelms even the crab's unsubtle flavor.

There's nothing wrong with the Swan Oyster Depot smoker, though, not when it produces such sweetly succulent delights as the smoked trout ($13.95), which was added upon request to our seafood salad, and the smoked salmon ($13.50). The lox was sliced before our eyes from a huge fillet and served atop slices of sourdough -- a special, wonderfully crusty version prepared for Swan by Parisian -- a simple presentation highlighting the meat's rich, tender flavor.

To wash all of this down you've got your choice of white wine ($3.95/glass), Heineken ($2/glass, $3.50/pint), or a selection of soft drinks ($1.60). Although there is no dessert menu per se, right next door is another great San Francisco institution, See's Candies, where you can get the most satisfying chocolates in the city (and yes, I've been to Joseph Schmidt).