Lucky Spot Hot Pot

The Portola District has been off the rest of San Francisco's culinary radar since the mid-1980s, when the great barbecue joint Vic & Betty's closed down. Recently, the proliferation of Chinese restaurants catering to picky Chinese immigrants drawn by relatively affordable home prices has again brought the neighborhood to citywide attention.

A standout among these eateries is Zone 88. Its cryptic name is presumably intended to mean "lucky spot": eight is traditionally considered a lucky number, so 88 is doubly so. The place is nicer than the average inexpensive Chinese restaurant: the dining room is tastefully decorated, the lighting is warm and indirect, and the chairs are comfortable. There are, however, TVs at both ends of the room tuned to different stations, and while the sound isn't too loud, you can hear both.

With the menus, the server brings out a complimentary appetizer of kimchi salad. It tastes like regular Korean mixed-vegetable kimchi that has been rinsed, chopped, and tossed with a dressing that includes hot chile oil and lots of black pepper. This addictive snack wakes up your palate and encourages consumption of fluids — the limited bar offers Tsingtao beer ($3.50) and a couple of wines.

Zone 88 suffers from an advanced case of Multiple Menu Syndrome. The dozen-page main book lists more than a hundred dishes, including many exotic Sichuan specialties such as boiled spicy frog, dry-fried eel, and Arctic snail. For many dishes it provides photos, some of which are helpful. There's a separate menu for hot pots; another for noodles, dumplings, pancakes, and breads (at least some of which appear on the main menu, sometimes under different names); a simplified menu with some standard Chinese-American dishes; a takeout menu with a selection of the less-challenging dishes; and at least one other page that may include dishes not on the main menu. The servers are friendly but don't speak much English, so if you don't speak Chinese you're on your own in sorting all this out.

The top draw here is the Sichuan hot pot, a meal best enjoyed with a group of four or more. The server brings out a portable gas burner, tops it with a doughnut-shaped pot filled with boiling broth, and surrounds it with plates of raw ingredients. You cook your meal yourself by dunking the ingredients in the broth.

Of the handful of places in town that serve hot pot, Zone 88 offers the biggest selection. You get a wide choice of broths ($9.95-$16.95), including regular, spicy, lamb, chicken (I believe this is "black" chicken, which is supposed to have medicinal qualities), fish, and mushroom. There's also a "two-flavor" option, a pot split into two compartments holding regular and spicy broths, but unfortunately you can't choose your own two flavors. The duck with beer broth I'd read about on Chowhound and was excited to try is no longer on the menu.

Dozens of raw ingredients include a wide variety of meats ($4.50-$6.50), seafood ($5.50-$7.50), fresh and dried mushrooms (all $4.50), noodles (all $3.50), tofu and other soy products (all $3.50), and vegetables (all $3.50, except pea sprouts and mountain potato, which are $4.50). The portions are generous: Around two items per person should be plenty.

We ordered the two-flavor broth with lamb, fatty beef, fish fillet (the server said it was sea bass), fresh black mushrooms, tofu skin (thick noodle-like rectangular strips tied in a knot), tong ho (edible chrysanthemum greens), and pea sprouts (aka pea leaf), which came to $45.50. Some ingredients cook so quickly that you just dunk them with your chopsticks: the beef, for example, is sliced so thinly that if you like it rare it's done in two or three seconds. The other ingredients you simmer until they're done, and fish out with your chopsticks or a long-handled mesh basket. The tofu skin in particular needed long cooking before it picked up much flavor.

The spicy broth was delicious from the start, and was a good match for the rich beef, gamy lamb, and musky, strong-tasting tong ho. In addition to chiles, the spicy broth is seasoned with Sichuan pepper, the buds of prickly ash that make your mouth feel like it's being mildly electrocuted, like when you put your tongue across the contacts of a nine-volt battery. (Yes, you can try that. If you don't get a shock, the battery is dead.)

At first the regular broth seemed very bland, but as it simmered it picked up more flavor from the herbs, including Chinese red dates, jujubes, and Sichuan pepper, and eventually proved the better match for the relatively delicate fish and pea greens. This broth (unlike the stronger spicy version) was nice as soup, so noodles would have been a good addition.

On the regular menu, beef tendon and tripe — a cold appetizer — had good textures and lots of hot oil and scallions, but was underseasoned compared with similar dishes at restaurants Spices and Z&Y. Chicken with spicy sauce, also cold, was delicious, intensely spicy, and nicely balanced with crisp cucumbers, but was a pain to eat since it was chopped so as to leave lots of sharp little bone fragments.