Disappointment on the West Coast - The Slanted Door, 1 Ferry Building, #3, San Franciso, CA

Expectations are admittedly high when you've been reading about a restaurant for several years, it's been labeled as one of the iconic restaurants in the U.S. and you make a trip across country to celebrate your father's 65th birthdy and your sister's 40th birthday at this very restaurant.  Correcting for high expectations, my slant on the the Slanted Door was that it is disappointing, average at best, and riding on a brand name that it created a decade-plus ago when it was a small, unique spot in the Mission district in San Francisco, established by a Vietnamese immigrant focused on delivering authentic Vietnamese food with fresh local ingredients.  Fast forward to 2009, The Slanted Door is a behemoth space in the Ferry Building with minimal character and soul (my father's assessment: an intimate restaurant transmogrified into an airplane hangar) it's noisy and cold and our table was, unfortunately, too close to the open, jarringly-bright kitchen.  The service was seemingly overwhelmed, and unattentive as a result, and the food was nothing special.  In fact, I was having trouble discerning it from anything I've had at other, non-descript, Vietnamese or even pan-Asian spots.  If I had to choose some food highlights, perhaps the green papaya salad (but you can get this anywhere) and the Berkshire pork chop with a shallot, ginger soy-sauce.  The daikon rice cake was mushy, the dumplings were unrecognizable as dumplings, the glass noodles were coagulated and the chicken clay-pot, which was talked up quite a bit, seemed to be flavored with no more than soy and black pepper.  I was truly disappointed.  What I was pleased by, though, was the wine selection: Riesling-heavy for the spice in the food.  We had two German Rieslings, one floral and dry and the other purely sweet and both went fabulously with the food - a bright spot in an otherwise lackluster dining experience.