Nice guys finish first Photo by Rory McNamara  In the Big Book
of Troubled Restaurant Spaces, there will have to be a long
chapter (with footnotes!) devoted to 2101 Sutter. Since the
mid-1990s this unassuming but hardly forbidding site has been
home to Nightshade, Laghi, Julia, Winterland, and now Cassis,
and I might be forgetting a few. The comings and goings have
been many and hasty. Why the address's occupants should have
such a nomadic bent, one after the other, isn't obvious when
considering the physical particulars. 2101 is a perfectly nice
setting, a sort of fat reverse L with the entryway, bar, and
small dining area on one axis and, on the other (beyond a
psychedelic screen that resembles strips of vinyl studded with
disks of glass, like a hippie's belt collection), a larger
dining area with an exhibition kitchen. The kitchen had been
covered over during the brief Winterland era, the picture-window
opening plugged with drywall, but now the view is back, and we
notice a pizza oven among the other hands