In a keen bit of time travel, Spork's Neil Jorgensen and Bruce Binn have turned to the past to shape the future of San Francisco dining.

At Thermidor, the pair's new venture in downtown's Mint Plaza currently serving dinner and debuting lunch next week, a refreshing combination of old-guard eats and mid-century design upends the familiar tropes of Bay Area restaurants. Wood-fired pizza? Not on your life.

Instead, Binn's outstanding food harnesses the rarified excesses of fine dining from the last 150 years, reconfiguring them with his own contemporary style.

Resembling uptown tater tots, pommes dauphine ($6) are served with a side of lobster butter. Binn's inspired chips and caviar ($6) comprises house-made potato chips with house-smoked trout, trout roe and crème fraîche.

That late-19th-century stalwart, brandy- and-mustard-spiked thermidor sauce, appears in two guises: It swaddles lush bivalves in scallops Newburg ($12) and is the base for its namesake, lobster thermidor ($32), a suave preparation of broiled shellfish with mushrooms long overdue for a renaissance.

Even Kyle Caporicci's smart desserts ($8.50 each) echo the well-crafted aesthetic. One fine example: Tobacco-infused custard is piped into an edible cigarette and served with coffee ice cream and miniature carrot-cake doughnuts.

People, the future is now.

Thermidor, 8 Mint Plaza, 415-896-6500 or thermidorsf.com