Garlic noodles the way San Francisco does them

A San Francisco Vietnamese restaurant dish that looks Italian from across the room. Butter and Parmesan on spaghetti, with fish sauce and oyster sauce slipped in underneath, which sounds wrong and turns out to be the whole point. Those two bottles do the work of a sauce that has simmered all afternoon, in the time it takes the pasta to boil.

Twenty cloves sounds like a dare. It is not. Cooked gently in butter they turn sweet and mellow, and the sauce needs every one.

1. Set a wok or a wide saucepan on a medium flame and melt the butter. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, for about 2 minutes, until the smell fills the room and the garlic has not taken a speck of color. Browned garlic is bitter garlic, and there is far too much of it here to hide the mistake. Stir in the oyster sauce, soy sauce and fish sauce, then take the pan off the heat.
2. Meanwhile, bring 1½ inches of water to a boil in a 12-inch skillet over high heat. Add the spaghetti and stir so it does not clump, then cook to a shade under al dente, about 2 minutes short of the packet time.
3. Tong the pasta across into the garlic butter, dripping wet, since that water is half the sauce. Reserve the skillet of pasta water, because you might need it later. Turn the heat under the wok to high, add the cheese and toss hard with a wooden spoon for about 30 seconds, until the sauce turns creamy and coats every strand.
4. If the sauce looks thin, keep it over the heat a few seconds more. If it looks oily, a splash from the skillet and another toss will pull it back together. Stir in the scallions and eat at once. These do not wait.

Want it grander? Throw a handful of raw shell-on shrimp into the butter with the garlic and keep the pan on the heat until they turn pink, 3 or 4 minutes, before the sauces go in. Crab or lobster folded in at the end is rather good too.