Arabian evenings

By Paul Reidinger

WHEN I WAS a boy, dinner was served every night at exactly 6 p.m. I did not know why then and do not know now (ritual? habit? the prime-time television schedule?), though in my adult life the dinner hour has slid deeper into the evening – to the racy, even un-American, hour of eight o'clock or so. Of course, that's still evening, except perhaps in the rainy depths of January. And when does night, with all its revels, begin? Most likely the instant I fall asleep, and that is almost always long before 11 o'clock.

In the last few years there's been much ado about restaurant kitchens that stay open late – until midnight or even later. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I still associate dinner with evening – the mellow borderland between the more sharply defined countries of day and night – and so I can't help but be charmed by the Twilight Café and Deli. Certainly the name is part of the appeal, but even more alluring is the hour of its closing: 8 p.m., meaning that the night belongs to ... someone, someplace else.

Whatever their hours, restaurants are, generally speaking, on the dog-years plan so far as life expectancy is concerned. A five-year-old restaurant has beaten the odds; a 10-year-old can lay some claim to the honorific "institution" (though that word has a nasty connotation in foodland). Twilight Café opened – in the border country between the Western Addition and the Richmond, just a few blocks from St. Ignatius Cathedral – in 1980. That pre-MTV year was the one in which Ronald Reagan was elected president and the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. Those events are a generation past now, and that makes Twilight, if not an old-timer quite to the degree of the truly ancient Tadich Grill or Old Clam House, an unusual example of longevity in a severe business.

And to what extent can Twilight's long-running success be attributed to the food? When you have a couple of decades to work on your recipes, you are likely to have worked out most of the kinks, particularly if you are cooking classic dishes. And Twilight's dishes are Middle Eastern classics, if there can be such things: dolma, falafel, various preparations of eggplant, lentils, chickpeas, along with a roster of all-American sandwiches. The presence of the last is somehow weirdly appropriate on a "Middle Eastern" menu, since "Middle East" is basically a Western idea, an attempt to describe a bundle of cultural attributes found in a long arc from Morocco to south Asia.

As in Indian cooking, the legume, whether lentil, chickpea, or fava bean, figures prominently in Twilight's recipes. But whereas Indian spicing tends to be symphonic, with all sorts of powerful scents and flavors mingled in kaleidoscopic potency, Twilight's strongly spiced dishes generally carry a single distinctive signature of flavor. In the beef macaroni ($4.60), for instance, it's nutmeg, which makes one think of the very similar Greek dish pastitsio, though the macaroni uses a tomato sauce instead of béchamel.

Meanwhile, the alarmingly named foul muddamas ($4.60) – a preparation of fava beans stewed in garlic, tomato, butter, and cream – is dominated by the faintly woody bite of cumin. (This dish could easily pass as a kind of chunky Mexican soup.) On the other hand, the mujadara ($4.60), a jumble of lentils and rice cooked together, managed to be powerfully tasty without benefit of a dominant spice. And fatayer ($3.95), a spinach-phyllo pie, managed to be fairly untasty, and slightly tough, despite the usually conspicuous presence of feta cheese.

Some of the plates are almost arty: a combination of hummus and kebab ($6.35), for instance, looks like a meat pie, with the paprika-dusted hummus made to look like a pastry crust filled with spiced barbecued beef. Others are exactly what you'd expect; falafel ($4.60) – the ultimate vegan food? – consists of the usual golden-brown ovules of ground, spiced chickpeas, immured with lettuce, tomato, and tahini in envelopes of pita bread.

As for nonfood art: Twilight's got a bit of that, too. The bulk of the setting is deli-ish – the long counter, the steel-framed chairs and plain tables – and you might think there was nothing at all to notice if you happened to overlook the wall opposite the counter. But that would be difficult to do, since the wall is taken up front to back with a mural, a long ribbon of blues and golds depicting a desert city perched among sand dunes – an image of Arabian nights, or perhaps scorching Arabian days, and the hardy desert souls moving through them, waiting patiently for the cooling breath of evening, for twilight, for dinner.