By Paul Reidinger

WORDSMITHS WITH SOME , even rudimentary, schooling in the Romance tongues will notice that Soluna Café and Lounge – the name of a quite chic new Cal-Med restaurant in the Civic Center – elegantly combines the Latinate words for sun and moon. Playful wordsmiths might further note that the constituent syllables could be rearranged into Lunasol, although to my ear that sounds a bit too much like a new brand of kitchen cleanser.

It would also emphasize night over day in a misleading way. For while Soluna does offer a dinner service – predicated, perhaps, on picking up some preconcert traffic and on filling some of the gap opened when Millennium decamped in March from its longtime digs in the Abigail Hotel in the next block for new digs in the Savoy Hotel in the theater district – the heart of the business seems to be the daytime crowd. And that is a big crowd, made up of toilers in the various governmental vineyards (city, state, federal) located just steps from the restaurant.

In the busy and hurried noontime market, Soluna has staked out an attractive niche. It is not as fancy as Stars was, but it is sufficiently stylish, with its gold-and-lavender-daubed walls, tented ceiling, and smart halogen lighting, so that power-eliters in coats and ties would not look at all out of place in the cozy booths toward the rear (where a tranquil garden opens beyond glass doors). At the same time its lunch prices are not grossly more than those of the more prosaic spots – the taquería, the Middle Eastern deli – nearby, while service is nearly as fast.

While the sun shines, the menu is one of those classic California jumbles – soups, salads, sandwiches, and pastas, predominantly Franco-Italian in character but with the odd homage to the Orient or America thrown in. On the latter point: macaroni and cheese ($7.95), sportily fitted out with cavatappi (corkscrew-shaped pasta), a rich variety of cheeses (Gruyère, sage cheddar, bleu, smoked Gouda), jalapeños, scallions, sun-dried tomato, and toasted bread crumbs. From the menu description, it sounded as if it would collapse under the weight of its own fanciness, but the upscale cues turned out to be nicely muted and well integrated into the basic creaminess of the dish. It was, surprisingly, a dash undersalted.

Not so a chicken apple brie sandwich ($7.95), assembled on a Dutch crunch roll and nested on a bed of well-dressed baby greens. This bundle of ingredients (grilled chicken, sliced apple, and brie, sauced with an apple-honey emulsion) could be the signature California combo for a new century: a little sweet, a little soft, a little savory, a little rich.

It also made a nice match with a cup of the soup du jour ($2.95), which on the jour of our visit was a smooth cream of tomato, chunked up with some actual fresh tomato and styled with some circular pipings of crème fraîche – a reminder of how much a simple, small touch can add.

But sooner or later the sun sets, and, as in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, this is not necessarily a good thing. The passing of daylight certainly doesn't hurt Soluna; the deep space, like the inside of a rectangular silo that's tipped over, fills up with jazzy darkness and thumping high-tech music and glamorous, sexually ambiguous young people. Could they be law students from Hastings? It seems impossible, but then so did a second Bush presidency not so very many months ago.

The menu too shifts smoothly, elevating to preeminence so-called California mezes – the tapaslike sorts of small (but not too small) plates you might find in tavernas in the culinary greater Greece that is still the eastern Mediterranean. Some of these plates seem perfectly Greek and not at all Californian: pig's ear-like lavash chips, for instance, with a trio of dipping sauces ($7.50). We liked the chips but weren't so keen on the sauces; the baba ghanoush was faintly bitter, the tzatziki runny, the paprika-scented hummus a bit thick. It was as if a set of virtues had been misdelivered.

Better was a wild-mushroom pizzetta ($8.95), fortified with caramelized red onion and smoked Gouda cheese, though the crust was a bit spongy for my taste. Better still was the day's grilled kabob ($8.95), a skewer threaded with chunks of tuna, disks of corn on the cob, and bits of green pepper and served over a fresh salsa of avocado and tomato.

Our opinion divided on the green olive-crusted tuna ($9.95): I was untroubled by its lack of pink, while my friend thought it compared unfavorably with the medium-rare kebab, with its internal stripe of reddish purple, and, despite a glistening, algae-like pool of parsley sauce, was "dry." But neither of us had any reservations about the apricot bread pudding ($5.95), a handsome cylinder napped with hazelnut crème anglaise and scattered with toasted hazelnuts.