By Paul Reidinger

WHEN I FIRST phoned Little Nepal a few weeks ago and was told the restaurant doesn't accept reservations, I suppressed a harrumph – partly of disapproval (restaurants should take reservations) and partly of disbelief at the claim that the place fills up most evenings by 6:30 or 7. They wish, I thought, ignoring the unmistakable sound of customer-generated clamor in the background. True, Little Nepal is apparently the only game in town if Nepalese cooking is what you're after; true also that Bernal Heights has seen something of an explosion of interesting restaurants since the opening of Liberty Cafe in the mid 1990s.

So I was prepared to accept some congestion and a bit of a wait. As it turned out, we didn't have to wait; we showed up in the middle of what was apparently Sunday-dinner rush hour and immediately snagged the one available table – for two. But despite that bit of good luck, we were nonetheless stunned by the spectacle of people milling and jostling in the tiny entryway. Parties of six, parties of eight, little kids galore. You might easily think Little Nepal was the only restaurant for miles around; you might easily think – given the bumper-car arrangement of expensive baby strollers outside the front door – that you were somewhere in Noe Valley. Or perhaps Noe Valleyism has been creeping along Cortland Avenue all along, in a wagon train of strollers.

While dining with a roomful of tykes and tots isn't necessarily the world's most relaxing experience, it does leave one with the cheery impression that tomorrow's grown-ups, alumni of Bernal Heights childhoods, are likely to have sophisticated tastes in food. Little Nepal is a trove of the sorts of vivid sensory experiences that indelibly etch themselves in young minds – older minds, too. The staff wear squat, cylindrical hats (the Turks sometimes wear similar articles) and offer abbreviated bows on your arrival and departure. The interior design, with its wealth of blond wood in narrow lengths, resembles a Finnish sauna, though a rear wall is plated in copper. And the tabletop service heavily emphasizes Siamese-style brass, from the water pots to the little long-stemmed pedestals in which sides of dal and curried vegetables nestle.

Given the cultural variety of these visual cues, the Indianness of the food comes as something of a shock, though not an unpleasant one. Nepal, after all, is a mountainous sliver (and home to Mount Everest) wedged between India and China; it is not surprising that Nepalese cooking would offer versions of dal and tandoori chicken. What is surprising is the near complete absence of Chinese-influenced dishes on the menu, apart from the Himalayan momo ($5.95 for either meat or vegetarian versions) – basically pot stickers that have been steamed instead of browned in a pan – and a version of chow mein (a dish I have mortifying childhood memories of).

On the other hand, there is a good selection of distinctively Nepalese preparations. We gobbled up a plate of lamb chhoila ($4.95), cubes of meat bathed in spicy mustard oil and served with little heaps of pop-soybean and beaten rice, which in their gravelliness seemed like things to be added to concrete. Himalayan thukpa ($8.95), a kind of curry spaghetti soup laden with spinach, cauliflower florets, and chunks of tomato, was quite unlike any soup I've ever eaten. It was also served in a vast bowl I could easily have turned over and used to cover my head in an emergency. And kukhura ra mula ($11.95 with sides of dal, curried vegetables, and nan) proves that boneless chicken breast need not be boring, at least not if it's cooked in a luxuriously fragrant sauce of radish, ginger, garlic, tomato, and "Himalayan" spices.

Even in dishes familiar from Indian restaurants, Little Nepal adds distinctive variables – a scattering of kidney beans in the dal ($7.95), say. These add a note of meatiness to the porridgelike lentils. And poleko jhinge machha ($15.95 with sides), though served, like its Indian counterpart, tandoori shrimp, on a sizzling cast-iron platter strewn with julienne green peppers, lacked its cousin's distinctive yogurty pinkness, instead relying for effect on the smoke of the grill played against the natural sweetness of the shellfish.

I suspect that, as a six-year-old, I would not have cared for Little Nepal. I would have been suspicious of the many peculiar details, from the odd hats to the odd utensils to the odd scents and colors of unidentifiable dishes, including the disappointingly flat, if white, bread. I would, surely, have wondered, in that repetitive-torture manner at which small children are naturally expert, why we couldn't go somewhere else.