By Paul Reidinger

FOR YEARS THE Castro was, gastronomically speaking, a no-fly zone. There were plenty of restaurants, and delightful places they were, but not to eat in. The scene began to shift in the mid 1990s, when spots like Mecca and 2223 started popping up with good food. But if they were, or became, destination restaurants, it was more because of the partylike spell they cast than the cooking – highly competent, sometimes interesting, never compelling – that found its way onto diners' plates.

Tallula, then, which opened in May in the vertiginous old Ryan's space, is apparently a Castro first: a restaurant whose food is so distinctive, and so splendid, that people from all over the city will – or at any rate should – brave the parking furies and the general tumult of heart-of-the-Castro 18th Street to eat there. Tallula's central idea is, like so many great ideas, really quite simple, and a variant of a wider idea that has produced some of the city's most interesting restaurant menus in the last few years: take the flavors of one of the world's rustic cuisines and reinterpret them as stylish Franco-California bistro offerings. At Tallula (the name refers vaguely to camp diva Tallulah Bankhead) the flavors are those of the Indian subcontinent, and the recombination results in a spectacular succession of Indian-influenced dishes that are simultaneously familiar and not.

The space abets the mood of intelligent whimsy. The address was last occupied by a straightforward trattoria, Incontro, that served decent food but seemed uncomfortable with all of the levels and the network of romantically narrow, creaky, and sinuous stairways connecting them; the place was like a handsome man in an ill-fitting suit. The old building's layout is so far from modern expectation – from the spare, soaring, open floor plans of so many contemporary places – that you naturally wonder, as the treads groan beneath your feet, just what you are getting yourself into. Yet you cannot help but be hopeful, so long as the building doesn't catch fire, in which case escape would be a tricky business, at least if you end up, as we did (twice), in the small dining room on the top floor, where French doors open to a terrace, and the city seems far away.

Chef May Lawrence's kitchen joins the current trend of offering smallish plates for sharing. In that sense the restaurant realizes a certain communal ideal – every dish belongs to everyone – while generating a fair amount of mess as plates and overladen forks pass back and forth, as they will robustly do. Sometimes the culprit is splintering pappadam (which appears in several guises, the first as a set of triangular sails rising from a complimentary dish of spiced, fried chickpeas), sometimes it's one of the chutney or curry-cream sauces, but always it's the elegant tastiness of the food.

Only one dish received so much as a divided vote from us. That was the aloo tikki ($6), basically a pair of chubby potato fritters jacked up with lemon and cilantro and napped with a plummy sauce of tamarind and date. My companion found the fritters to be lacking the desirable crispness of good latkes; I enjoyed their soft, citrusy interior.

But ... we loved everything else, from the recognizably south Asian to the unmistakably Californian. On the first point: dosas – south Indian crepes – elegantly filled in one version with baby leeks and morel mushrooms ($9) and spectacularly stuffed in another with lobster, corn, and morels ($12), the latter preparation also featuring a pool of curry cream. On the second point: frites ($5), served with a ramekin of mango-pickle dipping sauce that resembled lavender mayonnaise.

The kitchen borrows with abandon from cultures far and wide, giving cod seviche ($10), say, a Thai-style bath of coconut milk, lime, chiles, and onion and presenting the cubes of fish in an edible boat of pappadam. Artichoke hearts ($8) are roasted in an earthenware crock with bread crumbs, paneer (a mild, and usually quite fresh, white cheese), and preserved lemon, while anchovies, simply grilled on a skewer ($8), arrive atop a mixed dice of mango and cucumber, with sesame seeds and bits of fresno chile suspended in a drizzle of white wine vinaigrette.

The big dishes are simpler. Squab ($12) is roasted in the tandoor and served with unassuming little heaps of kohlrabi and shredded radishes. Curried lamb chops ($16) also take a turn in the tandoor before being plated on a lawn of finely minced onion, with a chickpea hush puppy for company. (We loved the hush puppy, found the lamb slightly overcooked.) And khera chicken ($12) resembles a confit in its moist meltingness – which makes the surrounding bed of pea-dotted basmati rice especially useful.