By Paul Reidinger

IN THE ANNALS of well-concealed restaurants, we will have to devote a chapter to Divi's Fancy. Its street presence is (despite a neon sign) retiring, scrunched as the place is among broad-shouldered auto body garages and muffler shops and various other grease-and-wrench endeavors that do not really require dainty, artful signage or alluring facades. Once I walked right past Divi's Fancy's door, even though I'd been there before, and found myself approaching Fly, at the next corner.

Step into Divi's Fancy (which opened late in November) and you are likely to form the distinct impression that you've entered some Mission coffeehouse. The broad, open main room is set with glossy wood pedestal tables and chairs that don't quite match. Flanking the door are a pair of cozy alcoves haphazardly lined with newspapers, free and otherwise, in true coffeehouse style; toward the rear of the space is a bar with a gigantic espresso machine agleam with portafilters and twitching analog dials. The machine filled me with longing. But our kitchen has no parking space to accommodate so vast an apparatus, and we don't have 220-volt service, to say nothing of coffee demand remotely sufficient to justify having it. End of fantasy. The monster, though, does reinforce the idea that Divi's Fancy is a place to sip from a succession of demitasses while conducting deep conversations with other sippers, or scarfers, as the case may be.

As it happens, there is also food – "Middle Eastern" food, according to the menu. The term Middle Eastern suggests a broad swath of possibilities, and in fact the owner and front-of-the-house man, Sam Salfiti, is Palestinian, born in Kuwait of a Lebanese mother. Fittingly, the menu features what presumably is the maternal recipe for keba, a deep-fried, egg-shaped shell of wheat and ground beef, stuffed with spiced lamb. The overall effect is something between that of piroshki and samosas. (A vegetarian version, with potato substituted for the meats, is also available.) Keba can be ordered separately (for $3.99) or as part of the "Mid-East Combo" ($6.99), a platter laden with such familiars as hummus, falafel, dolmas, baba ganoush, and tabbouleh, all ready to be scooped up with chunks of warm pita bread.

Divi's Fancy's food (Salfiti's wife presides in the kitchen) respects the conventions of Middle Eastern cooking in America – lots of kabobs, et cetera – but it has a fresh unfanciness I associate with good home cooking. You have the sense that most of the dishes are being made to order, with the possible exception of the excellent baklava ($1.50) – layers of flaky phyllo pastry soaked with honey and tarted up with ground walnuts. Usually I manage baklava without really liking it, but I thought seriously about ordering a second round of Divi's Fancy's. Didn't, for fear of seeming like a glutton.

For those whose wariness about exotic foods extends beyond baklava, or who just aren't in the mood for dolmas, hummus, and shish kabob, the menu offers a range of all-American favorites, including spaghetti and cheesesteak sandwiches. (There's even a Reuben.) We found the tuna melt ($5.49), with Swiss cheese and French fries, to be serviceable and a pretty good deal. The falafel ($4.99), on the other hand, though rolled in lavash (the tender flat bread found throughout the Middle East) and made from chickpeas ground in-house, desperately needed some tahini sauce to ease a strong feeling of aridity, like that of a sandwich without mayo or mustard. But that was the kitchen's only serious misstep.

Vegetable soup (included with the dinner plates) did need some salt, but once revived, it was rich and warming against the chill of a winter night. I liked the plainness of the vegetables bobbing in the green broth: carrots and celery, some zucchini and potato coins, a few leaves of cabbage. Seasonality doesn't always mean bursting-ripe tomatoes or peppers, and while the produce of wintertime is pretty subdued stuff, it is tasty and satisfying if handled honestly.

The menu describes with deceptive simplicity dishes that turn out to be quite good. A Mediterranean salad ($6.99) brought together a standard assortment of tomatoes, cucumbers, raw onion slices (too many of these), olives, and feta cheese on a bed of romaine lettuce drizzled with "house" dressing – a straightforward, garlicky vinaigrette that nicely bound together the other ingredients and at the same time made them jump.

Dolmas ($3.99) were a froggy, green-gray color, a bit underpowered but helped along by slices of cold, spicy potato. Of similarly somber overall hue was the plate of pickled vegetables ($3.99), though featuring – in addition to pickles and plump olives – a heap of house-made artichoke hearts whose pale green stood out not least as a promise of spring.

Kabobs were served on wooden skewers and tended to emphasize whichever form of flesh was chosen. The cohabitant vegetables, tomato quarters and onion slices, offered a mixed result, the latter benefiting from the grill, the former turning mushy. But the lightly seasoned meats didn't need much help: cubes of lamb ($8.99) were tender and still medium rare (and therefore juicy), while the prawns ($9.99), though not as big as we'd hoped, had turned a fetching golden-orange color, with just a bit of charring at the far edges to impart a hint of smoke as complement to their natural sweetness. We rather fancied them.