Only intersect

By Paul Reidinger

THE CORNER OF 16th and Valencia Streets is the Broadway – the Great White Way, as it were, to dabble in a politically awkward comparison – of the Mission's complex restaurant scene. Elsewhere in the neighborhood you have your off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway equivalents, but most of the heavyweight action is on Valencia from 16th to 23rd or so, with the corner of 16th being the nexus, the center of this small but bustling and brightly lit universe. If you plan on opening a restaurant in these high-profile environs, you'd best have your ducks in a row, or at least handsomely plated.

While spit-and-polish might be ascendant, it is not yet pervasive. From a window seat at Tannour, a spiffy Mediterranean restaurant that opened late last year just off the intersection of 16th and Valencia, you can peer across the street to a pair of long-running stalwarts that remember a grittier past: well-scuffed Muddy Waters and serenely unchic La Cumbre, which serves arguably the best burritos in the city. But turn away from the windows and glance into Tannour – at the handsome stonework, the long, gleaming bar, the artful sconce lighting, the tannour (a wood-burning oven quite like a tandoor), aflicker in a far corner – and you see the future.

Tannour, in its West Coast bistro-ness, represents another step in what seems to be an inevitable progression in which all the world's traditional cuisines will sooner or later intersect the Franco-California sensibility. The place immediately made me think of Tallula, particularly in the precision of the cooking and the care given to presentation. The difference is that while Tallula uses South Asian flavors and ingredients with a wide degree of license and even whimsy, the kitchen at Tannour hews more closely to traditional, if not always familiar, dishes – at least for the moment.

Kabobs, for instance (grilled over mesquite), are quite conventional in what we understand to be Middle Eastern cooking, although fish ($12) is a refreshing variant. The usual suspects are, usually, lamb, beef, and chicken. We suspected the fish in question, firm and white with an appealing flakiness, to be California sea bass; it was presented (skewerless – a gracious touch) on a bed of rice with a pair of nicely charred whole plum tomatoes, chunks of zucchini, and strips of green bell pepper. Quite summery for March, but on the other hand March was quite summery.

We suspected sea bass in the kabob because our server had told us the kitchen was searing that fish in place of halibut (which was unavailable) for a plate of seared fish ($15). Otherwise the dish remained the same: a jalapeño spicing for the flesh, an electric sauce of ginger, shallots, garlic, and black pepper drizzled round, and spinach and grilled potato (two of the great bistro sidekicks) serving as a bed.

The bistro drift is least evident in the starters, which include the requisite sampler platter (of hummus, baba ghanoush, and tabbouleh) but also more exotic items such as mtabbal ($4.50), essentially a baba ghanoush variant that combines oven-roasted eggplant with yogurt and tahini sauce (a hummus staple), and musabbaha ($5), a spicy spin on hummus in which some of the garbanzo beans are left whole for texture. Somewhere between the poles of the familiar and the exotic, we find foul mudammas ($4.50), a quite spicy presentation of big, brown fava beans (not the little fresh green ones) in a sauce of lemon, olive oil, and tahini.

Yogurt is key at Tannour. Its sour freshness enlivens several of the more-memorable dishes, including emmsakhan ($13), half a free-range chicken roasted with onions, pine nuts, and sumac, with a chunky sauce of baladi salata ("Egyptian salad"), a kind of Greek salad with yogurt substituted for feta cheese, at the side of the plate. The fabulous mansaf ($14), meanwhile, combines tender chunks of nomadic lamb in a Jordanian yogurt sauce thickened with tannour bread (which, when soaked, assumes a cheeselike texture) and pine nuts. (Pine nuts, incidentally, aren't really optional in recipes that call for them; you never use many in any given dish, but, like saffron, they add a subtle taste and scent that cannot be substituted for or dispensed with. It would be a poorer world without them.)

Some yogurt might have rescued the one dish we found wanting: gambari banadora ($13), charbroiled prawns served with a tomato reduction, rice, onions, and cranberry. "A little flat," their disappointed orderer noted – the crustaceans were inoffensive, plated in an attractive pattern, but diffident, no question, I had to agree – before moving on to the dessert menu. No one but me liked the tiramisu ($5), assembled from squares of richly insinuating date cake instead of the usual ladyfingers and featuring a length of halva on top ("too sweet," my tablemates said of the overall effect, but I liked the basso molasses tones and the absence of rum fumes). On the other hand, we both (on a separate visit) approved of the nammoureh ($5) – oven-baked farina cakes (quite like polenta cakes) layered with goat cheese, raspberry sauce, coconut shavings, nuts, and cinnamon. It was crumbly, rich, olfactory, sweet, sour, and sticky, all in a single bite. It had the market pretty well cornered, you might say.