By Paul Reidinger

WINTER AIR IS scented air: It smells of rain and eucalyptus and wood smoke. It also smells of curry, if you happen to be standing at the corner of Haight and Webster, where an Indian-Pakistani restaurant named Rotee opened last spring in the space that had housed Bloo. Damp winter air smelling of curry reminds me of London, of all places – perhaps some excitingly seedy part of Soho or Earls Court, where (if rumor and innuendo are to be believed) the homos have after-hours sex in the cemeteries. How strange the English can be, really, behind those stiff upper lips.

There are no cemeteries in the immediate vicinity of Rotee or indeed all of the Lower Haight, and I cannot speak to the after-hours activities of the neighborhood's homos, in part because I can no longer identify them with confidence. Still, the area bears a strong familial resemblance to other hipster outposts in the rich cities of the West – Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin springs to mind – and Rotee, swaddled in its seductive cloud of curry perfume, helps complete the subtle but clear sense of the not-mainstream.

Bloo was blue only at the front door, but even that discreet smear of signature color has been dispensed with in favor of a bright palette of reds and yellows that go very nicely with the smell of curry. The space is basically a large, windowy box, with an elevated counter at the rear, behind which the line chefs are hard at work. An ergonomic warning: the low benches along the walls, though attractive, are very uncomfortable to sit on. Snag a chair if you can. They are not fancy, but they are bearable.

Much as I love spicy food, I am always conscious, at some level, that a chief purpose of spice is to conceal problems of one sort or another with the principal ingredients – spoilage in meat, for instance. It cannot be coincidence that the most heavily spiced cuisines are those of the warmer climes, where freshness all too quickly can turn to rot. And one of the challenges of translating these spice-driven cuisines to an ingredient-driven setting like ours is to let the high-quality ingredients sing in their own voices while keeping in harmony with the spice choir. This isn't easy, and it might be one reason that South Asian food was so under- and drably represented here for so many years. As recently as the mid-1990s, the only South Asian restaurant of note in the Lower Haight was Indian Oven, which had a certain bistro chicness but wasn't particularly fragrant.

Rotee numbers among its peers not Indian Oven, which is merely a dressy neighbor, but Chutney (on lower Nob Hill) and Essence of India (on Guerrero, in the old Le Trou/NeO space), places that reconcile freshness and complex spicing at low prices in architecturally interesting settings. For me, the theme of reconciliation first sounded at Rotee on the arrival of braised mustard greens ($8.99), a house specialty that turned out to rely on a pleasant sourness (which one associates more with pickling, and chillier climes) rather than spice mixtures.

Still, the kitchen isn't afraid of spices. Palak paneer ($6.99), the classic combination of spinach and cubes of white cheese, has as strong a cayenne kick as any version in town, and kaabli chana ($5.99) – chickpeas in a tomato sauce – exhales a strong, freshening breath of coriander and cardamom. And if chicken tikka masala ($6.99) is milder than most of the rest of the menu, that's only because it's basically an English dish, and the English apparently (when not frolicking in cemeteries) like their chunks of boneless chicken breast floating in a creamy sauce that mutes the sharpness of the spicing. (The original base is thought to be ketchup.)

For years I made it a point always to order tandoori chicken when in South Asian restaurants. In part this was because of habit, or laziness, and in part it was just because I liked tandoori chicken: I liked its reddish-orange color, the tang of the garlic-lemon-yogurt marinade, the juiciness of the meat. But lately I have been turning with some frequency to tandoori fish, which if anything is even more moist and tender than its poultry counterpart and benefits even more greatly from the flavorfulness of the marinade. Rotee's version ($9.99) uses two steaks and a filet of a mild white-fleshed fish that might have been halibut but was probably ling cod. Placing delicate flesh in a high-heat oven might at first seem to be a brutal paradox, but in fact the heat sears the fish and cooks it so quickly (much more quickly than chicken) that there isn't time for it to dry out. Most fish shouldn't be cooked at all, really – the genius of sushi – but if you must cook it, cook it hot and fast.

The wrap craze waxed and waned with dot-commery, but Rotee preserves a bit of this history, and quite capably. The wrap envelope is plain naan – a flat bread well suited to the fate of being rolled around juicy ingredients, which (apart from tomatoes, lettuce, and onions) might include lamb kabobs ($6.50) or chicken tikka boti ($6.50). The result is something comfortingly like, but not an imitation of, a burrito: the texture of naan is not that of the tortilla, though the biggest giveaway is, naturally, the scent of what's inside. Rotee. 400 Haight (at Webster), S.F. (415) 552-8309. Lunch: daily, noon-3 p.m. Dinner: daily, 5-11 p.m. BYOB. MasterCard, Visa. Slightly noisy. Wheelchair accessible.