By Paul Reidinger

THE HAND- lettered sidewalk placard outside Patisserie Café describes the restaurant within as "an island of civilization south of Market." Of course, South of Market isn't what it was, especially in the neighborhood of the café. If civilization has been on a march through SoMa in the past decade, then so has loss; the Spinelli Coffee Co. (whose roastery, source of my beloved Top blend, stood in the next block) vanished some years ago down the maw of Seattle's other coffee colossus, and not long afterward its next-door neighbor, Appam's, morphed into a more ordinary sort of Indian restaurant.

Civilization means, in our time and place, mostly upscalery. Despite the bust of the so-called new economy and the dashed hopes of many a high-tech Cinderella, SoMa continues to bloom with chic new restaurants such as Oola even while sustaining slightly more aged ones like Fringale, Bizou, and XYZ. Much of the neighborhood's enduring vitality doubtless flows from the nexus of tourism and culture that has established itself just east of Fifth Street. There we find the burgeoning Moscone Center and its retinue of fine hotels (with their fine restaurants), along with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and, yes, even the Metreon, with its longest mile of movie theaters.

West of Fifth, though, the prospect changes, and, for restaurants, the casualty rate has been high over the years. Hamburger Mary's is gone, as are the Acorn and Jessie's, Twenty Tank and Eleven. Manora's and Le Charm are survivors, and one has high hopes of long life for the Public in its gorgeous old brick brewery, but western SoMa is still a pretty rough neighborhood for restaurants, and that means we should heed the sidewalk placard and not take Patisserie Café's sunny grace for granted, even as similarly graceful spots have popped up just to the east.

The name strikes me as a little flat – patisserie café what? – though useful. There is a long glass case full of house-baked pastry to greet you as you enter. (The bakery is actually just around the corner, down a narrow lane.) And the casual gloss of the setting – like an outdoor café moved inside – is urbane, equal parts Paris and San Francisco. But the food, once solidly French, has taken a turn toward the eastern Mediterranean. Like the cooking at Medjool and Saha, it is now a blend of California and Arabia, eclectically fresh, hauntingly spiced.

If one dish captures the kitchen's east-Med sensibility, it is probably fattoush ($8, or $10 with chicken shreds), the Middle Eastern salad assembled here with romaine leaves, diced cucumber, tomato slices, triangles of crisped pita, crumblings of feta cheese, and kalamata olives and seasoned with lemon, olive oil, and mint. The mint is what sets the salad apart from its oregano-breath Greek counterpart, though even the mint's freshness was not quite enough to cut the saltiness of the olives and the feta.

A rival exemplar might be a pizzetta ($8), built not on the usual foundation of yeast-leavened flat bread but, in the true patisserie spirit, a disk of buttery puff pastry. There is no denying the elegance of a puff-pastry crust, and the combination of toppings (tomatoes, goat cheese, oven-crisped pancetta) was appealingly direct, but even a single-serving pie (of about eight inches in diameter) was almost too rich for a single servee.

The menu is full of subtly spiced sleepers. We were quite taken with a pumpkin soup (a cup of which preceded the pizzetta) spiked with cinnamon and nutmeg. That old duo gave the soup a definite pumpkin-pie personality, but the specter of Thanksgiving cliché was forcefully exorcised by a lip-tingling charge of cayenne pepper and enough salt to balance the natural sweetness of the squash. And an oh-so-California-style salad ($10) of arugula, pickled mangoes, and pungent Cabrales cheese was finished with prawns tossed in charmoula, the Moroccan spice paste, before being sautéed. (Charmoula, like curry, describes a range of combinations, not a specific formula; as Joyce Goldstein puts it in Kitchen Conversations, "There is no one way to make it," but it tends to include lemon, garlic, paprika, and cumin.) Despite charmoula's formidable reputation, its presence on the prawns and in the salad was merely suggestive and surprisingly harmonious with the other notables, from the arugula with its pepperiness to the attractively stinky cheese.

Aficionados of more traditional Middle Eastern dishes might well settle on boneless chunks of grilled lamb nestled in pita halves ($8) – other nestmates include romaine lettuce, tabbouleh, and tomato quarters – and bathed in a combination of tzatziki and tahini. But lest we get the idea that the kitchen is entirely oriented to the east, we do find the occasional west-Med dish, such as butternut squash gnocchi ($11), sauced with sage-flecked butter, and an Italian tuna-salad sandwich ($8), with plenty of oregano and olive oil and served deli-style on focaccia lined with slices of tomato and provolone.

And aficionados of dessert will not be disappointed at the wealth of baked treats on display, among them tarts, mousses, bars, croissants, bear claws, and swirls. We settled on a pair of notably American cheesecakes ($4.95), creamy-firm disks about the size of hockey pucks that satisfied, in a quite civilized way, our respective sweet teeth.

Patisserie Café. 1155 Folsom (at Eighth St.), S.F. (415) 703-0557. Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Dinner: Thurs.-Fri., 6-10 p.m. Brunch: Sat.-Sun., 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible.