Sens and Sensibility

The room, once the home of the rather lackluster French-like Monte Cristo, now down for the count, hadn't changed at all. There were the oddly Flintstonesian rocks punctuating the rough wood walls, the slightly surrealistic hand-holding light sconces, the big windows overlooking the Ferry Building with the Bay Bridge twinkling behind it. Upscale ski lodge was the general feeling.

But the menu of the recently named Sens restaurant was new and intriguing, its Southern Mediterranean (Turkish, North African, and Greek) influences, favorites of executive chef Michael Dotson, lending allure and exciting our appetites. The large, creamy menu page was covered with big, dense print: 14 starters, three salads, 10 main courses, and seven desserts, all followed by a line or two listing ingredients, resulting in sheer poetry as far as I was concerned. Grilled octopus, shaved fennel, Rancho Gordo beans, mint sharmula; pickled sardines, avocado toast, radish, mace brown butter; Za'tar braised lamb shank, pearl couscous, roasted turnips, almond-parsley salad. And some fascinating wording: Moorish spices, sweet herbs. I mentally tried out flavor combinations, surprised by more unfamiliar ingredients than I've seen in some time. What were manouri, vitelloni, graviera, briam, trahana? I wanted to try everything.

But we were only three, at a late dinner, sitting at a divine window table on a rather echoey, almost-empty night. We did our best, starting with lamb meatballs ("aromatic spices, foie gras, cherry-tomato mostarda"), grilled vitelloni tongue (vitelloni, it turns out, is year-old veal, also known as baby beef), stuffed squid, and Turkish flatbread. The kitchen's best were the tender, rather delicate meatballs, three golf-ball-sized beauties in which the foie gras was invisible; and the squid, plumped by their sweetish stuffing of spinach, bulgur wheat, pine nuts, and golden raisins, and improved by their bed of fresh and also-sweet tomato sauce. The slippery-soft tongue, more texture than flavor, was paired with firm yellow-eye beans. These were new to me, much like soissons and apparently much in favor for baked beans, perked up with the acidic touches of green olives and preserved lemons. The flatbread was oddly soggy rather than crisp, and its topping of Sonoma Crescenza cheese, braised greens, chopped walnuts, and caramelized onions was rather obscured by too much of a musty spice mixture. We turned away an unordered dish of grilled octopus, but it was returned to us with the unexpected information that it was a gift from the pastry chef, an acquaintance of one of my two companions. The octopus, at least the tentacles that I tried, were clumsily grilled, rubbery, and overcooked, unworthy of the mint sharmula (a Moroccan dressing), Rancho Gordo beans, and fennel they were paired with.

My reaction to our main courses was also uneven. I adored the fat manti, firm ravioli-like Turkish dumplings stuffed with a smooth, seductive autumn squash and chestnut puree, anointed with tangy garlicky yogurt, and sided with caramelized cauliflower and translucent cipollini onions — the best dish of the evening, I thought. I liked the classic Middle Eastern kebab and kefta (spiced ground beef, like a fresh sausage) combination, although not as rarefied in flavor as the description of "grilled aged sirloin kebab and filet kefta" led me to expect. It came on a bed of lovely fluffy couscous, improved with dried apricots, marjoram, and a dash of Metaxa, the Greek brandy/wine blend, with sautéed oyster mushrooms — this plate, like the manti, was cleaned. We all approved of the presentation of the fat Wolfe Ranch quail, whole rather than disjointed, on a bed of escarole, merguez sausage, and fingerling potatoes, surrounded by littleneck clams in the shell. But the dish proved to be just that, an assemblage rather than a combination, the disparate elements never really coming together, and the somewhat metallic-tasting clams not harmonizing with the bird the way they can in Spanish preparations with pork. The wine list, put together by Saeed Amini, is exceedingly interesting, even in the offerings by the glass.