Sens and Sensibility

The dessert menu is one of the most intriguing, unusual, and inventive I've ever seen. We ordered three sweets, and were served four — the fourth one not only a gift from the phantom pastry chef, but also named "pistachio gift." The recurring theme was that these sweets were not really sweet at all, but subtly exciting in their sophisticated pairings of texture and flavor. The masterpiece was "lemon essence," a citrus soufflé propped up on thin fennel shortbread and sided with tart lemon sherbet and a dazzling, jewel-like assemblage of assorted citrus and a relish of pine nuts and dates with anise and Arbequina olive oil. "Warm chocolate" was a firm chocolate cake with cardamom ice cream and the optimistically named "Shuna's famous dark chocolate sauce." The pistachio gift was a lovely toasted take on baklava, with mastic-rosewater ice cream that I found overperfumed. The only inexplicable arrangement was an underflavored, slightly grainy butterscotch pot de crème that didn't mate well with its companions: a warm apple crepe, a beautifully silky-textured and evocative long pepper cream (the long pepper hotter and more fragrant than the traditional black peppercorn, but elusive in flavor), and a smear of honeyed lebne, a yogurt cheese. The pastry chef, Shuna Fish Lydon, writes a popular food blog called Eggbeater. A casual perusal reveals that her opening dessert menu featured poetic names for her creations, now gone, such as "first blush." Her prose is questing, thoughtful, interesting, and quirky, like her food.

I return for lunch and am somewhat stunned to prefer this meal to dinner; not usually the case, but then lunch is a livelier, busier scene here in what is, after all, a massive office complex atop fancy shops. My friends are already ensconced in a comfy leather loveseat and chairs with a cozy view, picking at a dish of fabulous assorted olives drenched in good oil, and a plate of fluffy ricotta, which is improved with a sprinkle from the small dish of sea salt alongside. I'm flustered from the effort of finding parking, and order a Lemon Drop: cold vodka, Gewürtztraminer grape juice, lemon, powdered sugar. It's icy and revivifying. We share roasted beets — red, gold, and chioggia— topped with sesame-crusted cubes of rather bland manouri cheese, and try to order avgolemono soup, but the soup of the day comes instead: a deep-flavored dark mushroom broth in which float chanterelles, barley, baby leeks, and sesame dumplings.

My mouth now waters, remembering my Tabil lamb burger, soft and savory under its blanket of feta, harissa aioli, and coriander-onion confit, the whole enfolded by a pillowy brioche bun and sided with hot-spiced french fries. Just as delicious were the wood-oven-roasted chicken meatballs, made with thigh meat, surrounded by saffroned pearl couscous, sweet peppers, and fennel in a little round metal casserole. The sea bass stifado was stewed with fat Gulf prawns, clams, and mussels, scented with preserved sweet limes and the exciting seasonal accent of cardoons. I was less enamored of our two vegetable sides: the briam, which turned out to be a rather ordinary baked layering of seasonal squash and onion; and chewy, underspiced spinach falafel, nicely dressed with chopped cucumbers in yogurt. We shared an exceedingly reasonable carafe ($18) of a light, fresh white wine from the Alto Adige.

Again with the gifts! This time it was because one of my friends, who works in Embarcadero 4, is already a lunch regular — he'd dined there the day before, was returning on the morrow — and it was his birthday. So we got a semolina cake with rosemary-caramel ice cream and hazelnuts; a chocolate panna cotta atop a firm sesame cake; and my favorite, a poached pear with a buckwheat cake and brown butter crème anglaise. The barely sweetened, unusually textured little cakes are three variations on a rarely seen theme.

Sens, in French, means meaning. My sense of the place is that I mean to return.