G force

Eastern Avenue south of the 215 is becoming the new ethnic Restaurant Row in the Las Vegas Valley. Park Place, a new mall, alone offers more than a dozen places to eat, including the Filipino bakery Goldilocks, Red Rock Chili Company, which serves several different types of chili, and the following two choices.

True Island BBQ

This is, so far as I know, the first and only Las Vegas area restaurant where one can sample the food of Guam, a U.S. protectorate in the middle of the Pacific. Owner Chef Jordan Manibusan is passionate about his cooking, and wants it to be known that his barbecued meats are cooked on an open flame, not on a flat-top grill as in many Hawaiian barbecue joints in town.

Manibusan also is proud of the fact that you eat his foods on actual crockery, not in Styrofoam take-out containers. Furthermore, you won’t find trash cans in here, because he relies on fresh foods, not processed products used in typical fast-food establishments.

So just what is Guamanian cooking? As I was there for one day in 1975, I’m not really sure, though I can tell you Manibusan bristles at the notion that his cooking is a hybrid of Filipino, Japanese and Pacific influences. His island’s proximity to those ports of call, however, and the fact that his menu offers lumpia, Tagalog for “eggroll,” and gyoza, Japanese for “pot sticker,” belies all that. Oh, so what.

For the record, True Island BBQ’s lumpia are bigger and meatier than ones in the Philippines, and much of what you will eat here is equally distinctive. One resolutely native dish is chicken kelaguen, considered a delicacy by Chamorros, the natives of Guam. It’s a chopped chicken dish laced with lemon juice and spices I couldn’t identify, served cold. I call it an acquired taste, but if you are a fan of ceviche, you’ll probably like it.

Most people in here will be eating big rice plates, accompanied by a delicious cabbage salad tossed with a pungent dressing. I didn’t try Nana’s sesame chicken, deep-fried with a sesame batter, but it looked delicious. Instead, I had flame-broiled barbecued beef and meaty barbecued short ribs, which reminded me of kalbi in a Korean restaurant.

Another specialty of Guam is red rice, which comes with certain dishes and is available as a side order. This is exactly what it sounds like, and has a mild flavor. Manibusan also offers mahi-mahi and shrimp, again with rice and salad, and done with Guamanian flair.

Greek Village Café

John Gumroyan is a cousin of chef Yannis at the Fat Greek, and we aren’t quibbling that they are both of Armenian ancestry. Asked Gumroyan, “If we called this place Armenian Village Café, who’d come?” Good question.

This cheerful space does have several delicious Greek dishes, in fact, as well as a hookah lounge and a wine list stocked by a Greek lady, full of boutique wines from Greece. And there are also a few dishes that have a distinctly Caucasian cast, such as a quirky take on Greek avgolemono soup, normally swirled with egg yolks and enriched with rice, but not here.

During lunch, most people come in here for gyros, done in pitas, on salads and plated. Gyro, or doner kabab in Turkey, is sliced lamb (and here, also chicken), nicely spiced and then browned on a rotating spit. The gyros here are served with tzatziki, a cucumber dill yogurt sauce, tomatoes, onions, spring greens and either pita bread or rice pilaf. It’s a win-win proposition either way.

I was more impressed with the hot dishes, though. What they call giouvetsi is really a beautifully braised lamb shank served on a bed of orzo, a barley-shaped pasta that soaks up the juice from the lamb like a sponge. A friend and I literally fought over every bite.

We also enjoyed spanakopita, flaky pastry triangles with a pureed spinach-and-cheese filling, and hot dolmades, grape leaves stuffed with a rice-and-ground-beef mixture. The dolmades here are certainly more Armenian than Greek. In Greece, dolmades are eaten with a rich egg lemon sauce that is absent here. Maybe if we can convince them to use it in the soup, they can put some on the grape leaves, too.

Yes, there are classic Greek casseroles, moussaka and pastitsio, the first being one of most famous Turkish contributions to Greek cuisine, a layered eggplant and ground meat casserole. Think of pastitsio as macaroni and cheese laced with meat, then topped with a thick rug of Bechamel sauce, made from flour and milk, before being baked to a golden brown.

For dessert, have the house baklava, and a demitasse of soorj, Armenian for what we more commonly call Turkish coffee. Gumroyan won’t mind if you don’t call it soorj.

True Island BBQ

9550 S. Eastern Ave. 492-9494.

Suggested dishes: barbecue beef plate, $8.75; barbecue beef short rib plate, $9.25; red rice, $2.50.

Greek Village Café

9550 S. Eastern Ave. 463-7300.

lamb shank, $22.