Kosher(ish)

Kosher restaurants are an amorphous lot. You’ve got places like Sababa on Durango Drive, where turkey shawarma and falafel are king, and Shalom Hunan, our only kosher Chinese restaurant. Some are so-called “dairy” restaurants, due to dietary restrictions that proscribe serving meat and milk products at the same time. Others serve what most of us would recognize as Middle Eastern dishes heavily influenced by the Ottoman Empire.

Now we have Panini Café, a spin-off of a popular restaurant of the same name in Israel. Our Panini Café is a boxy, brightly lit place on upper Fort Apache Road. The restaurant likes to refer to itself as “Euro-style gourmet,” but I’d call it Israeli-Italian. I’m not Italian, though.

I say that because I dined there with two guys from Italy, and they weren’t having it. One of my guests was from Rome, which has a Jewish community that predates Caesar. The other comes from Venice, Shylock’s hometown, and, like Rome, a city with its own version of Italian-Jewish cooking. So if you’re looking for Jerusalem artichokes, known in Italian as carciofi alla Giudia, you will not find them here.

This establishment serves fish, but not meat, on a giant menu of salads, sandwiches, pastas, soups, entrees and desserts. Most of the customers here are Israeli, and appear to be totally familiar with what comes out of the kitchen. Many of the men wear yarmulkes and wash their hands in water poured from a silver pitcher by a sink in the dining room. I don’t speak Hebrew, but all the servers, and most of the people eating in here, do.

One dish we all liked was the halumi salad, served warm. This salad has everything but the kitchen sink, a huge bowlful of mushrooms, red bell pepper, spinach, cherry tomatoes and mixed field greens, in a light soy dressing topped with deep-fried halumi cheese, an oily, pungent product popular all around the Mediterranean.

There is a proper salade Nicoise, that southern French take on tuna salad, with the usual suspects—hard-boiled egg, green beans and potatoes—and it’s just a little annoying that you have to pay an extra $1.79 for anchovies, a normal component of the salad. I also like the roasted beet salad, paired with jicama, candied pecans and feta cheese.

For me, the most interesting part of the menu is called European Entrees. One of these items is actually from Yemen on the Saudi Arabian peninsula, and if that’s Europe to an Israeli, who am I to quibble? That would be malawach, a baked puff pastry that is eaten with boiled eggs, pickles and tomato sauce. It’s the size of a small package, with a flaky, layered texture, sort of like a croissant on helium. The restaurant also serves it as a pizza, topped with sauce and cheese.

Then there’s shakshuka, a slow-roasted, spicy tomato sauce topped with a baked egg. I also ordered trout from this section of the menu, a baked, filleted plate of fish paired with rounds of nicely crisp roasted potato, and salad. The fish wasn’t bad, although somewhat overcooked, thanks to a nice brushing of garlic, lemon, butter and herbs. But next time, I plan to ask the kitchen to undercook my fish a little.

Things get a little dicey when it comes to pastas, though. My Roman friend expressed surprise when he saw a dish on the menu called fettucine e’prevete, which he claims is a dialect word there. The dish, flat noodles tossed with garlic, white wine, basil and cream, is stultifyingly heavy.

Better is penne Athens, tubes tossed with garlic, basil, feta cheese and Kalamata olives. Order the ultimate penne and you get cherry tomatoes and white wine, but no feta. There is also one called creamy spaghetti, fresh tomatoes, garlic, basil and cream. They are not, however, much like what you’d get in an Italian restaurant.

The same variations on a theme of the preceding sauce ingredients are also practiced on the house cheese ravioli, which come filled with a choice of cheese, spinach or portabella mushrooms. All pastas and ravioli are served with a basket of organic wheat bread. I dare you to stop eating after one slice.

As there is no beer and wine served here, you can content yourselves with Israeli juice in see-through plastic bottles with Hebrew-language labels from a company called Prigat. The grapefruit is my choice, and the grape isn’t bad, either, if you don’t mind the idea of a grape drink that is the same color as root beer. There is also the refreshing limo nana, a fresh, ice-blended lemonade laced with mint and sugar.

For dessert, try the multilayered, buttercream-frosted cappuccino cake, which tastes so good that you know it has to be bad for you, or the house warm chocolate cake, which the menu has optimistically dubbed chocolate soufflé. Sometimes there is even malabi, milk pudding thickened with rice flour and flavored with rose water.

An Italian wouldn’t go near it.

Panini Café

2521 S. Fort Apache Road. 558-6555.

Suggested dishes: halumi salad, $13.99; malawach, $6.99; ravioli Athens, $13.29; chocolate soufflé, $7.29.