BARAKA CAFÉ
80 1/2 Pearl Street, Cambridge
(617) 868-3951
(Directions)

Restaurant reviewed 09/17/98 by Fiona Luis

BARAKA CAFÉ Type: Mediterranean Hours: Mon.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. lunch, 5:30- 10:30 p.m. dinner. Good choices: Beef veloute; smoky eggplant salad; smoked pepper with sheep's cheese; savory chick pea custard sandwich; girlled chicken breast sandwich; seared salmon dersa; penne with goat cheese and spinach-basil pesto. Credit cards: Cash only. Access: Not handicapped accessible.

Strains of Algerian exile Enrico Macias singing "J'ai quitté mon pays" wound out through the beaded curtain, drawing me into a charmer of a room. Is this Baraka Cafe, I wondered? I'd almost walked past the storefront space, but the elegiac vocals and a whiff of spice lulled me to the doorway, which lacks any signs. I spotted my dinner companions ensconced in one of three booths along the right wall; a glass-front fridge and kitchen shelving occupy the left, while three small tables sit in the middle, a Mediterranean blue wooden railing providing serene anchor.

Nestled snugly into its Cambridge neighborhood, Baraka Cafe is a quiet little restaurant with a sizable pedigree. Owner and chef Alia Rejeb, who was born in France and grew up in Tunisia, has done duty in numerous ports of call. She apprenticed in Italy, once owned and cooked at a Mediterranean restaurant in Key West, and more recently and locally she worked as a pastry chef at Ambrosia on Huntington in Boston and Blue Ginger in Wellesley.

"I specialize in pastries and breads," she says. Her life, says Rejeb, has been suffused with cooking. "My mother was a pastry chef, my father cooked; my entire family has a cooking background," including her restaurateur brother, Moncef Meddeb. "We had a farm in France, grew our own vegetables, made our own cheese, and since I was 9, I decided I loved cooking."

Sharing the stove at the two-month-old 18-seat cafe is Krimo Dahim, once a lunch chef at 8 Holyoke in Cambridge. His Algerian background influences the Mediterranean menu, which lists a soup, three salads, four sandwiches, side orders and desserts, with daily dinner specials posted on a board. "It's based on the weather, and what's in the markets," says Rejeb, who shops at Arax in Watertown for her vegetables from area farms, olives, and spices. "When it's humid, I cook light; when it turns cold, I turn earthy." Rejeb's appealing mix-and-match dishware sports a Berber palette of sand and orange, pistachio and umber red. Blues show up, too. "The colors waving on the plates reminded me of the sea, the green in the south of the Mediterranean, the blue in the north."

That regional sensibility reigns. Beef veloute ($2.25) soothed nerves after a traffic-clogged drive to dinner. The Algerian soup is made with cured-beef broth; a base of red pepper pesto, oregano, mint, and chick peas; and thickened with a starter of yeast fermented into flour. It arrived with a beautiful triangle of garlic flatbread dusted with fennel, caraway, cumin, salt, pepper, and dried oregano, the perfect complement to the velveteen soup.

Two appetizers danced on the tongue: Tunisian mechouia ($5.50), a smoked pepper refreshed with mint, oregano, and sheep's cheese; and Algerian betenjel mechoui ($4.95), a smoky eggplant salad with roasted red peppers. Both were served with warm, grilled triangles of pita bread redolent with zaatar, a spice blend that had been mixed with oil and brushed on the bread.

Karentika, an unusual savory chickpea custard sandwich ($4.50), comes from a part of Algeria called Oran, which had been occupied by the Spanish. "When they left," says Rejeb, "the dish became a popular dish for the working class, sold in the markets," served there, as it is at Baraka, with harissa (red pepper paste, "the pesto of North Africa") and green olive tapenade. A grilled chicken breast sandwich ($4.50) subtly conveyed the spicing of North Africa, the chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and watercress offering a cool counterpoint on the tongue.

Dinner specials ran the food-pyramid gamut. Seared salmon dersa, a red pepper pesto with salt, black pepper, and coriander ($8.95), arrived with a delicious mound of gingered lentils, carrots, scallions, and couscous with raisins. Penne pasta ($7.95) was dressed with melting goat cheese, a spinach-basil pesto, and haricots vert. Casbah-style lamb ribs ($8.95) marinated in seven spices -- saffron, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, anise, fennel, ras-el-hanout -- were flavorful but sported a tad too much fat; the accompanying ratatouille and big fries with dersa were delicious.

Finales at Baraka are grand, thanks to Rejeb's ways with desserts. Five-spice chocolate flourless tart with cardamom, ginger, cinammon, nutmeg, and black pepper ($4.50) was quite simply ethereal, sitting on a Callebaut chocolate sauce with a black pepper base. But my favorite? Creme brulee ($4.50) with zgougou, black pine seeds from Tunisia. It's as wonderful to eat as to pronounce, intense and soothing all at once. As a dessert, it is truly unique, since traditionally it is made by north Africans just once a year to celebrate the birth of the prophet Mohammed.

Baraka, Rejeb tells me, means blessing in Arabic, while in French it alludes to a cottage or shack -- "Nothing fancy." That may be true for this little restaurant, but its presence in Cambridge is certainly a blessing.