photo:Teri Currie

Mall’s Well
By B.A. Nilsson

The Hidden Café

Delaware Plaza, 180 Delaware Ave., Delmar, 439-8800. Serving Tue-Sat 11-3, 4:30-9. MC, V.

Cuisine: continental/Mediterranean

Entrée price range: $13 (pasta à la Florentine) to $19 (seafood Levernesse)

Ambiance: casual

One of the nice things about my job is my level of veto power. A couple of weeks ago I joined some friends in a dining-out venture, and when I murmured my dismay at their choice of restaurant, they immediately insisted they’d switch to the place of my choosing. We were in Albany; it had been a couple of years since I’d last visited the Hidden Café; thither we went.

I was surprised and impressed by the transformation. It’s still, as befits its moniker, squeezed into an unseeable corner of Delaware Plaza; the space still bears the lunch-counter look of its original occupant. But chef-owner Joseph Soliman has continued to improve both the ambiance and the menu, fine-tuning the flavor of the place as his clientele grows.

He was born in Egypt but worked for many years on the other side of the door in some chichi Long Island restaurants. He taught himself to cook by copying the dishes he served. “First time I’d try one: not so good. Second time: better. By the fourth time: excellent. That’s how I did it.”

When he opened the Hidden Café three years ago, he featured a variety of Mediterranean dishes, items like spanakopita, falafel, souvlaki and a variety of kebabs. But the menu has evolved a more continental face. “I want to cook what pleases me,” says Soliman, “and what pleases my customers.”

Reduce cooking to its fundamentals and you find any number of opportunities to give a unique character to a meal. A recipe may always call for capers and lemon juice, but you decide the quality and amount of those ingredients; you also decide when to add them and what other flavor components might be welcome.

Soliman’s cooking shows the consistent personality of a chef who has reinvented the recipes he likes to suit his preferences. Garlic, for example, is a very good friend. It shows up, sautéed, simmered or roasted, in many an item.

It’s roasted in the seafood Levernesse ($19), which sweetens the combo of sautéed shrimp and scallops in a tomato sauce also flavored with olives and capers, all of it served over rice.

Chicken dishes dominate the entrée list, priced from $14 to $18. If you like it paired with potatoes, the chicken Mediterranean adds a delicious combo of roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts and portobello mushrooms; for a pasta pairing, the chicken in chicken Sophia is tossed with spinach and garlic, sundried tomatoes and mozzarella cheese in a tomato-cream sauce and served over rigatoni.

Philly’s flat iron steak ($18) is a bargain-priced serving of this boutique cut, paired with a blue cheese cream sauce that’s redolent of roasted garlic. The mashed potatoes underneath only enhanced its richness.

My favorite was the lamb kebab ($18). The combination of the marinade and the charcoal grilling make this a fantastic presentation of my favorite meat.

Among the appetizers are the Mediterranean classics, like baba ghanoush, hummus, falafel and stuffed grape leaves. With little persuasion, they’ll put a bunch of those together in a platter that could well serve your entrée needs.

During one of my visits to the café, I witnessed what I call the Olive Garden Phenomenon, a problem that’s more and more plaguing our better restaurants. When you work in a professional kitchen, you develop an inner timer. Thanks to my years in the kitchen, I know when an entrée is ready. It’s become a joke when I dine with my family: I can predict within seconds when the meal will appear when the restaurant is running smoothly.

Too much lag time means the kitchen or floor staff is in the weeds; too little time and your food probably emerged from cryovac—and that’s the food source of many a chain restaurant. The result is a clientele with an unrealistic sense of the wait time for food.

Let me reiterate a point I can’t make too often: There’s no such thing as a “30-minute gourmet.” Sure, you can sell cookbooks and TV shows by pandering to the impatient, but those who would feed you too quickly have no wish to feed you well.

Thus the OGP. I watched a nearby party place an order, fidget silently, and in what seemed like no time at all, begin to complain, first to one another, finally to the server. With utterly unrealistic expectations, their dining experience turned unpleasant. And it was self-inflicted—with the help of the profit-hungry fast-food industry.

The server spoke valiantly in defense of prep and cooking time, and I hope the result calmed the diners—but they were too busy stuffing themselves to show reactions.

Soliman’s food ought to be enough to quell that level of anxiety. He’s offering meals crafted around fresh ingredients, with enough of a Mediterranean sensibility worked in to liven the flavors in a healthy way.

It’s a friendly place with busy servers who nevertheless are as attentive as possible (and Soliman invites anyone interested in working the floor to get in touch with him). He’s obviously bested the canard that you can’t have fine dining in a strip mall.

Sure, he should be in a prestige location in downtown Albany or, better yet, Saratoga. He should have tuxedo-clad servers serving higher-priced food. He should get out of the Capital Region altogether and find a place where the clientele knows that real food takes time to prepare. But he’s staying here, with his family and friends, and we’re the ongoing beneficiaries of this kindness.

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