Tight Quarters

Saffron Room is soaked in amber. This is not surprising, given the luxuriously ruddy-yellow spice from which it takes its name. What is surprising is that this restaurant holds a mere 30 seats. This intimacy is exploited in the usual ways, with votive candles, sheers fencing the tables and pillows padding the banquettes. One set of sheers is strung from a chandelier that looks like one of those eggs that hatch the part of the typical sci-fi horror movie cast that isn’t unionized.

The large wooden door that serves as the portal to the restaurant has “Saffron Room” projected onto it in halogen light, the bulb neatly tucked under the eaves. The other detail of note is this: Virtually all the plates are square. OK, some are rectangles, but every plate surface has four sides and four right angles.

Well, maybe not all. Complimentary saffron and garlic soup arrives in a tiny cup, the kind with handles that look like they were designed to accommodate rat digits. The soup is luxurious, with a clean surge of lemon in the background and bright red flecks of diced tomato in the foreground. Smooth and silky, it coats the back of the throat like a warm lotion. The lemon gives it a tiny crack of sizzle. The soup didn’t need it, but you’ll be glad it’s there.

Yet this cup, delivered with the compliments of chef Kelly Hightower, which means he hopes it whets you, was stationed on a square plate, so in reality it didn’t veer from form.

The squares and rectangles keep coming, backing up on the tiny intimate table. But the similar shapes make stacking easy, especially when the surfaces are mostly licked clean. Pan-fried halloumi cheese was like a handful of cleaved sponges, nicely displayed among tomatoes–the heirloom kind, reds and yellow pear. It was all splattered in mint vinaigrette. The mint was so pungent that on one bite it did a basil pose, while on another it had a dill posture. What kind of chameleon is this? More double takes came our way: The oils, herbs and cheese joined in such a way that the sum came across with whispers of vanilla bean.

Explore the breadth of the Dallas menu landscape intensely enough and one of the many conclusions you’ll reach is this: House-smoked fish rarely comes across with any magic. Too many of them are stringy, dull or otherwise plagued with off flavors directly related to faulty smog control. Sometimes it’s best to keep smoke out of the house. This salmon was in tattered strips–pulled fish–and bundled up off to the side of the plate. With the salmon are a few crisp lavash chips with dill, cucumber, fat capers and crème fraîche. The salmon is smooth, moist and void of those sinewy strands that make you feel like you’re flossing with a trout.

But there are troubled waters as well, mostly in the swells of an exquisitely rich, brisk roasted tomato broth. The halibut it accompanied flaked pretty well and was well-seasoned. But it came with a fishy stench (the gusts gassed our nostrils upon delivery–the fume, the fume). The distraction was so complete we found ourselves unable to focus on the baby artichoke leaves, the olive tapenade or the goat cheese gnocchi littering the broth. I suppose it may be too burdensome to ask kitchen line crews to taste their craft every once in a while. But–and I’m pleading here–can’t you at least sniff it every now and again? It’s a simple technique that doesn’t even blow holes in the food budget–unless you catch yourself retching on inhale.

The rest of the menu can be safely characterized as benign, sometimes even sublime. Yet the latter may not rest well with the cinnamon roasted duck breast. The meat is juicy, if a little tough. But the pomegranate walnut sauce overshot the stirringly tangy and blazed a trail into strenuously sour. And what to make of the vegetable couscous? Shaped into a brain-gray puck, this cake represents the worst of the crab-cake genre: dry pastiness with a preponderance of filler. Of course, the latter is a redundancy. Vegetable couscous is filler by definition, but that doesn’t mean it has to act like packing material. You could hop it up on something, like sun-dried caper and heirloom roma chutney in anchovy jus. Just a thought.

Saffron Room is next to Café Izmir and is attached to the nightclub Kismet. Kismet burrows in the same brooding, jaundiced darkness as Saffron Room, except it has a ceiling strung with tiny green and blue Italian lights that are supposed to look like stars but come off more as Vegas couture. There are pillows and elevated platforms for sitting. Mediterranean and Middle Eastern sounds are run through the chic lounge homogenizer and spit back out like threadbare pickup lines dressed in expensive accents.

But still things work. Hearts of romaine in creamy “Elm St. Feta” dressing is a sheaf of white and yellow lettuce ribs with puffs of cream slipped into the stems. The stuffing is actually whipped feta (a secret recipe, it turns out). Speckled throughout are freckles of tomato and studs of apple-smoked bacon as crisp as corn nuts. The feta froth is brilliant because it dissipates the cheese’s intense cured punch.

Halibut and maybe duck aside, the rest of the entrées are astounding. You may find it difficult to reach this conclusion. While service is friendly and generally adequate, it takes awhile for the servers to deploy menus–nearly 20 minutes on one visit. Maybe they refuse to believe some people relish lingering over menu type while the wine releases its aroma (there is a tight, compact wine list). But this is a mistake. Some people like to hover over every modifier and ampersand, attempting to taste the syntax instead of just making a decision and getting the hell on with it. You must accommodate the shilly-shally.

Here, try this one: pistachio-crusted king salmon with garlic spinach & shiitake mushroom crepe and saffron chardonnay butter. Plow through all of the verbiage and what you get is this: moist, pink, firmly dense flesh with a gravely nut armor that is formidable but not overbearing. The brilliant touch is the slurry smear called saffron butter cream streaked with lemon, a sauce that almost comes off like lobster bisque. Though the shiitake mushroom crepe was a little soggy, it, too, was delicious.

But the Saffron crown jewel is the spice-rubbed pork tenderloin. Thick pink pieces of tenderloin, hopped up on spice, sweat juices. These flow into a smoky tomato and roasted garlic sauce, from which the meat pilfers its richness. A side of vegetable piroshki (small Russian meat pies in layered pastry) has a brittle, crisp exterior that wraps strips of cabbage and spinach while flurries of raw cabbage radicchio litter the surfaces.

But what begins with soup ends in soup. The chilled fruit soup, a watermelon gush with tightly brisk blueberries and strawberry slices draped in Lebanese yogurt littered with mint leaf strips, is a delicious teeter between sweet and searing berry bite. This quenching chilled run takes the edge off the summer heat and the Kismet beat. And it affords the opportunity to slurp–always a good practice in intimate settings.

3707 Greenville Ave., 214-887-1858. Open for dinner 6-11 p.m. Monday through Saturday. $$$