Café 21
**** (four stars)
2736 Adams Ave. (North Park)
(619) 640-2121

Prices: Appetizers and salads, $8 to $12; entrees and daily specials, $14 to $20

* = poor
** = mediocre
*** = good
**** = exceptional

The Road to Azerbaijan
By Frank Sabatini Jr.

Leyla Javadov has never attended cooking school. Yet everything she sends out of the kitchen at Café 21 leaves you craving desperately for the next bite, whether it’s a dish of assorted homemade pierogis that exist nowhere else in San Diego or a Flintstone-size lamb shank set atop cauliflower-curry puree that she foams by hand.

Like some Michelangelo turning marble into astonishing forms of human anatomy (and without record of any formal lessons in sculpting), Javadov converts proteins and organics into detailed culinary masterpieces that stem solely from her Ukrainian-Azerbaijani upbringing. Her husband Alex, who shares similar roots, works the front of the house along with a small, personable wait staff. It takes only one or two visits before you’re greeted as a familiar face.

At breakfast, Javadov’s hearty chicken-onion crepes and French toast stuffed with berry cream cheese taste heaven-sent. Lunch involves exquisite sandwiches such as turkey and apples piled onto rustic, homemade bread with house mustard. Another constructed with rosemary lamb, apricots and Swiss cheese is equally rousing.

During dinner service, which was recently introduced to the delight of Café 21’s morning-midday patronage, things like meaty stuffed peppers, salmon blinis and savory cabbage rolls rise gracefully to the forefront. In a recent visit, a plate of fork-tender mushroom-stuffed dumplings encircled by creamy cilantro sauce left us wondering if Javadov might be hiding a diploma from the Cordon Bleu Culinary School, despite a slight overuse of salt in the mushroom duxelle.

Supper begins with a complimentary carb fix of homemade dinner rolls spiked with turmeric, fennel and yellow curry. Warm and herbaceous, each roll is crowned affectionately with pats of softened butter. Among the appetizer choices, my companion opted for proscuitto-wrapped melon that soared above the hackneyed norm in both taste and presentation. The fruit is drizzled with cardamom-infused honey and speckled with slivered almonds. Woven throughout were generous, picture-perfect curls of the meat. It becomes quickly apparent that Javadov invests a great deal of fuss into her dishes.

Another appetizer, salmon blinis, appeared more fitting of a captain’s dinner aboard Norwegian Cruise Lines rather than something you’d see served in a strip-plaza café. The plate featured roses of fresh salmon arranged over pancakes the size of silver dollars. Crème fraiche concealed within the folds provided the spongy beddings with bursts of creaminess and moisture. Across most of the menu, Javadov garnishes her dishes with micro greens and edible flower petals, lending curious snaps of bitter, earthy flavors where you least expect them.

Pierogis served in browned butter were available as an appetizer special that evening and still offered a week later, according to friends. They came six to an order, half of them stuffed with cabbage, the other half with sour cherries. Both tasted magnificent while capturing the hominess of true Slavic ravioli found only in ethnic households.

“You can never get bored with the food here,” my companion effused as we progressed to a mondo ultra-tender lamb shank complimented with an onion-y potato pancake and meringue-like cauliflower sauce. The same staging was available for braised, boneless short ribs as well.

A crafty pomegranate cream sauce became the luscious backdrop for red bell peppers stuffed with lamb, turkey and mint. The filling qualifies as a novel, smooth-tasting meat pairing that I suspect Javadov discovered on American turf rather than when growing up in both the Ukraine and Azerbaijan, where turkey isn’t so common.

Tradition is recaptured, however, in a supreme dessert of moist honey cake layered meticulously with sour cream. Granulated sugar has no place in this creation, and you won’t miss it.

The booze list is succinct, though mostly non-pedestrian. Wines include Cotes du Rhone, California Mourvedre and Chianti Superior. Homemade sangrias are also available; the red offering fine apple-cinnamon notes and the white complimented by lemons and plump raspberries. Tap beers such as Hefeweizen and Sierra Nevada occupy tall 22-ounce glasses, with the exception of Palm Belgium Amber served in globe-shaped stemware.

In the cooking profession, advanced intuition is worth a thousand hours of schooling. And when it appears in your mouth at such humble neighborhood joints as this, every leftover scrap demands a doggie bag==or prompts tears when accidentally left behind. So much for my reheated pierogi lunch the following day.