A savory, successful melange

Sameh Wadi is definitely a chef to watch.

The 23-year-old's confident, generous cooking is a potent hybrid of influences: countless hours logged in his Palestinian mother's kitchen, a voracious reading habit, travel, a culinary school stint at the Art Institutes International Minnesota and hands-on experience at several local restaurants, including Solera and Cafe Europa. The result is one savory stew.

At Saffron, his appealing new downtown Minneapolis restaurant, Wadi manages to borrow from -- and respect -- the culinary traditions of North Africa and the Middle East without getting bogged down by the pesky burdens often associated with authenticity. There's enough familiarity to keep cautious Minnesota diners within their collective comfort zone, but his elegant, intricately seasoned travelogues-on-a-plate also manage to transport his customers to enchanting new places.

According to this bossy critic, every dinner at Saffron should begin the following two ways. First, go with the fabulous house-made merguez sausages, teasingly spicy things made with lamb, tomato paste and harissa and appropriately paired with a zesty roasted red pepper confit. Second, take a $12 spin -- a steal -- through an ever-changing assortment of four or five small plates. Each are just two or three intensely memorable bites, maybe fiery lamb meatballs splashed with a smoked tomato sauce, sweet roasted beets drizzled with tahini or a fresh chickpea-feta salad. All are delicious.

From those Moroccan-inspired tapas, the menu's riches only seem to grow, exponentially. A crab-avocado salad is a colorful stunner that seamlessly merges what feels like a world of textures and flavors. Vegetable fritters, piping hot, filled with eggplant and cauliflower and made with a hearty garbanzo bean flour, are a treat. Fragrant olive oil perfumes a pale-green salad of frisée and butter lettuce, so pretty it belongs in an 18th-century French painting.

Crunchy hazelnuts, silky preserved lemons and an earthy brown butter sauce sound just the right notes against delicate, parchment-thin slices of raw veal and tuna. Sizzling hot quail is juicy and tender, and feta puts a jaunty kick into a grilled leek tart. I love the perky house-made yogurt cheese, too, and a giant ravioli filled with slowly braised pulled beef and tangy eggplant.

Entrees continue Wadi's impressive flair for repositioning seemingly familiar dishes into a fresh new light. Salmon garnished with clams tasted even better than it looked. The velvety fish was marinated in a dizzying variety of spices and rosewater before being steamed in a savory tagine of tomatoes, lemon, olives and fennel, and the results are spectacular. A lavash-wrapped chicken has a similarly impressive spice profile. Twice-cooked lamb shoulder, humming with a zesty harissa melody, literally melts in your mouth.

Wadi's take on meat and potatoes is equally satisfying: thin slices of rare beef accented with oyster mushrooms, a swipe of tantalizingly stinky melted taleggio and a luxurious smoked potato gratin. Only an overcooked sea bass (in an uncharacteristically monochromatic presentation) and a drab, too-salty duck breast disappointed.

Lunch revisits a few of dinner's greatest hits before forging several don't-miss ideas of its own. There's a spin on the BLT formula, and it's a doozy: challah (grilled with lamb fat and swiped with tarragon aioli) layered with a fabulous house-cured lamb bacon, sprightly butter lettuce and a tangy tomato confit. It's born to be paired with an order of the potato salad, a finely tuned blend of fingerlings, poached shrimp and a dreamy preserved lemon emulsion. Other hits include a giant braised beef sandwich, crisp baguette slices topped with a pert shrimp-egg salad, expertly made frittatas and a boldly flavored toss of tomatoes, cucumbers and toasted pita dancing in a lemon-sumac vinaigrette.

The parts in the eye-popping desserts are often standouts on their own but don't always add up to a coherent whole. Skip the ungainly banana tart and go directly to the plate's mellow curried caramel and provocative ginger ice cream. A similarly bracing yogurt-cardamom ice cream -- and marvelous candied walnuts -- clearly outpace a dry date cake. And a perfectly fine chocolate ganache cake is similarly upstaged by a lovely vanilla-poached apricot and its companion, a full-bodied apricot sorbet.

The wide-open warehouse setting very nearly erases memories of the address' prior restaurant tenants. Cumin-paprika-saffron colors, tan brick and the bar's gleaming polished stone provide a warm backdrop for the dining room's crisp white linens and spotless stemware. It's a spare but fitting platform for a hot new kid on the block.

Rick Nelson • 612-673-4757 • rdnelson@startribune.com