Review: Zephyr (♦♦1/2)

Oddly, it took a restaurant to make me forget food used to be served here.

For a long time this downtown corner was the home of Rainbow Foods, Juneau’s only natural food grocer. The selection was small and quirky, and their salad/hot bar was expensive and inconsistent. But it was extremely popular and maybe the only place taking chances with unusual fare, including ethnic-theme dinner buffets once-a-week. It was pretty much even money whether the frequent substitution of tofu, vegan cheese and wheat-free noodles would be troublesome enough to sink the more exotic spices and textures of a dish.

Rainbow moved into bigger digs a few years ago and the space became the Friendly Planet Trading Co., offering pottery, jewelry, clothing and furniture aimed at the same crowd that used to buy organic groceries there. I never set foot in there without thinking of it as Grand Central Polenta.

Well, the polenta is back - yet for the first time I didn’t think of Rainbow Foods during our first visit to Zephyr, a Mediterranean restaurant trying to fit in with the more upscale theme Seward Street is trying to adopt. Across the street is Wild Spice, a continental/Mongolian BBQ hybrid doing a pretty good job of capturing the mood. Of course, a brightly-lit Subway continues to thrive on a third corner.

Zephyr is owned by Turkish native Haydar Suyun, who moved to Juneau after seeing it as a cruise ship worker during the 1980s. In 2004 he opened Raven’s Cafe in the rustic Imperial Billiard and Bar, serving casual fare like gyros, panini and chili-cheese fries. He closed the cafe in October of 2006, the same month Zephyr opened. It’s not just the menu targeting a more affluent clientele - there’s a wine bar for those climbing the narrow stairs to the loft and the likes of Sinatra being played at modest volumes on the loudspeakers.

Suyun has done an impressive job of remodeling the space with simple furnishings and a high ceiling, giving it an ideal sense of class and casual. Political power players were mingling at the bar much of our first evening, while the mostly full tables were occupied by couples and suits mostly engaged in quiet conversation. We didn’t have trouble getting a table without a reservation, but it might be advisable to make one during peak hours on weekends. An acquaintance at the bar was completely at ease shifting between an extra chair at our table and the power brokers - and when she started diving into one of our soups our attentive server showed up with an extra spoon almost immediately.

The food, while highly promising at times, needs to do a bit of catching up. Some dishes are great, others mediocre and others need a bit of tweaking in concept. At least one of us seems ready to embrace it as a new favorite, another sort of gave the food a shrug, but everyone agreed the setting and service alone make it a place for a good evening.

An appetizer of assorted spreads ($15 for three of the five varieties they offer individually) included hummus, a red pepper blend with an ideal level of zing and an pleasantly flavorful one with eggplant. It’s served with fresh bread and pita slices, the latter offering a more suitable texture match. A Mediterranean salad ($8 small/$15 large) was a fresh mixture of mesculun greens and other veggies, manchego cheese and quality sopresata salami. Less pricey starters such as avagolemono (a chicken, egg and lemon soup for $6) and a simple green salad ($5) are available among the roughly 15 options. Others looked like quality, if unoriginal, choices like steamed clams ($14) and a grilled portabella with mozzarella ($8).

There’s five pasta options and the four we tried during our visits were all solid, if not transcendent. The best was probably the pesto ($14), featuring thin-sliced fried potatoes and green beans over linguine - the double-starch mix of potatoes and noodles worked surprisingly well. A pasta rustico ($13) of roma tomato sauce, brown butter and parmesan over capellini (noodles even thinner than angel hair) almost got the concept of using a few simple ingredients to make a superior pasta dish right, but the light covering of tomatoes didn’t have enough flavor to anchor the dish and it could have used a bit more cheese. Fettucini alfredeo ($14) was ideally flavorful and mild, but didn’t surpass decent plates at a few other places in town. An agean pasta ($15) of sun-dried tomatoes, olives, pine nuts and feta butter over penne pasta was well-liked by others (I’m not a fan of the dish and unable to appreciate its nuances). Any of the pastas are substantial enough on their own, but it’s possible to add steak ($10), chicken ($7) or prawns and scallops ($11).

The entree menu is limited to seven items, plus nightly specials. A roasted half chicken ($19) was tender and well-seasoned with an avgolemeno sauce, but more a safe refuge than an example of an ordinary dish taken to the next level. A 12-ounce ribeye steak ($28) had a nice light crust and a tasty topping of wine, butter and cabrales cheese, but was grilled past the ordered medium rare. The best of our meat dishes was the lamb shish kebobs ($23), where chunks of flavorful spiced meat again were grilled to the point of having a crusty outside and tender inside, ideally complimented by tzatziki sauce.

Among those that didn’t work out quite as well was the polenta lasagna ($19), a great blend of flavors that was hard to appreciate because it was assembled into a smallish, tall square. The crustiness of the thin grilled polenta on top was pleasing but hard to cut with a fork, and the red peppers, portabellos, asparagus, goat cheese and pesto cream sauce underneath didn’t offer enough resistance to keep it from falling apart on the plate. The expert chef in our group and I later talked about ways of reassembling the dish without any real solutions, but it’s still tasty enough to justify scraping the various bits back together. Finally, in unremarkable territory was an enormous bowl of cioppino ($29), which ought to be served in a half-portion at half the cost. The tomato broth had spice, but not really any standout flavor, and the seafood suffered the nearly inevitable fate of being overcooked after being in a pot so long.

Service was among the best we’ve had in any Juneau restaurant: friendly, quick and almost scary in its sometimes invisible efficiency. Plates appeared and disappeared without some of us noticing our server step behind us. The slightest attempt to catch his attention was successful. One night, when we wanted to take some food home and watch a movie, the person on the phone was exceptionally friendly and helpful with suggestions of what would survive the trip well. Lacking anything to pack dressing for a salad in, they provided a generous amount in a wine bottle.

There’s a temptation to give Zephyr a higher rating for its ambient appeal, but there’s also the problem of some who feel the food rates no higher than two stars because of inconsistencies and overall shortage of top-end dishes. Still, it’s a place we’ll hit regularly when we have the funds and are craving the dishes we know are successes.