This is the extreme of ethnic dining, a small storefront restaurant where one person at a time cooks, busses, and washes dishes, and only sometimes speaks English. The clientele are mostly Somali men, still more refugees than immigrants. Non-Somali neighbors are starting to trickle in; soon there will be more, as Somalia (which used to be Sogal Café) has some very good food. Although there is an English-language menu, not all of it is available every day, and it took me three visits to try most of it, though I will be back for " mufo, " the most expensive thing on the menu ($9). Each of my visits was very different, but rewarding.

I thought Somali food might be like Ethiopian food, but it mostly isn’t. I’ve been in enough immigrant restaurants to begin with the question, " What do you have today? " On my first visit, the staff was a woman in a head scarf who spoke very little English. We eventually got to a list of " chicken, steak, chicken small-small, steak small-small, rice, spaghetti, mufo ... " After a couple of run-throughs, I decided that " chicken small-small " must be some kind of stew. This is, in fact, chicken suqar ($7), a wonderful stew of diced chicken, green peppers, onions, carrots, a fair amount of celery, and a few chunks of potato, not very spicy, but with intriguing black cardamom seeds here and there, and a scent of cardamom and coriander that is not like Indian curry, and also unlike the complex spicy sauces of Ethiopian and Eritrean food. I was offered two kinds of flatbread, and managed to wangle both. So I was alone in the restaurant with a plate of chicken stew, a small salad (iceberg, pink tomato, wedge of lime), two kinds of flatbread, and a banana. I didn’t see any tableware, but this didn’t surprise me since I knew that Ethiopian food is eaten by tearing off pieces of flatbread and using them to pick up bits of stew — all with the right hand, of course. So I started doing that, and the Somali woman figured I could feed myself, and went back to dishwashing. I also guessed that the green stuff in a metal measuring cup with a spoon in it was hot sauce, and it certainly was. Deadly, burning hot sauce.

At this point, a Somali man came in, ordered in Somali, and ended up with a slightly smaller version of the same lunch. He set right to work, making neat packages with the flatbread. One of the flatbreads was a crêpe close enough to the injera in Ethiopian restaurants that it is called something like " injeera. " The other was a flaky flatbread more like an Indian roti. I was not surprised to run out of flatbread two-thirds of the way through my stew. I’ve never been that efficient eating with flatbread, and I get dangerously full in Ethiopian restaurants. To start up a conversation, I passed the hot sauce to the Somali guy, and we had a nonverbal (but entirely clear) laughing discussion of just how spicy it is. I also gathered from watching him that at least one Somali uses the banana as a mid-meal foil for the hot sauce. Good idea.

I then got up and negotiated for two more injeera, and meanwhile discovered a fork hidden under my napkin.

At my second lunch, there was a multiracial table of young Americans. I ordered beef stew ($7, $8 with steak) and rice, but things slowed down considerably as the man in charge (who spoke better English) dealt with the other table. They were having beef stew, chicken cutlets, and a tremendous platter of rice so aromatic I could smell it 10 feet away. The rice is basmati, and lightly spiced to reinforce the fragrant aroma of Indian rice. It may be the best rice you can buy in Boston. The beef stew is cut into small dice, without vegetables, and is rather salty, with a slight aroma of cinnamon. You could serve it in a Haitian restaurant. You could serve it in a Vietnamese restaurant. You could serve it in a Malaysian restaurant, which may be the story, since Malay traders have brought rice and spices to East Africa for millennia.

By now, I was getting confident about Somalia, and invited a friend who is a major hot-sauce aficionado. We came in at the beginning of lunch hour and found a couple of Somali men seated at empty tables, drinking a kind of lemonade ($1). It isn’t on the menu, and it had an interesting bitterness, perhaps from limes, perhaps from sour orange. Somalia also has some sodas and bottled Poland Spring ($1). The staff was a different woman in a different head scarf, but it seemed like all she had was steak ($7), beef stew, and chicken ($7). We ordered steak and chicken with spaghetti, the third line of starch, apparently brought to Somalia by Italian colonists.

While we waited, we worked on tiny dabs of the hot sauce. It seems to be made daily with fresh green chilies, probably really hot ones like serranos or habañeros. The burn is lingering, so a minor dab will season most of a lunch. However, Anglos simply cannot use the hot sauce. Anglo children can feast on the spaghetti, which comes with a sauce of tomato, green pepper, onions, and a little meat. One of the Somali men explained to us that the banana goes with the spaghetti. We had two bananas each, which might have been compensation for no salad that day. The spaghetti really would have been enough, but we had a small plate of chicken-fried (i.e., fried in breading) steak cutlets, and another of a chicken leg quarter, perhaps poached and pan-fried, since it was very bland. Bland Somali food was not what I expected, but it certainly worked well with the hot sauce and a little banana.

The restaurant apparently has no desserts, and the only listed appetizers are sambuse ($1.50 with meat, $1.25 vegetarian), stuffed pastries especially popular during Ramadan. The restaurant is open long hours, but things run out. When I dropped in once at 9:45 p.m., there was nothing left but fish and spaghetti. The breakfast menu includes eggs ($4.50), home fries ($1), and beans ($5), but also two kinds of beef and one of chicken. Somalia is a land of Muslim herders, and Somalis expect meat at every meal.

Service at Somalia is pleasant, but lags when the place gets busy. It is a simple storefront painted pale yellow, with mismatched formica counters, some red-checked tablecloths (the Italian influence again?) and some in blue, and lace curtains on the windows. There evidently have been some lessons in American business practice at the Somali Development Center next door, as a sign in English reads: 5/1/03 ATTENTION: NO MORE FOOD LOAN. CASH ONLY. THANKS. MANAGEMENT. I don’t know if Somali-Americans will take up the restaurant trade (many are grocers in Seattle), but I hope they do. Their meat-and-multi-starch cuisine fits right in with American norms. I can’t wait to see what Somali cooks do with potatoes.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com