Café Apollonia is Boston’s only denominated Albanian restaurant (Anthony Athanas of Anthony’s Pier 4 is reportedly part Albanian), but the food here is so good and moderately priced that it would stand out in any category. As presented by the Hysi family, Albanian cuisine most closely resembles Greek food, only it’s even tastier and is spelled with extra Qs, Xs, and umlauts. It also looks farther eastward, to Ottoman skewers and desserts, and north to include some Croatian wines and a Dalmatian-style baked fish. Although Albania is a small country, it’s ethnically complicated, with two dialects, at least three religions, and a long-time diaspora in Sicily. Boston has one of the larger Albanian immigrant communities in the US, but it’s almost invisible, with most descendants affiliating with the Greek- or Italian-American communities. This restaurant also looks Greek, with columns and heroic statuary in niches, perhaps because the space was previously a Greek-American club.

In fact, dinner begins with what looks like Italian white bread, improved with garlic-herb olive-oil dip. Mixed-vegetable soup ($4.25/small; 5.50/large) is a thick kind of minestrone, flavored mostly with eggplant and bell peppers, then onions and carrots. But it would be hard to pass up the Apollonia Sampler ($11/one to two people; $14/two to four people). This large antipasto includes most of the appetizers, plus all three featured dips with buttery grilled pitas. "Our signature, traditionally cultured yogurt sauce" dip is liptao ($6.25/à la carte). If liptao sounds like Liptauer cheese, you’re in the right ballpark, although the liptao at Apollonia is more like drained yogurt "cheese" with a little goat-cheese bite to it, a little lemon, and some garlic. The other dips are fërgesë Tirane ($8.25/à la carte), which is hot, creamy feta-lamb dip, and elbasani ($7.25/à la carte), which is hot, creamy feta-pepper dip — all glorious with these pitas. You could probably also dip some of the eggplant caviar, here very garlicky. Solids on the platter for two included a couple of boiled eggs, kalamata olives, very-decent-for-May tomatoes, red onions, and a couple of prosciutto roll-ups ($7/à la carte), lined with lettuce and stuffed with more liptao.

Amazingly enough, there are other appetizers not included on the sampler. One such is croquettes à la Apollonia ($6.50), which are actually bruschetta-like baguette toasts covered with peppers, melty cheese, feta, and balsamic vinegar. A special appetizer one night was "Fest me Lofta phyllo" ($7.75), four triangles of phyllo layers, some with spinach-cheese filling, some with plain cheese.

Among the main dishes, I was perhaps most amazed by the moussaka ($14.50), which didn’t sound like an Albanian special, but turned out to be the meatiest and most delectable moussaka I’ve ever had. The dish’s tomato sauce lacks the familiar allspice, which may reflect the Macedonian and Turkish origins of some of Boston’s early Greek-American restaurateurs.

A house specialty is "qebap" ($14), pronounced chay-bop. It’s 10 beef sausages not much bigger than American breakfast sausages, but distinctly in the key of beef and mildly spiced, making a good synergy with a sauce of diluted liptao and a salad of cold roasted bell peppers. A special on roasted lamb in yogurt sauce, "tavë kosi me mish qingji" ($16.75), was lots of softened lamb in a thick yogurt-onion sauce, with the most incredible breaded and fried triangles of polenta and embedded herbs.

If you don’t want meat, the "vegetable turli" ($13.95) is a fine assortment of vegetables baked in olive oil and a light tomato sauce over a terrific rice pilaf. (Michael Dukakis used to donate a similar family recipe with Northern Greek flavors called "tourlou" to charity cookbooks.) The vegetables our night were zucchini, eggplant, red and green peppers, celery, and carrots, but this hearty casserole was more than the sum of its parts.

Turli must be a Lenten dish for Christian Albanians. Although the majority of Albanians are Muslim, this restaurant serves a number of pork dishes, of which we tried biftek derri me patata ($11.75), a couple of lean pork-tenderloin slices in another liptao-based cream sauce, with excellent roast potatoes and another salad of pickled roast vegetables. Troftë tavë ($14.95), described as "a true Albanian tradition," is a baked whole rainbow trout in what I would think of as a Dalmatian sauce of plum tomatoes, onions, lemon slices, and bay leaves, not unlike the Croatian baked fish served in some of the old restaurants of San Francisco.

The wine list is European and American, and delightfully inexpensive. A couple of Croatian wines, from a maker called FeraVino, were the hits of our two visits. The ’99 graševina ($4.75/glass; $18/bottle) is a crisp, lively white that goes well with the many yogurt-based sauces here. Frankovka ($20) is available only by the bottle, but is a light, quaffable red with some raspberry flavors that stand up to a lot of different foods. I’d like to get a few bottles home so I could pour them into large glasses. There are supposedly 54 different grape varieties grown in Croatia, which is what can happen when you have vineyards going in and out of production for more than two millennia. The original parent of American zinfandel is thought to be a Croatian grape.

Apollonia’s desserts are exactly what you might predict for the cuisine of a country between Greece and the former Yugoslavia. All are made with walnuts, and most have phyllo dough. My pick would be the torte de bauch ($5.75), layers of honey-soaked cake, a kind of soft Italian meringue that looks like whipped cream, and walnuts. "Nutty galaktoboureko" ($3.75) is like the Greek galaktoboureko, except that I couldn’t find the custard, so the filling is dense with nuts and honey and a touch of cinnamon, rolled up in a phyllo. The baklava ($2.50) is typically flavored, but twice as big as usual.

We had the same enthusiastic waitress both visits, a new hire, who was also of Albanian background and excited to be serving the food of her heritage. Despite the Greek trimmings, the color scheme breaks from the Greek blue and white with crimson tablecloths, carpet, and cushions. There is some jazz background music, and a little noise from a wide street west of Roslindale Square. I’m not so sure about the blue Christmas lights around the room. But mostly I am surprised that Albanian immigrants have kept this food a secret in their homes around Boston for more than 90 years. I know of only one Albanian cookbook in print in English, and it was written by people in Montreal. I hope some readers will take their grandparents to Café Apollonia and see what memories are aroused.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.