Hidyan Café

Hummus like mother used to make

On the Cheap by Yvonne Abraham

If it's buck-bang you're after, you can hardly do better than Hidyan. This Turkish corner café may be short on atmosphere (the chairs and tables, bathed in fluorescent light, look as if they were rescued from a 1970s bank closing), but it's big on delicious.

For breakfast, you can get a two-egg omelet with fillings including spinach, goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, and mushrooms, plus coffee, from just $3.50. At lunchtime, the pita roll-ups are as big as your head, or bigger. And they aren't padded with lettuce, either: instead, they're jammed with good-quality ingredients such as avocado, grilled chicken, roasted peppers, falafel, a very good hummus (tart and salty, like mother used to make), goat cheese, and scores of others. Even the fanciest come in at only $5.25. Our eggplant, sun-dried tomato, mozzarella, and roasted pepper number weighed two pounds if it weighed an ounce, and it contained a fistful of actual whole sun-dried tomatoes rather than the microscopic strips most places use.

On a recent chilly evening, we also tried the $2 soups: the lemony chicken-rice soup was rich and thick and appeared to be made with real stock; the French onion soup was intensely flavored and truly oniony.

Hidyan will throw all its delectable bits and bobs onto pizzas and into calzones, too. A couple of caveats: stay away from the healthier-sounding items on the menu: the veggie lasagna ($5.25 with salad) and the "stir-fried blend" vegetable roll-up ($4.45) were criminally bland. If you're gonna go to Hidyan, you might as well really go, and get the grease. Sure, there's a lot of oil in some of the food, but we'd rather have our oil dripping off sun-dried tomatoes than out of a plastic Wesson bottle. We're classy that way.

Hidyan Café, located at 80 Kilmarnock Street (West Fenway), in Boston, is open daily from 7 a.m. to midnight. Call 437-0966.

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